How to Overcome Feeling Numb, Stuck, and Overwhelmed in Your Business and Life 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. Hey y'all.

So I am excited to talk about a little bit of mindset stuff. This episode is purely a mindset one, and I want to share with you how this is going to make your business in life with chronic illness or whatever challenges you're going through feel better, have more ease in them. I think that we need daily check-ins and resets. Part of my journey has been formed by what I call my resets, and it's actually a part of my business framework that I teach my clients. I think having a reset, not only with what you're thinking, what's going on, but also what's going on in your business is super important. Why do we need a process for resetting? Why do we need a process for understanding when we're feeling the way we're feeling? Resets are important because you get stuck in your business, you get overwhelmed in your life, you get overwhelmed in your business, you get over— stuck in your life. There's so many different ways that we get stuck, so many different ways we feel overwhelmed and frustrated. And often many of us stay in those spaces a little bit longer than we would like because we don't have a system or a foundation in order to manage that. And this is how I came up with the reset. Now, the reset is like— it didn't happen overnight. I actually had to look over my journey and realize, oh my gosh, I'm actually just— I've created a reset, almost like a reset on your computer. It doesn't shut everything down, but it does, for the most part, put everything back so you have a moment, right? And it helps you to look at things retroactively, like actively and retrospectively, and like past, present. It helps you just kind of have a really good space to think about what it is that's getting in the way, what is it that you really want, and what is causing you the most frustration, overwhelmed feeling? And is it really true that what you're feeling or thinking is actually happening, or is it fear, or is it past experiences? Is it trauma? It helps you just realize all of that, and it also helps you get really in touch with your body and your mind. And this is where the mindset comes in. You know, some of the things in my journey living with multiple different chronic illnesses has had to be a moment of pausing, a moment of looking at all of the things, all of the information, all of the so-called facts. Some are facts and deciding, is this true for me? Is this the space for me? Have I added a filter of what it is that my goals and my values are in thinking about all of the things that have been presented or that are in front of me. So this reset was actually a physical reset for me that I experienced. I want to say back in 2018, maybe it might have been 2017. And it was a moment in my journey where I was numb. I was completely numb. I didn't— I couldn't feel my body. I couldn't feel my thoughts. I couldn't hear my thoughts. I couldn't really understand. I was in a place depression almost. I also felt extremely unsure of who I was and where I was going and why things were happening. And that was very unlike me. Like, I have been very certain for the most part of the things that I like and I don't like and what I wanted. And in this season, I was just done, stuck and done. And I was frustrated with my stuckness and my done-ness. I was like, I can't stay stay here. So this is important part of the reset is acknowledging that you are stuck, acknowledging that you're in a space that you really don't want to be. You may be in a space you don't understand why it's happening. You may be in a space where you're feeling so overwhelmed by so much information and you keep trying to reiterate, reiterate, reiterate, and you find yourself repeating yourself. You find yourself thinking and saying the same things over and over again. And this is the time for the pause. This is the time for the reset. And this mindset trick is amazing because it really helps you just reconnect and rediscover and redefine, right? Redefine things. And so for the things in my journey at this point where I was, when I realized, okay, I'm numb, I don't know what's going on. I would go to doctor's appointments and they would ask me what I'm feeling, what's going on. And I literally couldn't create the words. I couldn't even explain because I literally felt numb, even though I was feeling the pain, even though I was feeling the frustration. And this is very different from when I used to go to the doctor's office. I would be very specific. I knew exactly what to say, where the pain was, and I knew how to articulate my feelings. But at this point in my journey, I had no clue. No clue whatsoever. And I was extremely frustrated, you guys. So in this numbness, I decided to stop. For me, this is, this is one aspect of reset. I literally just decided to stop. And this was from a physical, like, treatment standpoint with, with my doctors. So yes, at this time I decided to, like, just stop taking all of the things. Literally, it was completely against all of the advice, all of the, like, doctor's advice, even people's advice, even friends' advice, like, "No, maybe you should stay on one thing." I was like, "No, I'm getting off of everything. I need a reset. I need to re-engage, rediscover what it feels like living in this body even though it's painful, and I need to like feel the feelings. I need to feel the pain." In a way, I was so busy trying to run away, I was so busy trying to fix it, I was so busy trying to figure it all out, like, quickly. And it really represented the space of getting to a place of feeling overwhelmed and stuck. And because I wasn't really tapping in, I couldn't really feel. And on top of that, lots of the medications had its own side effects and things like that. And so not only was I treating the issue, but it was also creating other issues, and it just was too much. And so at that point I decided, nope, I'm not taking anything. We're going to take it. Actually, it took a year of taking like a year off of taking everything. And you know what? While I'm talking about this, this actually happened before my surgery. This happened somewhere in like the 2012-ness of things. I was like, right now in my brain, my anchor is always the, my hysterectomy that I had in 2017 when I think about it, because I had another reset in 2017. But my initial reset was back in probably 2014, 2015, something like that. And anyway, I go back to what I'm saying, but in that, in that time of just taking a moment to completely just stop, I became so much more aware. I got more like data, if you will, of what's going on with my body. I could feel my body, I could feel my feelings. I became more aware of my thoughts about my body. More aware about the thoughts of how I was feeling. Did I still have pain in dealing with the things? Yes. But also, you know, I could feel them. I'm a very feeling person, so feeling gives