3 Ways to Get Out of Your Own Way

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, my beautiful people. I have been sick as a dog, sick as a dog. But before I get into me being sick as a dog, this episode is about the 3 ways you're sabotaging yourself from making money with more ease and speed. So I did a little write-up about this in my email on my email that went out today. So you kind of getting a little bit of this, but I'm going like a little bit more deep dive into this topic on the 3 ways you're sabotaging yourself from making money with ease or easier and faster and with speed. I want to give you guys just a heads up. I am recovering from the cold of the summer that just like took me out. Like, I thought it was COVID. It was definitely not COVID. It was some kind of other thing, flu, something. And it definitely felt like COVID. But anyway, my voice is doing a weird little thing of, you know, we've been coughing and hacking and blowing my nose and all of that beautiful thing for the last 2 weeks. So bear with me, bear with me and my raspy voice, if you will, and my sips of water if you happen to hear that, but Let's get into it. Let's get into why I'm talking about this. Oh my goodness. This is something that I don't think we hear enough about around the topic, around the fact that we can get in our own way of creating the result that we want. We sometimes go all in on all of these strategies and all of these courses and trainings and everything. Without taking some time to reflect on, am I the problem? Is it me? As that Taylor Swift, hi, hello, I'm the problem, it's me. Have we taken a moment to take a look at ourselves in this? And I see this come up not just for myself, but when I've worked with clients, when I'm working with clients, I see this and I see this a lot depending on where clients are in their journey. Of either becoming an entrepreneur or being an entrepreneur while living with chronic illness, or just in general, like dealing with everyday life hurdles or trying to transition from one type of like persona of a person in their work life to a different type of work life persona. So I thought this was really important, especially since we are in that half time of the year. Where some of us feel like, oh, well, if we haven't attained our goals yet, it's over. We're not going to happen. It's not going to happen. Or where some of us are feeling the pressure of making it happen. So we start to tap into some of these self-sabotaging things I'm going to share a little bit more. And I wanted to bring some more context and nuance to what I shared with you all on my email list. And by the way, if you're not on my email list, you should be. That's where I share exclusive content. Oftentimes it happens there before you hear it here. I kind of use my podcast and my email as my exclusive content machine, where anywhere else you get things, you will get it maybe in a different way, a different speaking about it, but I've talked about it before and first here on the Instagram— here on podcast, here on the podcast or in my email. So what are some of the 3 ways? So one of them is Dream downsizing. So this is where I've seen this happen most frequently when we don't believe that what we thought was impossible is possible now that we're living in whatever time, energy, circumstance, whatever, right? And I wanna caveat this tremendously. Do I recognize and do I know that some things when it comes to things that you want and you dream are going to be affected and sometimes snatched from you because of those different variables. Yes. But often what I have found is that many of us snatch them away from ourselves because of not knowing any other way of doing something, of not being aware of the tools and the resources out there to create this result. Because of conditioning, because of lack of awareness around what is actually possible. So, and, and also our thoughts about ourselves, our thoughts about what we're capable, our thoughts about our worth, our value. All of this has a lot to do with dream downsizing. And when I say dream downsizing, I just mean like You have a vision for doing something and then life happens, your chronic illness happens, and it seems like it's absolutely impossible to attain. It is impossible to achieve. It cannot happen for right. And I want to show you how it's funny that even though you tell yourself and you go down this rabbit hole of this is impossible, there's no way for me to do it. If it is a deep enough desire, if it's a deep enough strength and thing that you just naturally do subconsciously, you will try to create it in some other form and call it so different and make— and it will feel more difficult and not enough. So here's what I mean. Let's take, for example, you had a dream of being a Pilates instructor. I used a different example on the email, but I'm going to use this one because this is relevant-ish to me, and I never would have thought of this, but this is just a random hypothetical. Just, just, just roll with me, okay? Roll with me. Imagine you are, you know, an active person. You are a volleyball player. You You volunteer a lot of your time, you're walking all of the time, you're doing all of these things, you're living your best life, and you're