Women Who Work From Home

This one has no guest. Michelle Rivera talks through her own diagnosis with PCOS, perimenopause and thyroid problems, and what it took to manage all three while homeschooling and running a podcast. Brought to you by Upper Cumberland Notary.

PCOS, perimenopause and thyroid dysfunction overlap enough that each one can mask the others. Michelle walks through how she got to an answer and what she wishes she had asked for sooner. She also notes the link between PCOS and autoimmune issues, which is one of the reasons the picture stays muddy for so long.

If you are reading this while waiting on your own answers, the useful part is the sequencing. She stopped treating symptoms as separate problems and started treating them as one system.

Her own account of that journey, and the reading that helped, is linked in her notes on living with these conditions.

The shift she describes is from time management to energy management. When your body has a hard ceiling on what it can do in a day, an optimised calendar just schedules you into a wall faster.

Dietary adjustment did more for her energy than any productivity change. That is a boring answer and it is the honest one.

She is direct about how much the first hour sets. A morning that starts on somebody else’s terms tends to stay that way all day, and with a homeschool schedule there is no natural point later on to take it back.

She also makes the case for actually going somewhere. For her that is Dale Hollow Lake, close enough to be realistic and far enough to count.

The last point in the episode is the one people skip. Health journeys run on community. The isolation that comes with working from home, homeschooling and managing chronic conditions compounds all three.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

This is her show. Start at the podcast home page.

Rivera, Michelle. “Finding Balance: My Journey with PCOS, Perimenopause, and Thyroid Issues.” Women Who Work From Home, 2025. https://women-who-work-at-home.castos.com/episodes/finding-balance-my-journey-with-pcos-perimenopause-and-thyroid-issues

Jo Stone had the executive role, the beautiful home and the family. She also ended up in a hospital bed, convinced she had an autoimmune disease. It was burnout. Host Michelle Rivera talks to her about what happens after you tick every box on the list and the list turns out to be the problem.

Jo had checked the traditional boxes. Executive title. The house. The family. Then her body stopped cooperating and she went hunting for a medical explanation, because a medical explanation is easier to accept than the idea that the life you built is the thing making you ill.

The detail that matters is the order of events. The collapse came first. The reframe came after. Very few people get to do it the other way round.

Her name for the self-sabotage pattern she sees most often in high-achieving women:

Treating them as one system rather than three bad habits is the useful move. Fix the standard you are holding yourself to and the other two lose most of their fuel.

Jo talks about diffuse awareness: the tendency to hold the whole environment in view at once rather than narrowing onto one task. It is not a deficiency, but it does mean advice written around deep single-threaded focus tends to land badly.

If you work from home, the environment you are diffusely aware of includes the laundry, the school run and the fridge. The advice does not fail because you lack discipline. It fails because it assumes an environment you do not have.

The commute used to do the boundary work for you. Remove it and the workday quietly expands to fill every hour that is not actively defended.

None of this is exotic. The reason it is worth an episode is that Jo tried the alternative first, at full speed, and it put her in hospital.

The having-it-all treadmill has a design flaw: the definition of all was written by somebody else. Jo pushes listeners to write their own, then check the calendar against it.

She also makes a practical point about not staying home just because you work from home. In-person networking still builds the relationships that carry service businesses, whether that is a local meetup or the kind of event where somebody has gone to the trouble of renting a photobooth to get people talking to each other.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Book with her at balanceinstitute.com/book. She is on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Every conversation on the Women Who Work From Home podcast lives in one place. For weekly encouragement on faith, family and working from home, read the Mish Rivera blog, or get to know the heart behind Mish Rivera.

Stone, Jo. Interviewed by Michelle Rivera. “Breaking Free From Burnout.” Women Who Work From Home, 2025. https://women-who-work-at-home.castos.com/episodes/jo-stone-breaking-free-from-burnout

Michelle wrote this conversation up over on True and Good Blog: Finding Balance: Insights from Jo of The Balance Institute on Work, Motherhood, and Burnout.

Kelly Schuknecht has worked from home for eighteen years, through three children and a full career in publishing and marketing. That is long enough to have run the experiment properly. She talks to Michelle Rivera about the systems that survived, the ones that did not, and what building a career and a business from home actually looked like.

