From ER to Empire: How Burnout Led to Building a Bold Digital Business

What happens when your body forces you to stop and listen? In this compelling conversation, Emma Green (The Tennis Elbow Queen) shares her journey from hospital burnout to building a thriving global digital business. After 30 years as a physical therapist, Emma found herself in the ER - a wake-up call that led to completely reimagining her work and life.

Learn how she transformed a crisis into an opportunity, building a business that serves clients across six continents while prioritizing what matters most. Emma's story explores:

* The subtle signs of burnout we often ignore

* How crisis can become a catalyst for change

* Building something new without a roadmap

* The power of trusting yourself to pivot

* Creating success that feels sustainable

Whether you're feeling stuck in your comfort zone or sensing it's time for a change, Emma's journey shows what's possible when you choose to trust yourself and build something aligned with your values.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

02:00 Emma's journey to becoming the Tennis Elbow Queen

05:00 The challenge of leaving comfort zones and hospital work

08:00 Burnout experience and hospitalization

15:00 Navigating business transitions during pandemic

20:00 Digital transformation and telehealth adoption

25:00 Building online communities and courses

30:00 Evolution into wellness programming

35:00 Future vision and holistic health approach

38:00 Final advice for those feeling stuck

KEY TAKEAWAYS

- Sometimes the hardest decisions lead to the most transformative changes

- Listen to your body's signals before reaching burnout

- Digital platforms can expand reach and accessibility of healthcare

- Success can be redefined to align with personal values and lifestyle

- Creating community is as important as providing treatment

KEY THEMES

- Transitioning from traditional to innovative healthcare delivery

- Balancing professional expertise with entrepreneurial growth

- The importance of work-life integration

- Building sustainable business models

- Embracing digital transformation in healthcare

QUOTABLE MOMENTS

"I had to stop being that person in order to become the person that I needed to be."

"Nothing was wrong, but something wasn't right."

"Here is my opportunity now to rewrite my lifestyle and how I not only work but live."

GUEST CONTACT

Website: https://www.tenniselbowqueen.com/

Wellness Program: https://www.tenniselbowqueen.com/optimize

Books: https://www.amazon.com/Tennis-Elbow-Relief-2-0-Epicondylitis-ebook/dp/B0CW3DLD62

Social Media: Search "Tennis Elbow Queen" on all platforms

CONNECT WITH EIMEAR

📱 Instagram: @eimearzonecoach

💻 Website: eimearzone.com 📧

Email: hello@eimearzone.com

Subscribe to Girl, Choose Yourself on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

© 2025 Eimear Zone Coaching. All rights reserved.

Transcript

From ER to Empire: How Burnout Led to Building a Bold Digital Business

Host: Emma, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Emma: Thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure to be here.

Host: Wonderful. Listen, you and I have known each other for quite a number of years, and we're both European girls living in the US. You're from the UK originally, and I'm from Ireland. Culturally, they're quite different places where we grew up compared to where we live. So I'm really interested in your perspective on what it took for you to claim this space of being the tennis elbow queen.

Emma: Definitely. The US and the UK - even though we think they're so similar because we speak the same language, culturally there are certain differences. When I moved to the US almost 20 years ago, I didn't realize how different the mindset was going to be. It's something that I noticed quite early on and even now, I still see that difference.

In the UK, there can be quite a mindset of "people need to look after me, the government needs to look after me, everything is somebody else's fault." It's all a bit doom and gloom - whether that's because of the weather as well, I don't know. But coming over to the US and seeing this "I'm going to take care of myself" and this can-do attitude, this much more optimistic attitude that people have over here... And this is a sweeping generalization, I mean, it really is, but it was very noticeable to me when I first came over.

I've come to realize that as entrepreneurs, we are the weirdos, we are the ones that don't fit in, we are the ones that travel the world. I have a small group mastermind for other physical therapists and every single one of us in that group has moved at some point in our lives to the other side of the world.

About 7 years ago, somebody called me the tennis elbow queen. I've been a physical therapist for 30 years, treating tennis elbow patients for 15. When someone called me that name, I thought "Yes, I am!" And I claimed it because that's exactly what I do. It became my brand and it still is my brand.

Every now and again, I'll work with somebody in marketing or online advertising, and they say, "Oh, tennis elbow, Emma Green, tennis elbow queen" - the way that it rhymes. It just happened that way, but it really helped because people remember my name.

Host: I love that. And you know, if anyone looks up Emma online and looks on Amazon, you'll see the tennis elbow queen and there are many photographs of you actually wearing the crown. I love it. Obviously, I love it because I'm all about people, women in particular, taking up more space in the world, choosing themselves and just saying yes to themselves.

