In this episode of Business with Chronic Illness, host Nikita Williams addresses the abrupt hiatus of the podcast that began on February 6th, explaining that the pause was driven by a combination of health changes, loss of key support staff, and the need to reassess how the show fits into her evolving capacity. She highlights the concept of "quiet transitions"—subtle, unannounced internal shifts that entrepreneurs with chronic illness experience, which often go unnoticed by the external world. Williams references a series on transitions by Andrea Nakayama to illustrate these hidden changes. She then announces a relaunch plan: new episodes will be released bi‑weekly on Wednesdays featuring guests, with additional solo pop‑ins on Fridays. She also promotes her solo podcast, Built To Breathe, for deeper dives into her own processes and client work. To foster community, she introduces the first Business with Chronic Illness Insider (BWCI) Zoom call on May 7, 2026, a free, limited‑attendance session aimed at discussing personal health challenges, fears, and business pivots. The episode underscores the importance of building businesses that align with chronic illness realities, creating intentional spaces for support, and redefining persistence as protecting one’s work rather than constant outward showing up.
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Are you tired of hearing business advice that completely ignores what real life looks like when you're navigating chronic illness, autoimmune disorders, flare-ups, medical appointments, and just life? Life-ing. Business with Chronic Illness is for entrepreneurs who know they're capable of building something meaningful but need a way to do it that actually works with their body, not against it. This podcast brings you honest conversations with founders, CEOs, and other bosses sharing their strategies, adaptations, and lessons they've learned while building businesses alongside chronic illness, including what worked, what didn't, and what they wish they had done differently before burnout forced the lesson. I'm your host, Nikita Williams, a globally ranked podcast host and entrepreneur who's built my business while navigating chronic illness and helping others do the same without sacrificing themselves. I created this show to open up the conversations most business spaces avoid. The promise of Business with Chronic Illness is simple: to show you that you can build a thriving business with chronic illness and autoimmune disorders without sacrificing your health, your peace, or your profit. You're not behind, you're building differently, and you're in the right place.
Welcome back to Business with Chronic Illness. If you've been here before or you are a new listener, or if you are a longtime OG of the show, thank you for being here. And if you're new, good timing because I'm getting back into some stuff here on this podcast. And we're starting with a nice reset refresh. But before we get into what you can expect from the show moving forward, I obviously have to address to all of my listeners from the point of I disappeared on February 6th. I just kind of disappeared from the podcast world. And I want to share with you a little bit of why and some updates on what you can expect from the show. So there was no announcement. No, you didn't miss it. There was no explanation. No, you didn't miss it. And no, there wasn't like a goodbye episode either. I just stopped. And if you noticed, I see you. Many of you reached out to me and said, hey, everything good? How's it going? That means the show, this podcast matters to you as it matters to me. And that's exactly why I needed to press the pause button unexpectedly. So here's what I know. I continue to keep like coming back to. I have grown out of a lot of different spaces that I'm currently in. Or was in, and I've grown out of the way I used to run the show. Here's what I haven't grown out of. I still love the conversations. I still love sitting across from someone on the Zoom room, in person on Zoom, or like actually in person, whether it's recording or just chatting with someone and watching them name something or identify or feel something or share something that they've been carrying alone for a while. That part still gets me and I never get tired of it. Never get tired of it. But the back end of running a guest podcast is a lot of moving parts. And when I lost my VA who really helped me with this process, with our systems and our SLPs that we had in place, all those things landed on me. And on top of that, I've been going through some health changes and there was a capacity that I had. As you guys know, I spend a lot of space within my systems and flows and that I thought I had enough and it just wasn't what I needed now. It needed to look a little bit different. So I had a choice to keep showing up out of obligation and pushing myself and doing the hard thing because we know how to do hard things, right? Follow a routine, follow the idea of what consistency has to mean, right? Or stop, get quiet, and figure out if this show still had a purpose I believed in and it still was serving its purpose for my overall vision of my business as well as where I'm going and for all of you. So I stopped and in that space I found my answer and this show still matters to me. I just needed space to figure out how to rebuild how I run it in this time of my life. So I wanna talk to you about something that doesn't get talked about enough, and it's transitions. I wanna shout out a good friend, Andrea Nakayama, where we actually talk about this. She has a whole series. I'll have that connected for you in the show notes. But in that series, we talked about how there's so many transitions that happens like every day or even throughout a certain periods of our times of life