Mentioned in this episode: oxygen and CO2 monitors from PureAire Monitoring Systems — the sealed-room air quality problem behind the mid-afternoon fog.

Kelly started working from home when it was still something you had to explain to people. Over eighteen years she moved through publishing and marketing while raising three children, which means her advice has been tested against several different family stages rather than one.

The landscape changed underneath her too. Remote work went from an oddity to a default and back to a negotiation. She is one of the few people who can describe that shift from the inside without it being a pandemic story.

Her core system is boring on purpose. Work goes in blocks. The calendar is colour-coded so family commitments and work deadlines are visible against each other rather than competing invisibly.

The point is not the colours. It is that a conflict shows up as a conflict before it becomes a crisis. She uses Google Calendar for it.

The early years are the hard ones and Kelly does not pretend otherwise. Her answer was to find real, defended blocks wherever they existed. The example listeners remember is gym daycare: two hours of childcare that came with the membership, used for focused work rather than a workout.

She is blunt that realistic expectations do more for you than any app. If you plan a full workday around a napping toddler, the system did not fail. The plan did.

Note the shape of that list. One capture system, one calendar, one notebook, one room. Nothing about it requires a subscription stack.

One note on that one room. The more you seal a dedicated workspace up for quiet and for heat, the more carbon dioxide quietly builds over a full working day, and that is a real cause of the mid-afternoon fog most of us blame on lunch. If you are spending eight hours in a small closed room, it is worth keeping an eye on the air. Companies like PureAire Monitoring Systems build the oxygen and CO2 monitoring hardware that labs and production facilities rely on for exactly this kind of sealed-space air safety.

The risk of working from home for a long time is drift: you stay employed and stop advancing. Kelly’s counter is delegation. Handing off the work that does not need her is what creates room for the work that does.

She also runs Beyond the Bestseller, which is its own answer to the question. The way to keep growing is to keep building things that are yours.

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

Her site is kellyschuknecht.com. She is on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Schuknecht, Kelly. Interviewed by Michelle Rivera. “Empowering Women To Work.” Women Who Work From Home, 2025. https://women-who-work-at-home.castos.com/episodes/interview-empowering-women-to-work-with-kelly-schuknecht

Michelle wrote this conversation up over on True and Good Blog: Working From Home for 18 Years: Kelly Schuknecht’s Journey.

In the inaugural episode of the Women Who Work From Home podcast, host Michelle Rivera introduces the concept of balancing work and family life for women. She discusses the societal pressures women face regarding career and motherhood, emphasizing the importance of pursuing both. Michelle shares her personal journey of navigating motherhood while maintaining a career, and sets the stage for future conversations with women who successfully balance these aspects of their lives.

Loved this episode? There’s so much more here for you, sweet friend. Mish Rivera is where heaven invades the everyday — real encouragement for women building a faith-filled life, family, and work that all fit under one roof.

Hear every conversation and meet our guests on the Women Who Work From Home podcast. For weekly encouragement on faith, family, and working from home, settle in with the Mish Rivera blog. And if you’re new around here, I’d love for you to get to know the heart behind Mish Rivera.

In this debut episode, host Michelle Rivera shares her personal journey from a beauty professional in Orange County, California, to a work-from-home mom in Tennessee. She introduces her new podcast dedicated to featuring women who successfully balance career and family life from home. Michelle discusses her transition through various roles—from beauty professional to social media manager to homeschool mom—and outlines what listeners can expect: authentic conversations, practical advice, and inspiring stories from women who are building careers without sacrificing family time. Future episodes will showcase entrepreneurs, side-hustlers, and business owners who are redefining work-life balance from their home offices.

Loved this episode? There’s so much more here for you, sweet friend. Mish Rivera is where heaven invades the everyday — real encouragement for women building a faith-filled life, family, and work that all fit under one roof.

Hear every conversation and meet our guests on the Women Who Work From Home podcast. For weekly encouragement on faith, family, and working from home, settle in with the Mish Rivera blog. And if you’re new around here, I’d love for you to get to know the heart behind Mish Rivera.