But it can be very triggering for other people, particularly if you come from a culture or family environment where you weren't really encouraged to go for it. There's a lot of "who does she think she is?" when taking up space that boldly. It can be triggering for people for whom just the idea of claiming that amount of space seems very scary.

Take us back to your story of coming to where you are today. Things are going phenomenally well for you right now. You're serving so many people in person and online in different ways. But let's go back to when you were on the brink of burnout and ended up in an emergency room.

Emma: Yes, if we go back five years to 2019, I was working part-time in a hospital outpatient physical therapy clinic. I'd been there for 11 years. Very happy there, loved my job, obviously loved my profession, loved the people I worked with, best boss ever. There was really nothing wrong with it at all.

But something was not right. I was part-time in the hospital clinic and had my own business. Going back to that entrepreneurial spirit, pretty much as soon as I graduated from physical therapy school 30 years ago, I had a part-time sports injury clinic. I always had my own side hustle.

I would leave the house every morning at 6am, and I would put the key into the lock and think, "I hate this." It wasn't my job that I hated because I didn't. It wasn't the people I worked with. I just couldn't figure out what it was. I had to leave when my kids were still sleeping, and if one of my kids was getting an award at school, I would have to ask for time off, which wasn't always possible because of scheduled patients.

I would go from my hospital job over to my clinic, literally swinging by a supermarket to pick up a banana for lunch as I walked from one place to the next. Then work at the clinic, pick my kids up at 6pm every night, dinner, bath and bed, do it all again.

I was on this treadmill and felt like I couldn't get off. I was at the point where I was going and hiding in the occupational therapist room at the back of the clinic because I just needed space. I was on the verge of tears and, you know, as a Brit, stiff upper lip - that wasn't me. I knew something had to change.

I thought, well, I either give up my clinic and just do my hospital job, or I give up the hospital job and go full-time into the clinic. I knew I didn't want to give up my clinic. So I made what I consider to be the hardest decision I've ever made - I left my hospital job. I'd been a hospital therapist for 25 years. That was my comfort zone, my safe space.

As you rightly said, I've moved halfway around the world while seven months pregnant. That was easier than leaving my hospital job. I left on Halloween, October 31st, 2019. The following weekend, about 10 days later, I was supposed to be at a conference.

I was going to a business conference by myself in Orlando, and I was so excited about this. It was a mastermind with people I'd been with for two or three years. For the first time, I was going by myself - usually, I would always take my kids.

But then I started to feel unwell. I woke up in the middle of the night with what I thought was stomach flu, and it just got worse and worse. I got to the point where I was throwing up every half hour. I couldn't function. I ended up going to urgent care, and they gave me a shot of something, sorted me out. I thought I was fine, but they told me to follow up with my primary care.

The next night it started again, worse than before. I got to the point where I couldn't wait for urgent care to open - I needed to go to the ER. My husband bundled the kids into the car and got me there. The medical team did my bloodwork and said there was something going on with my heart. Instead of going to Orlando for the weekend, I was admitted to the hospital that I had just left.

They did every test under the sun, and everything came back normal. But I realized this was burnout. What really put me onto it was that two months earlier, I'd gone to a conference with another Brit, and she had told me her story of burnout. She was a successful woman, had written a book, had a successful business - very similar to me. When she told me her story, I thought, "You're not the sort of person that I would ever have thought would succumb to burnout." Because I'd heard her story just two months before, I recognized what was happening to me.

Host: It's interesting how you use the words "succumb to burnout." I think that's really common because we think, "I'm doing all the right things" and "I can do it" and as women particularly, we just take on more and think "I should be able to cope" and "this is normal." We normalize things, a level of stress and busyness that isn't sustainable.

Emma: Totally. Having heard her story, having got all these tests back that were normal, thank goodness, and putting two and two together - I realized I hadn't been happy for so long. This was building up, and then it was basically my body's way of saying "stop."

At the time, I read Jen Sincero's "You Are a Badass." I'd read it before but I read it again. She talks about the ego as the little prince, and my little prince did not want me to leave my comfort zone, my safe space, which was being at the hospital. I think it wanted to put me back in there, saying "that's where you belong."

Host: It's weird, isn't it? You said that a couple of times - "nothing was wrong, but something wasn't right." When you're making such a big change, when you're leaving the security and comfort of what you've always known in the hospital, and then you move out on your own and make this big choice - I think your story really demonstrates in quite a dramatic way that it's not just "oh, and then I went out on my own and I just felt this was the time and there was fabulous music and I was living my dream." It's hard. There's doubt and challenge.

