In this solo episode of Business with Chronic Illness, host Nikita Williams reflects on 2024 and looks ahead to 2025. She begins by thanking listeners and reiterating the podcast’s mission: to help women with chronic illness build sustainable online businesses. She shares her top lessons from the past year, emphasizing a mindset shift toward embracing slow growth, self‑compassion, and intentional pacing both in business and personal life. Nikita discusses how chronic illness continues to teach her about her "new normal" and the importance of understanding her body’s capacity. She announces her recent enrollment in a health‑coach certification, linking it to her background in life coaching and aromatherapy, and explains how this deepens her holistic approach. Looking forward, she predicts several business trends for 2025: greater emphasis on community (both free and paid), niche "pods" within larger groups, long‑form content platforms (Substack, podcasts, extended video), memberships, and the continued role of AI as a productivity tool. She stresses that human‑centered, customized marketing will be crucial, especially for creators living with chronic illness. Nikita outlines her personal plans for 2025, including more in‑person events in St. Johns, Florida, and integrating aromatherapy into her offerings. She invites listeners to share their reflections and 2025 goals via Instagram, email, or voice notes, and closes with a call‑to‑action to book a sales call or join her email list for coaching on building profitable businesses while managing chronic illness.
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Welcome to Business with Chronic Illness, the globally ranked podcast for women living with chronic illness who want to start and grow a business online. I'm your host, Nikita Williams, and I went from living a normal life to all of a sudden being in constant pain with no answers, to being diagnosed with multiple chronic illnesses and trying to make a livable income. I faced the challenge of adapting traditional business advice to fit my unique circumstances with chronic illness, feeling frustrated and more burned out than I already was while managing my chronic illness to becoming an award-winning coach with a flexible, sustainable online coaching business. I found the surprisingly simple steps to starting and growing a profitable business without compromising my health or my peace. Since then, I've helped dozens of women just like you learn how to do the same. If you're ready to create a thriving business that aligns with your lifestyle and well-being, you're in the right place. Together, we're shifting the narrative of what's possible for women with chronic illness and we make a living. This is Business with Chronic Illness.
Hello, I am coming to you live from my new home and I cannot believe that it is the last month of the year and that we're in just a few weeks away from 2025. Just saying 2025, it sounds crazy. But I wanted to start off this episode first with some gratitudes and thanks to all of you. Some of you have been following me for a while, some of you are new around these internet audio waves, and I just want to say how thankful I am for your being subscribers, listening, downloading, and just really leaning in to the content I create. This content comes from a real place of love. It comes from a place of wanting to be of service to all of you. Hopefully sharing some of the things I share with you, the teaching, the mindset things, the questions, the journal prompts, the perspective things, the questions to ask yourself, the strategies, hopefully opens up a world of possibility for you. And I am just thankful to have a medium like this that allows me the space to come to you from wherever you are in the world to serve you and be able to help you feel, hopefully, that you're not alone and that what you think is impossible for you may not be so impossible because of the show and all of the women I get to connect with and people I get to connect with. So in this episode, beyond just telling you thank you, I want to take a moment for you to personally reflect on some of the things that you experienced this year, some of the growth, the learnings, some of the things you decided to keep, and some of the things you decided to say thank you, no thank you to, and really just take a moment to acknowledge those things. Oftentimes at this time of the year, people are looking at how can they rev up for the new year, how can they get ready and like do all of that stuff. Also, you're looking at the whole year and like looking at how you didn't reach your goals, how you didn't get to where you wanted to go, or if you did get to where you wanted to go, how you can make it better. And I think it's so important to be able to take the time to be okay and celebrate the being and that what has been done, that is as, as important as the work is. In creating the goals and the plan for next year. Because what you feel about what you accomplished this year or didn't accomplish this year will follow you in your goal setting and your mindset around what you can do next year or what you're capable or not capable of. We had a whole conversation about this inside of my Chronically You and Profitable program, which is my group coaching program. Where we talked about what are your goals, what are some of the things you're excited about, some things you're not excited about, and like, how are you feeling about what you did do and what did come about? And I know there's probably lots of content that you're looking at and you're like doing vision boards and doing all of the stuff and you're preparing for 2025, or you already have prepared for 2025. But I also want you to take as much time to reflect on what is good about what happened this year, what was hard this year, and what lessons you learned from that, and what thoughts and mindset shifts you've had to overcome or change in order to create whatever results you have in your life. What