Rising up, MS to Success founder Karen Dwyer dreamed of sometime being profitable. Her childhood imaginative and prescient? Hitting the hair salon for a weekly skilled blowout. At present, the Dublin-based entrepreneur and persistent sickness advocate will get her hair blown out twice per week.
And whereas Dwyer seems ahead to her common hair appointment, it’s nothing in comparison with the enjoyment and success she’s skilled as a well being coach on a mission to assist individuals with a number of sclerosis take cost of their well being—and alter their lives within the course of. MS is an unpredictable autoimmune illness that causes the breakdown of nerves’ protecting masking; it impacts practically 3 million individuals worldwide.
Whereas Dwyer doesn’t have an MD, RN or a PT after her identify, she provides one thing many well being care professionals don’t: lived expertise with a number of sclerosis and its bodily, psychological and emotional toll. Although her analysis in 2011 hardly felt like a present, navigating life-style adjustments, mindset shifts and every day challenges has develop into her best asset as a coach and founder.
When Dwyer discovered that MS was accountable for the right-sided numbness she’d been experiencing, she had a 7-year-old, a brand-new child and an inexplicable sense that the whole lot was going to be OK. Whereas she acknowledges it sounds unusual, she was struck by an inside understanding that mentioned, “You’re beating this.”
Although her instincts had been proper, there was no scarcity of hurdles alongside the best way. From optic neuritis to crushing fatigue, an episode of acute swelling in her mind and weekly injections of an immunosuppressant that compelled her into mattress for total weekends, Dwyer struggled to deal with her new analysis together with motherhood, a full-time advertising and marketing supervisor place and what she describes as a poisonous relationship.
Inside a couple of years, she’d withdrawn from most social actions, however when her sickness compelled her to step away from work, “I felt like I buried myself and my confidence 6 toes below,” she recollects. Issues bought worse when her companion left at Christmas a couple of decade in the past.
Two weeks later, she attended a convention that may change her life. There, she was requested to replicate on what she was grateful for. Initially, she drew a clean. Till she realized she had not been accountable for herself and her personal actions. Waking as much as that actuality, she describes, “was like a moist fish throughout the face.”
One 12 months later, Dwyer’s vitality had returned, she was off the immunosuppressants that gave her flu-like signs, and her physician mentioned her MS lesions had shrunk. Most significantly, she was discovering pleasure and peace once more. She remembers leaving the clinic that day and pausing to odor the flowers. Her physician informed her, “No matter you’re doing, maintain doing it.”
Whereas she made many life-style adjustments that 12 months, together with experimenting with weight-reduction plan and motion, she additionally shifted her perspective. As an alternative of “white-knuckling the entire thing” and feeling determined for every new complement or life-style change to work, she took a extra relaxed strategy, viewing every remedy as an experiment.
Over time, she discovered that, together with delicate adjustments to her routines together with consuming, transferring and even respiration in another way, gratitude performed a big position in her well being. “It does prime and rewire your mind,” she explains. Impressed, she printed a gratitude journal in hopes of giving others the prospect to profit from a gratitude follow.
However that was only the start. Dwyer began spending hours on the cellphone with strangers looking for MS help and recommendation. Whereas she’s adamant that “I don’t have a treatment for MS,” Dwyer was at all times pleased to share her story in hopes that others might study from it. “Then, I’d begin waking up at 4 a.m. being like, ‘I forgot to inform her this!’”
Finally, Dwyer stop her company job to teach full time. “It was a very thrilling time, however I had no thought find out how to run a well being enterprise program on-line,” Dwyer admits. So whereas she was busy serving to individuals discover holistic, customized methods to enhance their well being and high quality of life, constructing relationships and garnering testimonials with no sustainable marketing strategy, her checking account quickly shrank.
Dywer wasn’t about to let funds cease her, although. “We exist to bridge the hole between the medical mannequin and on a regular basis life,” she says, and given the breadth of that hole, strolling away was not an possibility. As an alternative, she did one thing utterly novel—she requested for assist. First, she bought a mortgage from her mother. Subsequent, she engaged a enterprise mentor.
With help, Dwyer has grown her enterprise exponentially. At present, she says her staff consists of greater than a dozen practitioners, together with a neurologist, a naturopath and a behavior coach, simply to call a couple of, in addition to administrative workers. Her shoppers, who hail from 27 international locations, are supplied as many as a dozen digital group teaching periods every week, the place they’ll entry the methods, group and hope they should envision a brighter future.
Although it’s developed over time, Dwyer’s enterprise has at all times been true to its mission: Altering lives by giving people like her the instruments to take cost of their well being, one individual at a time.
What units Dwyer aside is her multifaceted, holistic strategy. “We meet individuals the place they’re at,” Dwyer says. “It’s not a cookie-cutter program. It’s not like you need to go vegan or do these loopy exercises or meditate for 3 hours a day,” she explains. “It’s like your neighbor subsequent door placing their arms round you and saying, ‘I’ve bought you, and we’re gonna work with what you’re doing proper now,’” Dwyer says.
As an alternative of making an attempt to make sweeping adjustments in a single day, the main target is on small, sustainable changes. Dwyer’s strategy empowers shoppers to make the correct every day “micro selections” with the intention to change the mindset and habits that could be holding them again.
In spite of everything, it was a collection of micro selections, starting with adopting an perspective of gratitude, that began Dwyer on the therapeutic journey that developed into a training enterprise that’s altering lives worldwide.
This text initially appeared within the September/October 2025 situation of SUCCESS journal.
EDITOR’S NOTE: CONSIDER CONSULTING WITH YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDER BEFORE MAKING ANY MAJOR CHANGES TO YOUR CARE PLAN.
Photograph of Karen Dwyer from ©Fiona Madden Pictures