like physically feeling good and great and everything's great. And you are also doing Pilates and you love Pilates. It's like such a thing, you love it. It's the thing that helps you so much and just your stability and feeling confident. And then you have an accident. You break your knee, your knee gets cracked or something in some other activity, and now it feels like Pilates and becoming maybe the Pilates instructor that you thought you were gonna be at some point as another thing that you would lean into can't happen. It's just not gonna happen. It's just not, not your thing anymore. And you have now decided that you can't be this Pilates instructor as well. You've decided that's not a dream that's really attainable. You've decided it's not something you can do. So what naturally, and when I've seen oftentimes with clients who come to me who are like, when I ask them, what do you want? They first have to really think about it. And they give me like this answer that seems like this is what they want because this is all they believe they can want. And then it's like, but what do you really want? Like if you didn't break your knee, if you didn't have a chronic illness, if you didn't have some random crazy life circumstances, what would it— what would you actually want? Like, what would that be, right? And when I hear what they actually, actually really want versus what they have told themselves that they want, they're not that much different. Okay, so let's go back to this Pilates instructor person who wants to be a Pilates instructor. So she's like believing she can never be a Pilates instructor, right? She's got this knee issue. She finds out, well, she's got rheumatoid arthritis. And she's got this inflammatory other fibromyalgia thing, and she just knows she's not going to be able to accomplish, in her head, this, this lifestyle of being a Pilates instructor. It's just not going to happen the way she thought it was going to happen. And so she now tells herself, well, I don't want that, I can't have that, so let me think of other ways of doing something else. So instead of being a Pilates instructor, she starts looking for other ways to pursue her physicalness. So she starts doing— she's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna teach people how to stretch. I'm going to become a person who understands stretching, right? And she's like, I'm gonna start a business all about stretching, and I am going to like share with people how they can stretch at home. I'm going to learn different, you know, movements for stretching, and that way, you know, it's not Pilates, but It's still physical and I'm still doing this thing. So here she goes trying to share and learn about stretching. She's doing it, but she's not passionate about it. But hey, it's working. People are coming to her. She's like somehow like creating some momentum. People are coming and wanting to learn how to stretch from home. And as she's going through this process, she's finding it like really challenging from an energetic space, a time-space where she feels like drained and unmotivated and like, why isn't this working the way I want it to work, right? And then she walks into a Pilates studio because of course there's stretching in a Pilates studio. And, you know, she tells people, you know, we're really— I'm really looking to share my stretching class or whatever she's doing with her— their community. And it's diff— it's not Pilates, but it's, it's a close second best, right? And the instructor goes, the other person goes, oh, that's really interesting. So share with me, like, what kind of things are you doing? So she shares with them what they're kind of doing. And they're like, so how's it working? She's like, well, you know, people are coming. I'm just not really that motivated to like all the time do all of the things that's required for me to talk about stretching. It's kind of boring to me. I, I kind of get frustrated when other people aren't doing it a certain way. I also get tired of trying to explain like how stretching is so important. Like, but you know, it's, it's, it is important. Like it's a thing I need to do. And then the Pilates instructor says, how is this any different than Pilates? And in that moment, this person who's like thinking she's never going to be able to be a Pilates instructor realized like she's already doing the majority of the work it would require her to be a Pilates instructor, but she's doing it teaching people to stretch. And hating it, right? And hating it. And so what I have found is that many of you have told yourself you can't pursue a dream, you can't pursue this new pivot or this new reality or this new thing that's a difference that you're really interested in. And so you go try pursuing something else that's probably pretty close to, or sometimes some clients are like completely opposite, and then they're wondering why it's not working, why they're so frustrated, why they're banging their head, why this feels like it's so hard. And it's because they believe so much right now that the, the thing that they truly want, there's no way to attain it. There's no way to get to that thing. But here's what I want to offer you, and this is where this, this is self-sabotage, y'all. The same amount