In this solo episode of the Business with Chronic Illness podcast, host Nikita Williams addresses women living with chronic illness and how they can redefine what success means for them in business. She explains that success is not a one‑size‑fits‑all metric; it can range from earning a few hundred dollars a month to replacing a six‑figure income, or simply gaining the flexibility to manage health needs. Williams highlights how health status—whether newly diagnosed, in an awareness phase, or a long‑term chronic condition—shapes each person’s goals and feelings about success. She shares a client story from her group coaching program, Chronically You and Profitable, illustrating how a client questioned whether coaching was the right path and how allowing herself permission to pivot led to a new definition of success. Williams also reflects on her own learning journey, using an algebra analogy to show that alternative problem‑solving methods can still produce correct outcomes, emphasizing that past “failures” are valuable lessons rather than evidence of inadequacy. She outlines a flexible coaching framework that helps clients set personalized success targets—whether $2,500, $10K, $100K, or a single client every six months—while navigating societal pressure from social media and industry role models. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to join her programs, book a sales call, and remember that they are "crafted to thrive" despite 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 how we make a living. This is Business with Chronic Illness.
Hello, beautiful people. Okay, so in this episode, I want to talk to you about success. I've really been thinking about this, especially for those of us living with chronic illness, and just like how success in business looks very different. Our definitions of what success looks like is going to look and feel different. Some clients that I work with want to make $100K. Some clients want to make $2,500 a month. Some clients just wanna make $500 a month. Some clients wanna replace a 6-figure income. That means that they're the breadwinners for their family. Some clients want to have just a fund of money that helps them take care of those extra things that the insurance say aren't necessary. Things like, you know, acupuncture and chiropractor and massage and whatever other things those might be. And this is going to look different, right? And if you are a person who's looking to invest with a coach right now, you're looking to spend time and energy in your life, trying to create a business, a side hustle, or like a full-time gig as your own business for the freedom and flexibility that you want. I just wanted to come on here and remind you that success isn't a one-size-fits-all kind of thing, right? Especially for those of us living with chronic illness. I think it's hard because we are bombarded with social media in the world today that says that success is a dollar amount. That success is a client number amount, that success is all of these digital numbers. But it can be for some of us, but it can also be options. I always like to say, like, success for some of my clients and for me is having more options, meaning because I get to work for myself, I have options on when and where I show up to do what it is that I need to do for who I need to do or who I don't need to do it for. Right? So success is going to look different and success is going to feel different based on what's going on with your health. If you're a person who's in the newbie phase of chronic illness, who is just diagnosed or not even diagnosed yet, and you're going through a lot of different things, your version of success probably feels confusing. Probably it's up in the air. You're not quite sure what it's going to look like because you're trying to figure out, is this permanent? Is this not permanent? I just need to have more flexibility because I can't be in this job every single day. I, you know, I can't, I can't go to work and like fake how I feel and just deal with whatever. Like, I can't. And for those of us in the awareness and the OG phase of chronic illness, success might look like, I just want something that feels sustainable and easy, right? Or it's something, I have this great ambition and I want to grow and I want to build. But here's what I think about success. No matter what success looks like for you living with chronic illness is that you get to decide. You get to decide. So, so many people come into starting a business and they are looking at what the OGs in the space are doing. Like, you look at the Amy Porterfields, the, you know, all these other, you know, big folks that are doing things, and they've given us great foundations for how we can start our businesses and things like that. And we view those successes like our own. But even if you look at that, you might be feeling like, I don't want that. And I want to just remind you that you don't have to want that. You get, you get to decide what size of business or time or clientele you have.. And depending on the communities and the education and the coaches that you decide to lean into, you— it's okay for you to advocate for that. So I had a client in my container recently in my group coaching program called Chronically You and Profitable, and most of the clients in there are clients right now currently that are looking to start and grow their coaching business or sign their next highest client in their coaching business, right? And so I have a client in there who kind of has played with the idea of coaching, and it keeps coming up here and there. And she asked me this question of like, but what if I don't want to coach?
And then I asked her, well, what do you want to do?
