Nikita WilliamsFounder & Principal — Crafted to Thrive LLC, Crafted To Thrive LLC · Top 2.5% Podcast Host of Business With Chronic Illness | Business Coach for Creatively Driven, & Capacity-Aware Entrepreneurs & CEOs who want to increase profit, impact, & rest. | Chronic Illness Advo

Stop Making Business Decisions From Fear

15 Sept 2025 · 2 min

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1:30

In this brief dialogue, Speaker A reflects on how individuals living with chronic illness, especially business owners, often make decisions from a "fear paradigm"—a mindset driven by the pressure to catch up and avoid falling behind. This fear-driven approach leads to burnout and suboptimal outcomes. Speaker A emphasizes the importance of grounding decisions in personal foundations and purpose (the "why"), and recognizing the value of the decision‑maker themselves. Speaker B concurs, noting that making decisions while fearful can be dangerous for health, finances, and overall well‑being. He shares that taking an extra moment to pause, reduce fear, and wait for a clearer, healthier decision consistently yields better results, though it can be challenging when the urgency to catch up feels constant.

Chapters

I think for those of us living with chronic illness, there's a tendency when we take those pauses to feel like now we have to catch up. So we make a lot of decisions based on catching up, right? Like this fear of like, I'm already behind. So we make some of these decisions in that space. I call it the fear, the fear paradigm space. We're making those decisions from that space. And that's what ultimately I feel like creates the burnout. It creates the, like all these decisions. And I just hope that when people hear these conversations, they're not— they, they hear it and say, okay, there's a different way I can do this. And my foundations matter and your why matters. And the reason why you're doing what you're doing matters. And so do you, like you, the person running the business matters, right?
Yes. Yes. I, yes. All of those things. Yes. Because without that, I think it's easy to get lost. It's easy to get swallowed up in the whole process and it can be dangerous. You know, dangerous for health, dangerous financially, dangerous for all the things. And I love what you said about— you're right about making decisions from a place of fear. And I, I've found in my experience, every time I do that, it doesn't end up the way that I would like it to. And that sometimes taking the extra beat, the extra moment to dial it down, remove the fear, wait till you can make a, a, a sound decision, whether it's health-wise or for the business, it tends to always be the better choice. It's just hard to learn how to do that when you feel like, like you said, you're always trying to catch up.