me data and it helped me to really reassess like, okay, what is actually happening to me, for me, and what are my next baby steps that I can do? And so in the reset, that's what we're doing. We're taking a moment to pause, to become more aware, to be visual and identify where we want to start or start taking baby steps and identify what values and things matter to you. It may have been different. Maybe you started this journey way ahead, like years ago, and your values and your perspective on life has completely shifted. And you need time for a reset. And that's what this purpose is. And so in this reset, you want to do a couple of different things while you're pausing. Now, when I say pause, for all of you who have businesses and are starting a business, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to like put your business on sabbatical and like walk away from it completely. Although I do think it might be helpful for some of us. But what I mean is disengage with the constant learning and going and going. Do what you know that already works. Do the bare minimum and focus in on the things that you need to focus in for you, your mind, your body, your spirituality. All of those things are so important to get back to. Identify where have you lost track of those things? Where have you become disengaged or numb to doing outside of your business. So reengage with those areas of your life and take it down, slow it down a little bit with your business. I think also at this time it's a really good point to disengage from the amount of content you consume, the amount of information you consume. If you're following people that are like you, like competitors or, you know, people you admire, maybe block them or mute them or unfollow them for this period of time. Quiet the noise. Literally, that's what we're doing in this reset is quieting the noise so that you can hear your thoughts, hear your challenges, seek those answers through a different means other than these business people. Like, get out of your normal routine. And get back into your thoughts, your body, your spirituality, your mindset, to reconnect with yourself and look within yourself for some of these answers. Some of these answers will come from within. They will come from you acknowledging, like, when you do this reset. So the first step is to like kind of disengage and to become more aware. That's really a twofold part of the reset. And the second part of the reset is to really take some time to decide. Decide what you want. What have you been doing that has been working against what you want? Whose voices have been the loudest in your head? If it hasn't been yours or your spiritual— your spiritual— spiritualness of whoever that is for you. For me, that's Jehovah God. If his voice and my voice are not loud enough, then and I haven't used them to guide me and to make decisions, then I've lost my way and I need to reengage even more fully. I need to like double down on that, right? So that's the, that next, next step is identifying and deciding what it is and whose voices have you been listening to and how's it been getting in the way and what you need to do in order to reconnect to those things. So important. And lastly, the thing I love about this is, lastly, start taking smaller baby actions, baby step actions towards what it is that you truly want. If you've been stuck and overwhelmed, look at the things that have been getting and adding to your stuckness and your frustration and your numbingness and identify how you got there. I think it's really important that we identify. So for example, living with chronic illness and not really knowing at first what was going on with my body and then finding out made me rush into like trying to try all of the things. I finally got a label. I finally knew what my diagnosis was, and a part of me started living in that label. Like I completely lost my identity outside of that. It complete— it completely started feeling like I am— like I am these chronic illnesses. I, I no longer had my own personal identity. I also had feelings of resentment. I also had feelings of anger, and those things drove me to becoming kind of obsessed with trying things, trying to fix it, trying to get it better. And it, to some degree, led to more harm than I thought it would. I thought it would solve more things. And so when I did this reset, the very thing I had to come back to was who I was, who my body was trying to tell me who I am. And, and one of the biggest things that I discovered in my first, like, acknowledgement of a reset was that I am an extremely sensitive person. My feelings are extremely sensitive and they affect my body in ways that I am still baffled by today. Like, it's like so sensitive. When I say so sensitive, I just think about like when you're touching a live nerve or a live wire, like you, you touch it, you gonna spark, something gonna happen. And that's how my emotions are and that's how my body responds. It's very intensive. And part of this, I think, is just from some trauma I've had. And also because I'm an empath, I think, in a lot of different ways. I feel people's feelings. I feel the lack of people's feelings, if that makes sense. And it really, it really hurts. It really hurts me. It really causes me to have what my body will trigger into that state of my nervous system fear, those negative— like, those positive helpful things our nervous system does to protect us, but it also does a thing where it just creates stress in my body, and therefore it responds. And so when I discovered this, I learned that I also don't like to be rushed. I also learned that I like to take my time I learned that connection is everything. And what I mean by that is that connection to the reason why I'm doing something, who I'm doing it with, how I'm going to do the thing, all interconnects with who I am and who I'm working with. And that includes my doctors, right? And so I started thinking about like the doctors at the point, at the time I was working with, were they listening to me? Were they gaslighting me? And I realized a function of a lot of my doctors, they were gaslighting me and they were like kind of feeding into my mindset at the time. Fix it. Go, go, go, run, run, run. Right. Let's get this done. Let's take this pill. Let's do this shot. Let's get this fixed quickly. Oh, I don't know. Well, we'll just try anything kind of thing. And that wasn't okay with me anymore. And that's where I think my numbness came from because I wasn't tuning in to what was so important. Important, which was connection. I also had lost some space of listening to my higher power, my higher power, my, my father, my God, my friend. And I was disengaging a little bit because it felt like I wasn't enough. I felt like since I wasn't doing the things that I used to do because I was in so much pain, it meant that I wasn't enough for him. I wasn't enough. I wasn't doing enough. And then I realized He, he never asked me to do