of work and energy and effort that feels so heavy that you're doing in these other things, that's not really the thing you want to do. Would feel more light, more easy, and more fulfilling, and happen faster, even though you take your time with taking the baby steps to achieve that thing in a different way. So if this woman had just decided— you guys remember, this is a hypothetical— if this woman decided, you know what, I can't be a Pilates instructor like a year from now with all of these new things that I've got going on, but I can figure out a way to step into that place? What kind of different decisions would she have made? How many other things would she be more motivated and committed to, to attain that goal, even though it may take her a different route of achieving that, right? And some of you might be listening, well, what if stretching was that other way? She finally realized that's where she wants to go and she's going to be in Pilates. Absolutely. Absolutely, that is a possibility. But many of you all don't actually get to that step because you don't believe you are worthy. You don't believe you are capable. You have told yourself that you cannot. There's no one else that can do it. There's no one doing this thing like that, right? But when you lean into curiosity and you lean into learning and knowing and like gathering information, you might find that you can achieve that big goal, but just in a different timeframe than the timeframe you thought you would actually accomplish it. So if you're in this time of the year where you feel like you can't accomplish this goal that you may have set earlier in the year, so you're gonna make a smaller goal, I want you to reassess and really look at and being like, Well, is it that I can't attain this goal or is it that I need to keep the goal but adjust the way that I'm going at it? Right? Is, is that what I need to do? How can I do that? If you've been doing it alone, I can guarantee that's the reason why it's challenging. Ask someone else who might be able to give you other feedback of how you can get to where they're going or where you want to be that you think is impossible. And your brain will tell you that it's impossible until you're like basically right in front of it, right? And you give yourself baby steps. I call this baby— like it's a baby step framework that you kind of just guide yourself into doing the thing. So I use Pilates, for example, because I had an injury a year or so ago. And also I was in crazy flare-up, crazy flare-up. And for a while there, I just told myself I can't do it. I didn't even try to do anything different. I'm just like, I'm not, I'm just, I just can't do it. I don't think there's any other way, but part of me knows that I can, 'cause I've come back from much greater situations when it comes to my knee and getting back on the horse, so to speak. So I'm like, it's just right now I'm okay to rest, but I will get back to Pilates. Notice the difference. I will get back to it. I don't know how I'm gonna get back to it, but I will. Right. And during this time I've been working on my mindset. I've been working on like, How, what are the baby steps I need to do? One, keep doing the motions that happen with Pilates. Keep thinking about them. Keep engaging in different ways so that you don't lose the muscle memory that you, you gained over a year, 2 years of doing this so consistently, right? Secondly, talk about how this is challenging for you, how you want to get back to it. So talk about it. Like I talk about it with my husband. I talk about it with my therapist. I talk about it with my friends and like the people in my Karen Gation, I'm like, yeah, I love Pilates, but I haven't been in like a year. It helps me stay accountable to like, this is a dream and this is something I really enjoy. And I'm, as challenging as it is, if I keep talking about it, the more I'm going to figure out how to make it work, how I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to figure it out. Right. And so that's led to a text message to my Pilates instructor of being like, hey, if I were going to come back, if I wanted to do such and such, can I just do like a 30-minute, you know, If that session, private session, just to start with, that's all I, that's all I've done. That's all the conversation I've had. Cuz then I got a cold and I'm like all janky and yucky. But like, you see how I did that? It's okay to pursue other things in your life while you still stay committed to the thing you actually want to achieve. Because when you do, you find the solutions to achieve it. It's when you give up and tell yourself you can never, or you, it's not, you are not capable of creating that reality.

But you are.

We are powerful. We have been wonderfully made to be able to accomplish so many things, even in the state of imperfection and in state of strife in the world that we, we see today. So how do you identify the self-sabotaging thing? Look at the things that you actually wanted to do before maybe having a chronic illness or before some event happened, right? What were some of those things that you wanted to do? Are those things that still feel aligned and good for you? Are they still passionate? Like, do you still have a passion for you?