Emma: Yeah, I think I really sort of got clarity about the timing of it all. All of that went down in November of 2019. Then I obviously had a little bit of time off under doctor's orders, got back into the clinic, got everything back on track. We had our best month ever in January of 2020.

And then at the end of 2020, my physical therapist gave me her notice and my landlady gave me notice as well. She was like, "you need to be out." I'd been there for eight years. We had a great relationship and I was like, "I have patients booked throughout February. Is there any chance I can stay through February?" And she's like, "No. You need to be gone at the end of January."

This is very much the entrepreneurial journey. I always see the employee journey as very kind of gentle with ups and downs, but the entrepreneurial journey is this freaking rollercoaster. The ups are incredibly high, but the downs can come crashing down as well. And it's all on you.

So I started the search for a new location, which I was really enjoying actually because of this local realtor who I got on really well with. We would go out for lunch, look at a few different spots, and I found this most amazing space. It had exposed brick walls, wood beam ceilings - it was just beautiful. I was like, "Yes, this is the spot. This is where I'm going to grow and expand."

I sat down with one of the business advisors from the small business development center that I was working with at the time. I said, "I found this space. I absolutely love it. This is going to be amazing." And she said, "Show me your numbers." I did. And she went, "You can't afford it."

And if you just take note of the timing, this was January 2020. Something happened around then, I think. She saved me from signing that lease.

I found another location, which was going to be a new gym that was being built at the time. One of the owners was British. We hit it off like a house on fire. He was like, "You know what? I've got a room. We were going to use it as a storage space, but it's quite big. I think we could have this as a physical therapy room." It seemed amazing.

So we were going to move from the original location into that new location. It wasn't ready, so we just moved into an interim space for the short term. There was no lease signed. I was working with a business coach at the time, and she said, "Sign something for your new location or you're going to lose it."

I went round there and asked him, "Can we get something on paper?" He was like, "Absolutely, yes." We sat and chatted, had a bit of banter, but then his team came in with some issue he needed to deal with. So we didn't get it done, and he said, "Let's revisit this in a couple of days."

Then lockdown happened. And I was out of my lease from the first place, hadn't signed the lease in the new place, was on a week-to-week in the current place. My business advisor had saved me from signing the lease on the place I couldn't afford. I could not have been in a better position when lockdown actually happened.

Host: Wow. It's amazing when you think about it, all these fortuitous happenings that saved you because so many people got in so much trouble at the beginning of COVID who were locked into very disadvantageous arrangements and were just spending money on premises they could not use and were just draining their bank account.

Emma: And that totally would have been me had the landlady not asked us to leave. I would very much have felt like I had to keep paying my rent, you know, had to help her out. And it probably would have put my business under.

Nobody knew how long it was going to last either when it was beginning. We all thought this would be a few months. Nobody had any idea. Even in May of that year, a couple of months into lockdown, I had a call with a business advisor I was working with at the time.

I said to him, "The temporary location actually wants us to stay. The new location wants us to go there. I don't have anything in writing with either of them yet, but I think this could be really good. I think I could end up with two locations." And I can vividly remember this - he sat back in his chair and crossed his arms in front of him and just said, "Should you?"

Host: Isn't it funny the way you can - I love how you describe it as a pattern interrupter and this pattern of just going on this "build it bigger, more is better" path, doing the traditional model, another location, another location. And then somebody asking you just those two words, "should you?" A simple kind of pause that stops you and gets you to reflect. Then you ask the big question - what do I really want? And when you sat with that question, what came through for you?

Emma: I was like, I love being at home. I love working from home. I love being with my kids. I know it was only two months in, but I love being there to help them. I love not having to be somewhere at a certain time. And of course, going back to me putting the key into the lock - that was the thing, the big thing that I did not like. I thought, "Wow, here is my opportunity now to rewrite my lifestyle and how I not only work but live."

Host: Just kind of tingling all over as you say that, Emma, because it is so empowering. It's taking it back from everybody else's view and a very externally validated view of what success is and what you should be pursuing. And then kind of coming into your own power, really, and saying, "What works for me?" How has that journey been?

Emma: Amazing. I mean, my goodness, if I just look at the last five years, it has been absolutely transformational. I'd already started working a little bit of telehealth pre-pandemic because being so specialized in what I do, I would have people further and further away geographically reaching out to me.