that don't get a big celebration, right? There's no big announcement. There's no save the date preparing you for these things. There's no pivots with all of these sequences around how this is gonna roll out. What I'm talking about are the transitions that happen so quietly, right? The ones where something inside of you has already changed, but the outside world doesn't even know it's happened, and you probably haven't even subconsciously caught up to it yet. Those ones are the ones nobody is clapping for. There's nobody over there saying, this is what you need to know what's happening, let me sit in with you, sit in it with you, unless you ask for it. And those transitions really matter, even when nobody else knows that they're happening. And they deserve space and they deserve time and they don't always come with a pretty bow on them. So I think a lot of us know exactly what I'm describing because when you're running a business and your body is constantly letting you know what it needs so that it provides you the, the feedback that you need to make good decisions for your nervous system and your actual life that's happening. You're like in this transitional space versus an optional space. Like, you kind of in survival mode with this aspect of trying to find the counterbalance of the two. And you don't always get to announce when that's gonna happen. You don't always get an opportunity to explain or even understand what it is or have the words to explain it. This is why I want you all to listen to the series on transitions that my friend has all on her website. But sometimes you just have to honor them, even when it doesn't look pretty. It may mean you're a villain, as my friend says it, a villain in someone else's story. And it may mean that you need to stop from the outside, even though you're still working on the inside. And I want to give all of you the same permission in your life. So many of us are trying to build in real time with everyone seeing and knowing and kind of like moving through it. And I think there is a beauty allowing space for some of that to be done in your own space, in your private space, if you so choose. So persistence doesn't always look like showing up. Sometimes it looks like protecting what you're building long enough to come back to it. And make it something that feels really good and aligned with where you are right now. So here's where we are. Business with Chronic Illness is back. We are going to be releasing episodes biweekly on Wednesdays. There will be guest-focused, and I will leave, like this episode came out on Friday, I will leave Fridays for my random pop-ins to share and connect with you. You're gonna get 2 episodes a month, with more intention, more space for you to really dive in and communicate and chat with me, um, via Instagram or email list and other spaces that we're creating community. So if you want to hear from me solo though about my process, my real-time figuring out, my, you know, ways that I'm helping clients create results in their business, I have a new podcast for that and it's called Built To Breathe. More information on that is in the show notes. So you want to get on my email list to find more out, to learn more about it, because I'll be sharing more about that in my email community. So if you want to join us in the show notes, go ahead and do that. And there's something else I want to test. I've been wanting to move into this and test this specifically with the community here on this podcast, Business with Chronic Illness. And here's what I wanna do. On May 7th, 2026, I'm hosting the first ever BWCI, the Business with Chronic Illness Insider call. It's gonna be a free Zoom small group. I'm gonna limit the number to 25 attendees. It's gonna be intimate and there's gonna be one specific agenda. I want to hear what's actually getting in the way for you. Not just the strategy questions, not just the numbers. I wanna know about the fears, the challenges, the pivots, the things that are going on with your personal physical life as far as how it reflects in your business. And you have goals and plans and vision for what's coming up in your business or even in your life, whatever they are. I want you to bring them into that space.. And I want to support them. I feel like sometimes we don't have spaces that are there just to hear ourselves say some things out loud. And we find that clarity like that. We find the clarity like a click of a finger, right? And I wanna create that space. And I also wanna bring from our content that we're creating and all these conversations and move this into a real live breathing community where we support each other and cheer each other on with resources and support. And at some point I'm imagining this to be like an in-person type of event for business entrepreneurs and owners and founders. So that's where we're headed. This is the first one. I'm building it, testing it out. I don't know exactly how it's gonna work or if it's gonna work, but I sure hope it does. And I just know that I wanna start a place to have more conversations in real time with all of you. So the link to register for this is in the show notes. It's free. I'm keeping it intimate on purpose, and I'd love for you that you're listening to be there. So thank you for still being here and listening and downloading and sharing and reviewing.
It has meant so much for me for over the years.
I appreciate you. Thank you for giving this show and me a space to come back to that feels really real and connected. So the next episode you're going to hear from me or in this space is a guest episode., and it's going to be talking about burnout and disconnection and how that shows up and how you might be approaching your business today. So we'll see you on Wednesday. Remember, you are crafted to thrive.