surprised you this year? What are you most proud of? Right? These are really powerful questions that I think will help you really turn whatever you feel about this year into a more full throttle view versus a one-sided view. I also want to say the mindset you bring into creating goals and planning for next year is highly reflective in how you acknowledge and accept and become aware of your thoughts and your decisions and your results and your beliefs of what happened this year. Okay, some things I want to share with you from my top lessons from 2024. Mindset. Something this year I had to learn to embrace is that the slow growth— and I think I've always thought this, I teach you guys this— baby steps, baby steps. But this year I really leaned, I really leaned into embracing slow growth and it changed my whole approach to a lot of different things. And I was a lot more compassionate with myself. I was not beating myself up. I wasn't trying to like compete with myself to be better than what I was. I gave myself a lot of grace and it amazed me in how much unlearning I had to do and also relearning of what my voice is, what it is that I wanted, where it was that I wanted to go. And that came from slowing down but still doing the work right. And that also applied not just only in my business, but in my personal life. I slowed a lot of need to always be around people, do things, go, go, go, to really sitting with what is it that I feel and what is it that I want. What is it that is important to me? And that helped me break a lot of molds open this year. And I really do think that has led to shifts in my relationships with folks, and it's really helped me get even closer with others in ways that I didn't think was possible and put us in a place that now we're in a good place as far as like decisions that are truly our own. That feel good, that don't feel obligatory, that feel like they're our own load, if you will. Now, life with chronic illness this year has been an interesting year. It has been lots of ups and downs. There's been lots of new things going on. There's been lots of things that I just thought I was done with. Right. And the OG brain of my chronic illness is like, you're never done with learning new things about your body. And it is something that this year, again, the slowing down and being more intentional has allowed me space for giving myself the roadway or the pathway for understanding what is my new normal, what is my new pacing, what is my new capacity. And I'm thankful, I'm thankful for that. So now I want to talk about what I think is going to happen in the space of entrepreneurship and for creatives those living with chronic illness and coaches and in the health industry, if you will. If you guys don't know, fun thing, I started my certification for health coaching just like a month ago as of recording this in 2024. And I'm super excited because it really is a full circle moment. I never thought I would want to be a health coach, but this health coach certification is really based on me getting a more found— like understanding more fundamentally how the body works. I feel like I learned a lot about that with my life coach and my life coaching certifications that I've done and business coaching, learn a little bit about life, and especially with my professional aromatherapy certification. I learned a lot about the body, like so much. But now I wanted to give it another lens that comes from an even more full, complete space. So I'm in the process of becoming a certified health coach. So I'm excited about that. But I wanted to share with you what I think is coming up as far as business is concerned and the way that we operate living with chronic illness in the world. And I think it has a lot to do with this experience of the hybrid running your business, living your life online, and also finding community and collaboration. This is no different. I feel like I say this every year, like every year people say, yeah, this year is going to be the year where there's more collaborations and da da da da. Here's what I want to say. Collaborations have always been profitable. They have always been meaningful. They have always been impactful. I just think that in 2025 they will mean more. The way you authentically show up and be yourself and tell your story, the more powerful those collaborations will be. And if you're living with chronic illness and you're deciding to build a business, it will become easier if you choose to do this with through long-form content and community building. It will be essential for you in order to create the, the long-term nurturing sequence that will be the way people buy. So we all noticed that people were buying, you and I were buying this year, but it took us a lot longer to make decisions. It took us a lot more conversations or following people to make a decision whether or not we're going to invest with them. Long-form content does this. Yes, video is great, short form, but I have found based on a lot of the things that I'm seeing on things like TikTok and YouTube and things like— what is that platform called that people write on? Oh my gosh, what is that platform called? Lots of people are writing on it. I'm going to look it up. It's Substack. Things like Substack have become extremely popular. And the other thing that has become even more popular, and again, you guys, these things just happen in cycles, just honestly in the marketing and business side of things, these things all just come in cycles and run the cycle of community building being like a huge part. But what's more of a cycle is memberships. Like, that's something that small businesses, even local health and wellness companies, non-health and wellness companies, are trying to create this experience of an exclusive experience, a membership where where you get exclusive access or exclusive content or exclusive experiences because of being a part of these memberships, or vicariously communities. Now, like I said, none of this is new. It's