How Do You View Yourself with Chronic Illness?

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.

So it's really important to think about how you view yourself with chronic illness and how this is going to affect your business and how you grow. So I don't know if any of you are like me, but part of my just makeup has been very much of like, I'm driven to like prove people wrong. I'm driven to prove myself wrong. I'm driven to do the best I can. I'm a driven person. There's nothing, like it takes a lot for something to take me out. I've given myself a lot more self-compassion, a lot more kindness and understanding, but it's taken a long time for me to get to this place in my life., and I've recently been thinking about this when I've talking to my clients with inside of my program, Chronically You and Profitable, which is a 12-month group coaching, high-touch program where we teach you how to create and launch your online coaching business through sustainable marketing and sales strategy systems and have a holistic mind and body toolkit to make it easier for you to make a livable income, thrive, and have better days with chronic illness. And so within this program, We talk a lot about marketing and sales and all those things, but we also talk about how we view ourselves doing these things. And it's interesting cuz I've been in business for a long time now and I've been in this arena of online marketing before the bubble of the pandemic and everybody becoming like, what's this online world? Let's do this thing. To now after the, the pandemic to seeing different business owners and seeing The change of how people view themselves in their business. And I have this saying that I've said for a very long time. I think I started saying this back in 2018, that business is personal. And I've added to that the fact that business is personal, and when it is, it becomes easier. And what I mean by that is that obviously there are numbers in business, like we have to know the numbers. There are statistics and stats and everything, but all of those things are run by the complex, beautiful nature of humans. And when we get down to the basis of everything, even our marketing and sales and messaging and our words has everything to do with the human psychology of how we do think and be people that oftentimes we neglect to see how The way we view ourselves is showing up in the way we operate in our businesses, in our lives, in our careers. If you're in a corporate environment, right? And depending on how we view ourselves deeply affects the things you actually do, deeply affects the goals you actually have, deeply affects the motivations and the intention behind what you do, which therefore can have an effect on your results. And I often ask my clients to really assess, really, how they view themselves living with chronic illness. And a lot of it means potentially looking at maybe how you believe people view you and asking yourself, are these beliefs that you have either over time started to believe, or are these beliefs you've assumed other people have thought of you and now you have lived in them as a reality of what others— you believe others view of you. Are these your critical thoughts of yourself? One of the biggest shifts that will happen when you really just become aware of who you are, how you view yourself, negative thoughts, certain pieces of advice you will therefore filter through. So let me give you an example. Something that I've realized as a woman living with multiple chronic illnesses is that the advice for majority of us, anybody, not just us, like living with chronic illness, like any business owner, is to just start, like in the very beginning, just try everything because you're not going to get it right.

You're just not going to get it right.