So when lockdown happened, we shifted all of our patients from in-person in the clinic to telehealth straight away. I added in a daily fitness class because some of our clients would come to the clinic for the social aspect as much as the therapeutic aspect. I didn't want anybody to feel alone, especially many of my clients who lived alone or were older.

I started to look at what I could do with the 10 hours a week I got back from not doing the school run. Well, I wrote my book. I had probably been writing it for the previous five years, like a chapter here, a chapter there, and then nothing would happen with it. So I used that time and finally completed it. It was a way of getting my information out into the world.

I created an online course because people further and further away were starting to ask me for help. The reason that happened was because I had created a Facebook group for the tennis elbow sufferers that I was working with so they could socialize and interact with other people in a similar situation, so they didn't feel like they were going through this thing alone.

Then some people were saying they couldn't afford the course. So that's when the book was born - there's the Kindle Edition at less than ten dollars, to make it as accessible as possible to people. Then the YouTube channel came from that, and it just started to snowball.

Now I have several courses. I've got small courses for people who haven't had tennis elbow or golfer's elbow for very long. I have a comprehensive elbow pain course for people who have had it for longer. Maybe there's a number of things going on. I include group coaching with that. We can do individual coaching if somebody prefers that. Still got the Facebook group going.

I started to realize that this whole new world, this digital world of giving people information, that's exactly what we do as physical therapists. We're educators essentially. The education side of it is the biggest part of what we do. And I started to realize this is something that I can utilize to help get my information out there and reach more people.

Host: Obviously COVID and the pandemic and the lockdown sort of pushed you in that direction. It forced many people, but I really see you as a trailblazer in this area because you were stepping in, hungry to learn. So many people would just have offered their services via Zoom sessions when their offices were shut, and as soon as offices opened back up, they went back to in-person.

But you just took on the digital space. I think it's really important for people who are listening to realize what this journey is like as an entrepreneur. Emma, you didn't know where you were ending up. You were taking the next obvious step on a pathway as it emerged, as you were hearing back from the people you were serving about what more they needed.

Emma: Yeah, it's so interesting to see how this evolves as you go along. If I think about this year, I restarted my podcast or kind of created a slightly new podcast. It's very much on the lines of helping tennis elbow sufferers, but a lot of what I teach can be quite generic. It can be applied whether you've got back pain or knee pain or neck pain or foot pain or whatever.

I'm speaking with other experts who are experts in what they do. I've had a gentleman who is an expert in thoracic outlet syndrome, another one who's an expert in chronic pain and sciatica - essentially kind of people like me who are doing things in the online space in their own particular area.

That's now morphing into more of wellness and looking at wellness. The people who've been with me in fitness classes and Pilates classes over the past four or five years, we're now looking at each month next year focusing on different elements of health. In January, we're going to be setting our health and wellness goals, looking at specific biomarkers that we can track through the year. In February, we're looking at heart health and adding a cardio component. In March, we're starting to look at nutrition and adding core components.

Host: I love that. I love that taking the power yourself of what you can influence and how you can look after yourself and taking it as a really holistic approach. From such a medicalized sort of approach that is often taken... And I know that you're so interested in seeing the whole person you treat. You're an absolute expert in your field on tennis elbow, and you're incredibly curious and interested in the whole person. You have to be because we are whole organisms. So I find that fascinating.

Tell people, Emma, where they can find out about all these amazing offerings and start living an incredibly healthy life where they're prioritizing their wellbeing on all levels.

Emma: Yeah, for sure. So you can go to my website. It's tenniselbowqueen.com. And forward slash optimize will get you to the health and wellness membership that we're starting in 2025. And yes, you can join at any time. You can contact me through the website as well. And you can find me on socials. Literally, if you search up tennis elbow queen, you'll find me.

Host: Yes, you will! She is everywhere in all the best ways. I want to just kind of ask you a final question for anyone who's listening and there are going to be inspired by the journey that you've been on and what you have created and continue to create for yourself and for the people that you serve.

If there's a listener who's been listening to your story and they're kind of stuck in a job that's unfulfilling and they're worried about kind of burnout and kind of looking after themselves. What advice would you give to them?

Emma: I think that the number one thing is to really look deeply inside and think what is it that you want? What is it that you want to do? Not what you think you should be doing or what others are telling you you should be doing. But how do you want to live your life? How do you want to wake up? What do you want to see? How do you want to feel as you're going through the day? And that's what you've got to figure out first.

Host: Emma, that vibe is just so, so powerful, wonderful. Love talking to you all the time. Thank you so much for your time today. This has been amazing.  [End of Transcript]