And she shared with me what she wanted to do, and I was like, how can we get that? How can we make that a reality for you? What does success look like for you? And oftentimes we don't even give ourselves permission to ask and be the person to be a little different in those spaces. And I want to give you permission to be that person in whatever container that you may be in right now. Maybe you had wanted to be a coach, like maybe this client did want to be a coach, and then something happened in her life and that shifted and that changed, and she is really deciding on something different. She wants to do something different.
That's okay.
And the other thing I want to give you permission to give yourself in this context of success is a lot of you guys beat yourself up on starting and stopping new things. Like, you've— you, you kind of spend time spinning out on, well, because I decided to start this business or start this thing and I never finished it, quote unquote, I'm just a failure. I can't ever make anything successful. And so you don't believe— you don't believe that now that you kind of in your heart and in your head know exactly what it is you want to do and how it's going to work. You don't trust yourself because you've discounted all of those other things you did as not being successful. But I want to offer you, what if all those little things that you did and tried have one, given you the tools the perspective to make this thing that you're now going to do be what you want it to be? What if you needed to go through all of those different variations of what you wanted to discover what you really wanted? Is that not a success? Is it not a success that now you know what it is you need to do? It's kind of like, I think about this when I was a kid. I was horrible. I was horrible at math. Like, I, I was horrible at math when I got to high school. I should say I did pretty good all the way up into high school, but then we got into geometry and algebra, and I had some hits and misses with geometry, but algebra was the bane of my existence. And I would try doing all of the things, and the thing that frustrated me the most— and this is part of the reason why I believe success has a very interesting connotation for those of us specifically with this thought of like, oh, I tried this thing, or I did this thing differently than everybody else. It means that I'm a failure when it doesn't mean that. It just means you came about to the answer in a different way, and that is what made you successful. When I would do my algebra, there's a very specific way apparently you're supposed to do these formulas. I would do the formulas in Nikita's way, like in my brain way, versus the way that I was taught to do it, because it— the way I was taught to do it just didn't click for me. My dad would teach me different ways to do it, and that made more sense, and he's like from England. So some of those things would click, and then my tutor would teach me a different way, and that would click. But then when I would go and take the test, because I didn't use the exact formula that the book said I need to, to, to do it, I would get part of the question wrong because I wasn't following their system, but the overall answer was still correct. We have been conditioned as a society that you can't come to the same conclusion a different way, and if you do, you're not successful. And I want to offer you— that's why there are different learning styles. There's some of us that are visual, some of us that are audio, some of us that are like, need to read or touch or be engaging with something in order to really understand something, right? And so Just because you've tried something here and there, you did something and you changed your mind or things change doesn't mean that you're not successful. Once you land on doing something you truly want, the success is in you doing and keeping going. That's the success. It's not the, oh, I failed. It's the lessons you've learned along this journey. It's the lesson you've learned that not only are those lessons that may have been mistakes, may have been pitfalls in the context of like, oh my gosh, I didn't mean to spend that much money, or I didn't mean to say this the same way. You can now take those lessons that will help your thing that you're doing now be even more successful. So for me as a coach, my goal for you is to remember that success isn't a one-size-fits-all. I have a framework that I help my clients work through, and everyone goes through that framework and it looks different. For each person coming out of it, right? And that's okay because you are unique. Your success is your own. Your path to success is your own. A good coach hopefully is there to help you see where you can be guided and maybe avoid some of the pitfalls, but ultimately get to where you want to go and creating the results you want, whether it's $2,500 whether that's $100K, whether that's $10K, whether if that's just one client every 6 months, it's going to look different. Don't allow the noise in the world telling you you have to do it a certain way stop you from even giving it a shot. So I just wanted to share that with you. This is something that came up in a couple of my group calls, also reviewing some of my, um, sales calls over the last few months. Is that a lot of you are holding yourself back from investing or connecting with community because you feel like, oh, I don't belong there because my success doesn't look the way that I think it should look. And I want you to be brave and courageous enough that you can step into any space and make anything work for you when you are set on what your version of success looks like. Advocate for you, advocate for what you want, and whatever room you go into will be exactly what you need. All right, loves, love having you here on the show. Hope you're having a great summer and we'll 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 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.