not new under the sun. It's just having an uptick, I believe, that's going into 2025. And so my thing has been like the fundamentals, which has always been community, marketing, and sales. And having a holistic life and business system that supports your overall goals and lifestyle and your well-being is the key to creating a successful, sustainable, growing business. And this year, it's just coming around, 2025, looking to 2025, where you see brands really prioritizing community, whether it's free or paid. You see a lot of people diving more into those long-form content platforms, writing long blog posts or doing videos or doing podcasts. Podcasts had the biggest insurgency this year. Like, it grew a lot and it's still one of the lowest saturated spaces in the market as far as marketing. And it's going to continue to do that because people are continuing to be on the go. You're going to be going to those networking events, going to be driving, going to be doing all those things, and you're going to want to listen to something along the way and people are going to start making that even more of their routine. Audiobooks became more popular this year, like massively on Amazon. There was an uptick and AI became a really important thing. I think AI, of course, is going to continue to be a thing that we need or people want to have. But because of AI, the fact that community is growing is, to me, is just a byproduct of the reason why community is becoming more important, because as great as AI is in saving us time and money and all of that, community is what allows us to grow faster. It's what also helps us to create this web of resources and connection that is humanly, like, needed heart-centered-wise, right? Like, we're humans, we need humans, we need the connection. It's literally a need. It's literally part of our psychological need. Of being accepted or being in a space where we're understood and seen. So as much as we're going to see AI do its thing in 2025, we're going to see more communities create more communities. What I also think is going to happen with communities is going to be more niche than broad communities. I think even within communities that are really broad in who they are looking to support, there are going to be what I think are more pods creating more niche communities. And so this is really important for you to be really clear on your values and the things that matter to you most and things that are crucial as part of the reason why you're going to be showing up in your business or starting a business. That's my kind of thoughts about this. The other thing I was thinking about when related to this of why I think this is going to be so important. TikTok talking head videos, long form, longer than 15 seconds, longer than 3 minutes, now up to 10 minutes, or going live has intensified and increased, and it has shown that people are watching and viewing those videos longer. So people are craving that human, human, real talk, real life, not necessarily always pretty life, right? And so as we see that, it just to me gives a mark to or a nod to the fact that in our marketing and our sales, we have to be human-centered. We have to be human service-centered, focused on what does the client need, what are they telling me that they need, and is it in integrity and the value systems that I, I have and I can fulfill. There's going to be a lot more need for customization with clients. Because of seeing how many of us are trying to create a very unique solution for our unique situation and is being flexible to create that, right? Whether in a broad sense in your marketing and your nurturing or in your offers and services altogether. So that's just what I think is going to happen in 2025. I could be wrong. I am just a girl on the Instagram and podcast who've been doing this for 8 years, crazy or not, and we'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. I know for me, going into 2025, I'm so excited. I'm going to be doing more in-person events, especially because I'm in this beautiful city of St. Johns, Florida, and we are going to be working through networking and connecting with the community here. I'm going to be leaning a lot more into my aromatherapy. That's just my world. I'd love to hear what your excitement or the things you're looking forward to for 2025. I'd also like to hear what you feel like this year was for you. Was it hard? Was it not so hard? Was it a roller coaster and you learned so much and you're so thankful? I want to hear it. So you can always reach out to me in my DMs on Instagram @thrivewithnikita or on the podcast website at craftittothrive.com. You can actually leave me a voice note. Did you guys know that? And if you're in the app of I think Spotify, Apple. You can also leave me, I think, some fan mail information, I think, there. But Instagram is the easiest way to share whatever is got going on. And if you're on my email list, you can just send me an email, reply to one of my emails and send me an email. All right, that's a wrap for our 2024. What's coming up for 2025? Just a kind of reset or review what's going on, how I'm doing, Can't wait to hear how you're doing. Our next episode is going to be about elder starters, and then we might have one more episode and then we're going to take a little break before we get into the new year. So just be prepared for that. And I just cannot wait to hear what you have coming up. All right, guys, thank you.
That's a wrap for this episode of Business with Chronic Illness. If you would like to start and grow an online coaching business with me, head to the show notes to click a link to book a sales call and learn how to make money with chronic illness. You can also check out our website at www.craftedtothrive.com for this episode's show notes and join our email list to get exclusive content where I coach you on how to chronically grow a profitable business while living with chronic illness. Until next time, remember, yes, you are crafted to thrive.