You don't know what you want to stick to, yada, yada, yada, yada, right? And it's also kind of that same advice we get, or I got living with my chronic illnesses. I got in the very beginning, like get all the blood work done, which granted it needed to happen, and then try all of the things all at once. And it's okay if you fall, it's okay if you get exhausted, it's okay if you have to hustle your way through it, it's okay if you have to sacrifice more time or money, yada yada yada, to figure it all out. And as I look at my journey living with chronic illness, the reason why I believed that to be true is because of the way I viewed myself. The way I viewed myself was like, it doesn't matter how hard a situation is, I will figure a way. I will figure out a way to make it work. I don't care if it causes more pain, if it's harder, I will figure out a way because I am determined. I'm almost like tunnel vision, right? And to a degree, that served me really well. I definitely believe that served me to not give up and not allow doctors to gaslight me and all of these things. But to another degree, it caused harm. It really did. It made me choose and decide on things and try to force myself into a situation of healing or, uh, of knowing without allowing the time that is required for me and for my body and my circumstances to truly actually get the answer. Now I'm saying this and I'm sharing this because I truly believe the way we view ourselves directly and indirectly affects our results in our business and the results we get for our clients, right? I believe there is a fine line of caring and being a passionate for our clients and a fine line between being everything to our clients, trying to prove and do all the things for our clients. And here's the reason why. I have seen million-dollar coaches, business owners literally shut down their businesses because of not really taking stock of how they view themselves truly and seriously, right? What I have found, like, the more you give yourself the space to be real with who you are, the more space you give yourself to create the path or the space you need to actually grow sustainably. And this is why I truly believe that those of us living with chronic illness really can take a lesson from those who are still in business, who have, you know, really high level of income and profit in their businesses and are sustainably living their life and running a business versus the advice of so many in the industries, specifically in coaching, who are no longer in this business anymore, or who have taken the longest sabbatical and now have left everything because of burnout, because of not acknowledging how they view themselves and how this could be showing up and hindering their growth in their business. And this might be way meta for some of you who don't even have a business yet or not there yet, but for those of you that do, this is for you to think about. Right. You know, you don't need to be making $1 million to grow your business sustainably now when you're making $10,000. I'mma say that again. You don't need to be making $1 million to decide now that you can grow your business sustainably at $10,000. Because if you view yourself as a person, as determined, and you're gonna get stuff done, it doesn't have to be tomorrow. Determination doesn't mean that there is a, a time limit or a time space of when that's going to happen. And that's really the shift. See, for me, as a very determined, go-getter kind of person, it used to have a time limit. It was like, I got to figure this out in the next couple of weeks because I ain't got time for this, right? I've got other things to prove, which ultimately led to more pain, more hurdles, more struggles, more not learning versus being like, yes, I am determined. I'm a go-getter. I'm a pusher througher, if you will. But I can do that at a pace that's sustainable, that allows me to have the capacity to implement, to learn, to digest, if you will, and to tweak as I move forward. This is part of the reasons why I believe a lot of those of us starting out our business really needs to have more of a mindset or thought of ourselves as a million-dollar CEO in our business now. Even if you don't have the goal of being a million-dollar CEO person, it's helpful because a lot of those people who are still doing that and doing it sustainably— I'm gonna keep saying that caveat— are doing it with the thought in mind that time is a good thing. Determination in time while in happening right now is a good thing. Persistence is a good thing, right? And so if you view yourself as a person that is a perfectionist, Type A, you've got to do all of these things. If you take the good things out of being like— being a perfectionist means you're probably super organized, for example. Being a perfectionist means like you are— you pay close attention to the details. Being perfectionist sometimes means that you want to have everything right, even though we're imperfect and things are gonna go wrong, but you like— you have a high standard. But oftentimes we add a time limit to that. We add a time cadence to that. And I want you to think about, if I view myself as a perfectionist, can I release the timeframe and give myself the space and the grace to learn and grow and implement while being a detailed-oriented person, while being focused, while being the person that is looking at all of the things. And giving myself time, right? In a good way, not in a procrastinating way where you just can't like pull the lever because it's not perfect, but in the way that you're learning to implement and take action, right? At a pace of your knowing. So sometimes that might require needing help. Sometimes that requires leading out and looking for mentors who know or have been where you are. Sometimes it means just being in community of like-minded peers who are willing to give you ways of thinking of things in different angles. Sometimes it's a coach who doesn't give up on your vision when you feel like it's time to, and it's, it's not yet because your perfectionist brain and your go-getter, proven-it brain says, this isn't it, so I must move on, right? It's so important for you to take some time to really think about how you view yourself because the The first step to a successful business is being really aware of who you are and who you're not, and that helps you at least be real with yourself, right? It helps you be real with yourself. It helps you give yourself space to make decisions that are in alignment with where you want to go. So I want you all to think about this. I want you to take a second and take some journal notes of the things for you to think about. Here are some journal prompts to help you when it comes to thinking about how you view yourself. Think about this: Do I love who I am? What aspects of me do I love? What aspects of me kind of irk me? What are things that I wish I can improve? What things am I impatient about? What things get on my nerves? What things do I wish were done already? What things are done that I'm proud of? And this could be related to your life personally or in your business, right? When people say negative things about me, or I perceive they're saying negative things, what are the 3 top most common negative thoughts that I usually ruminate on? And do I believe that those things are true for me? And if not, how would I disprove? Like, what's the evidence? And if I do believe it's true, is it necessarily a negative thing or is it a place for growth? So those are just a few questions to ask yourself that might help you to prompt you in this like summer going into the end of the year timeframe, sorta of like, how are you viewing yourself? And the last question I'll add is like, is any of this showing up in the way I make decisions in my business? These thoughts, are they showing up in the way I make decisions about my marketing, the way I make decisions about my offers, the way I make decisions about my collaborations, my sales? Those are questions to ask yourself. All right, loves, that is it for today. I want to keep it really brief. I've been, you know, doing the summer briefs here and there kind of thing. That's where we're on a bi-weekly schedule. But I can't wait to see you in the next episode.

That's a wrap for this episode of Business with Chronic Illness. If you would like to start and grow an start 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.