Do—

or is it still a skill that you have? Is it a skill you want to continue to develop? Like, identify what you want. Many of us are walking around this world. Doing things that we don't want and mad about it. We can change that. We can change that. It may not happen overnight. It may mean that you're doing some other thing in order to support you getting to what you want, but you can attain it. It can happen, but it only can happen if you identify what it is that you want and choose to want it, choose to fulfill it, choose to find ways to make steps to get to doing that. Right? So that is one way you're self-sabotaging yourself from making money. Because what happens is if you're not doing what you want, you end up spending a lot more time and energy doing something you don't want to do. And it feels like treading water and you actually don't make that much money and you don't save that much time because you're trying to force something to work. Okay. So that's self-sabotage number one. Number two, you get caught up in all of the tiny non-specific important things in your business that look pretty, that feel easy, sort of. But you really only need to focus on the things that help you tell your story, show up for your audience, and demonstrate and show people how you help them, right? If you have found that you're specifically in your business right now and you're not where you want to be in your finances or your lead things, like even in your lead pipeline, and this also applies in your like personal life, if you find yourself not getting to the goal of where you want to be in your personal life, what— where are you spending a lot of time doing things that don't get you to where you actually want to be? That make the biggest impact for you getting to where you want to be. So unless building a website and you're going to focus on cold lead traffic and you're going to be focusing on like networking where people are just going to visit your website, you don't need to be worried about your website. People spend a lot of time on trying to make things so pretty. I have been that person. I am a— I love pretty, but sometimes we get so wrapped up in making things pretty that we lose focus on the thing that actually gets people to decide whether or not they're going to work with you, with which, which honestly is people knowing and seeing you and you showing up and providing value and helping them to see what's possible for them. What's, what's possible that they believe that's impossible, right? This is what builds trust and happens, that happens a lot faster. The reason why you end up focusing on other things that are kind of like behind the scenes that are like small little details to things is because there is often a fear around being seen as someone who can help someone, right? It's sometimes the, the fear of, you know, the fear of success, the fear of failure, the fear of someone thinking you don't know what you're talking about. Or maybe you feel like you don't know what you're talking about. Maybe you feel like you don't have enough experience. Maybe you feel that if you haven't attained this goal right now in your life, you probably won't, right? Your beliefs have a lot to do with where you spend your time. If you spend your time tinkering on all these little small things versus showing up and letting people learn from what you have to share— your story, your, your— and the way you help people solve problems and how you help people attain what they want. Then you're kind of trying to keep yourself small and you can be visible and still have a modest business. You can be visible and you can share and support people and still have, and not, and still be humble, right? So it's about really identifying, am I, my, one of my coaches calls it buffering. Am I buffering? Am I over here like tinkering on this Canva post forever? Because it needs to be perfect? Am I over here tinkering with like the backend of my, my, my automations and everything to make sure everything is super crisp to the point? Am I like, is my perfection, my perfection of wanting everything to be so perfect where I can't show up as myself getting in the way of me getting to the next level or growing in my business? Am I doing that to myself? Like those are some of the things to keep in mind. And lastly, this is, this is, this is, if you haven't figured it out, this third one is like really tied to everything, but you are neglecting mindset work. You think, you think that mindset work is not really that important. You just need to know strategy, right? So you keep trying lots of strategy, lots of different strategy. You keep learning lots of different strategies. You keep trying to do all of the strategies perfectly, and yet you aren't spending the same amount of time and effort on your mindset work, on how you believe about, like, what you believe about yourself, what you believe is possible, what you believe is not possible, what you believe you're worth, what you believe you're not worth, right? What you believe creates impact and what you believe doesn't create impact and results, right? Your mindset and energy levels are significantly impacted by your actions and your results. So if you're spending a lot of time learning all of these different strategies and you're getting frustrated and keep trying to learn new ones, you best believe your mindset and your energy is also going to go tank, tank, which means you're not going to— you're going to get stuck. You're not going to want to do stuff. You might be in that place right now. You might be in the place right now where you have been trying all of these new things and it's not working, but you're also, you haven't been paying attention to your mindset because you have just said, oh, it's just, it has nothing to do with my mindset. Right? So you're self-sabotaging because you keep telling yourself it's more about the strategy than about how I think about myself. And about me doing the strategy. Okay, when you get your mind on board with whatever strategy you're doing, if you can fully be in it, you create better results because your mind is on board, right? Because when your mind is on board, your body's on board, and these forces work together. Your mind and body work together. It's energetic, it's science. It's how it works. It's how we work. So you can't take the tool, these