more than I actually could do, and it was just coming from me. And so because of me pulling away a little bit, like, I was doing more harm. And so I started leaning more into my spiritual practice again, um, just getting back to more deeper study and things like that. And it just helped so much. It helped absolutely the most of all the things, but it definitely helped so much. And the life things that were happening, I kind of just said, you know, I'll pray about it and then just move on. And then I realized I needed to do more than pray about it. I need to do research. And things like that. And I found so many answers. I found so many articles at one point that were related to what I was going through that I never even thought to look up. And I was so like, soothed, and it helped me feel so much more connected to my Heavenly Father. And I was so thankful and grateful for that. And so, you know, a lot of times when we think about our lives and our businesses, we think we have to have— we have— we are on our own and we have to do it by ourselves and we have to figure it out. And we ignore and we push away our feelings, our body, our mind, and things like that. And we kind of get to this place where we're feeling so frustrated and stuck and numb that we've lost the very thing that helped us to get to growth and movement and motion and momentum. And so that's the power of the reset. Reset is important. So this applies not only to your personal self, this applies to your business. Often we get bombarded, we are bombarded with so much data and information and sensory information from social media and friends and businesses and people's voices. And there's like so many different ways to do the same thing. And, and, you know, as many times have I said and other coaches have said, anything can work. So it feels so overwhelming, right? So it's time at, at those times is time to step back. And this is part of what I help my clients to do. This is actually one of my favorite things to do within the first like 30, 90 days with my private one-to-one clients. And I also inter— incorporate this into my group coaching program where it's a time to reset. It's a time to listen and reconnect to who you are, what you want, and where you're going. You know, so much information and business information out there is telling you to ignore what you need and want because your customer base is telling you what they need and want. And if you have been living by that completely wholeheartedly in your business, at some point you will get to a point where it feels like this isn't your business, this isn't who you are, this isn't what you want, even if you're making tons of money, right? So the reset is really important and it's part of something that I teach my clients to do every, you know, 6 month or every quarter just to take a moment and reset and, you know, really identify those things that's going on and reconnect with themselves and with the things that truly matter to them and see and use that as a filter to do an audit or to do a— yeah, to do an audit of everything, honestly, and use that filter and decide, is this for me? Is this not for me? And what's the next step going to be? So I just wanted to share that with you because I've had a couple of friends and I'm currently kind of in a reset as well because many of us have gotten new diagnoses after the pandemic. Many of us are experiencing new body situations like myself this year. It's been really difficult and a lot of different things have come up for me and it's a realization like, oh my goodness, I moved away from some things. I've done some audits on like how my clients' experiences have, like where they ha— what happened with them, what's going on with them. Is there any reflection of where I went, like off my value road perspective? And I'm seeing some things and I'm seeing some things and it's powerful because this is what allows you to continue to grow and move forward. And it helps you not to ignore the things that are getting in your way and that can stay in your way. Right. And so that's the power of the reset. And it's also really great. I've had a client, some clients going through like life transitions and things like that. And sometimes we hold on to things or we grasp onto things that no longer serve where we're going or where we need to go. And sometimes we allow the labels of things or the, the diagnoses to like define us as who we are, like, all-encompassing. And it does give us context, it does give us perspective, but it doesn't define us. We get to choose and decide how we move forward. And yes, there is probably going to be some grieving, there's probably going to be some reckoning, if you will, of realizing what it is. But it also is a powerful tool in helping you live your life in a way that you've always wanted, now that you know what's going on and redefining what that life is going to look like now that you have clarity around what's wrong or what's been happening or may have been causing the friction. And that is a more empowering place to be and to go from, because then from there you can move forward and feel more empowered. And of course, wallow in it however long you want to wallow in it, like deal with the grief and the pain however you you need to deal with it. And just know that when you're ready, there is an empowering way to move forward. And part of it is in what I'm sharing with you today— a reset. A reset, looking at things through a filter of where you are, what you want, the values that matter, and moving forward. So I hope this is helpful for you guys, this little mindset reset slash just come— some people call it come to Jesus moment, but I just think it's come to what's, what's now, what's happening now, what has happened, and really just move through it and grow through it and flourish through it. So if you have any questions about this, or if you're wondering, Nikita, how can I do this systematically without like losing revenue in my business, without breaking down, or if I do break down, how to build myself back up, all of these different kind of things, I'm here for you in the DMs on Instagram or you can book a call with me to learn how to work with me one-to-one to do this process. I do think working with a coach through this process is helpful. I did it at first. My first time doing a reset was with a health coach, um, and a mindset coach, and she helped drastically. And that's what I love, what I do as a business and life coach. Many of my clients have told me that just the process of doing the reset with someone to remind you of keep asking yourself these right, like the right questions can empower them so much to create what's on the other side of the reset. All righty, you guys, thank you so much. Can't wait to talk to you in the next episode. We'll be starting some interview conversations with other fellow guests, and you want to stay tuned for that.

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.