strategies that you have, the hammer, and expect the person using the hammer to aim correctly if they are not looking at the instruction manual of how they can use the hammer or how, how a person needs to be operating in order to operate that hammer. Effectively, right? So you have to do some of this work on yourself mindset-wise, and oftentimes we self-sabotage ourselves in thinking, well, if I'm doing the, the, the strategies, then I don't need to do the mindset. If I'm just do— if I just get perfect at doing the strategies, I don't really have to worry about the mindset work. But guess what? The strategy requires your mindset to be with you. While you're implementing the strategies. So if you're writing, I, if your, your strategy is podcasting to be the main way for you to get out long-form content, to attract clients when you need to rest, while you're dealing with whatever flare-up in life, things that you actually want, and you are doing the strategy on like creating content, answering questions, but your brain and your head says this isn't going to work. Nobody's going to listen to me. Nobody even knows what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. You will, one, not be as clear and confident. You will, two, not be as consistent and it won't be sustainable. Right. So can it— can you get some results? Absolutely. You can have like some trash mindset and get results as long as you continue to work on your mindset intentionally. This is something I teach my clients, like, you don't have to have a perfect mindset in order to create results. You just have to intentionally be working on your mindset all of the time, like, as, as much as possible in order to create results. Even though you're not perfectly in your, like, your mindset isn't perfect, right? You have to have the belief work behind, I am a work in progress. And because I am a work in progress and my mindset's a work in progress, whatever strategies I implement, are going to see the results of that as long as I continue to intentionally work on my mindset. So don't discount this. When you work on your mindset intentionally, actually, you actually make the strategies feel more easy, more effortless, and helps you to create more results faster when you're doing the mindset work along with working on those strategies. Okay. So you might be like, Nikita, dawg, this is kind of heavy. This is kind of deep. It's the, it's, it's, it's just a few of the self-sabotaging things that I've actually noticed working with some clients, getting some sales calls and seeing this. And also just in the industry of what I'm seeing as far as like the posts that I'm seeing and the content that I'm seeing from some people is that there is this, there are some of these things that are happening where people are leaving industries, people are deciding that This business model doesn't work, or da da da. And I think a lot of these things are just symptoms of some of these sabotaging, mostly mindset things that were not dealt with before and weren't part of the reason, like weren't part of the holistic solution to how they were approaching their business, right? And so I don't want that for you. I don't want that for anyone, right? I don't want you to get to the end of the year. I mean, like, this is not what I want. And it's because you never asked yourself what you wanted, and it's because you never actually explored what it is that you wanted. We get afraid of exploring, doing things that we think are impossible because it feels uncomfortable. But what if you explored what was impossible and it didn't feel as impossible anymore? Wow. What? Wow. Right? So we are afraid of our feelings. We're afraid of the unknowns. We're afraid of The status quo not being our status quo. And so therefore we start self-sabotaging, start making ourselves smaller. We start working on things that don't really get us to the next place that we actually want to be. And it makes us stop doing the work on our own thoughts and our own beliefs. And those things all in together affect how you're able to make money with ease or not. Right? So I wanted to share that with you all. I hope this was helpful. I hope it made sense. I gave a much more clear, concise example of this in the email that I'm sending you. And I also did a shorter video, like a real quick video about this on a Loom video that I did like in bed while I was still like a little bit sicker than I am today. But I kind of just wanted to go like real ham on this for you all to kind of get some clarity. So how do I help you like not self-sabotage in any of my containers you working with me? One, in my one-to-one coaching, I am quick to identify when you're self-sabotaging. I also teach you to know how you are self-sabotaging. I also teach you how to go after and create a business that is not only profitable, but it's sustainable for you and you, your, your energy energetically, because that is important, right? And so because I do that with you on a one-on-one basis, I'm not just giving you support without any access to me. You get access to me, you get access to a free team member to support you and getting you to where you want to go. And I also help you see things from a different perspective, but you start to see things from a different perspective by just changing the way you're thinking and believing about what's possible, right? It changes everything, but you get the strategy, you get the, the tools you need, you get the the systems and all of that to actually run your business online living with chronic illness and make a livable income. And you get support on someone helping you to know, hey, you're about to run off a cliff, don't go over there, right? And that's the power of one-to-one coaching is having someone over there with you being like, who's done it before, to be like, hey, also you're going to hit some bumps in the road. Let's try to avoid some of those bumps in the road. Let's also avoid some confusion and overwhelm that happens from advice that you're consuming from the world that's not considering what your life is like living with chronic illness. That's the kind of work that we do within our one-to-one container. So if you'd like to learn more about that, go ahead and book a call, and I will see you on the next episode. Thank you so much.

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.