In this solo episode of the She’s Crafted to Thrive podcast, host Nikita Williams explores why women—especially entrepreneurs living with chronic illnesses—often delay investing in themselves. She recounts her own journey from endless medical appointments to realizing that mindset work, emotional healing, and holistic coaching are essential beyond what insurance covers. Williams explains the hidden costs of neglecting inner work, such as prolonged pain, reduced business revenue, strained relationships, and slower progress toward goals. Using a staircase metaphor, she illustrates how skipping personal‑development steps leads to setbacks, likening it to falling and breaking a leg, which then requires more healing time. She describes the emotional trauma of repeatedly entering “warrior mode” in medical settings and the mental toll it takes. To counter these challenges, she advocates for accountability, coaching, aromatherapy, and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) as practical tools. Williams invites listeners to invest in themselves through coaching, a membership community, or other supportive resources, emphasizing that the true cost of not investing far exceeds any monetary figure. The episode ends with a heartfelt encouragement that every listener is "crafted to thrive."
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Welcome to She's Crafted to Thrive. I'm your host, Nikita Williams, and this show is for all the ladies who are making and creating things that they love. You will hear conversations about the real everyday struggles of juggling life and business while trying to maintain passion and harmony. As women, we have the skill of getting things done, but sometimes we get in our own way. It's here where you'll see that you're not alone. You'll discover that success does not mean perfection. Fear and negative thoughts Thoughts and challenges are all a part of the journey. And on this podcast, you'll find the inspiration and tools you need to have a life and business that thrives. Welcome back to the She's Crafted to Thrive Show. I am excited because I am doing a solo cast. We've had amazing, amazing episodes this month. I hope you've gotten a chance to tune in to Kenzie, who was sharing about social media and how to get out of the cringe area and start to love it and harness your strengths. I hope you got a chance to listen to Dani, who is the owner of Handmade Seller Magazine, which is an amazing community of handmade, um, sellers who are sharing their stories and the expertise in what they do. And then I really hope you got a chance to listen to Alicia Chester, who talked about really embracing your gifts as a creative person, like really identifying your secret sauce and leaning into that. And we also talked a lot about grandparents and how we feel and look and all of that jazz. So if you haven't gotten a chance to listen to those episodes, I really hope that you go back and kind of jam and pack into those conversations. They are a bit longer than usual, um, but they are really good. I promise you, there are so many gems. So in this episode, what I would like to chat with you guys about is this thing that I think we all go through and it's deciding whether or not to invest in ourselves. And as a woman living with multiple chronic illnesses, for a very long time, I was going with the motions of just like, what's wrong with me? What's physically, tangibly wrong with me? Let's go to the doctors. I remember at one point I was probably seeing 4 or 5 different specialists at one time. Y'all, that's more weeks than there are in a month. And I was just trying to get answers right. And then at some point I had to realize that there was a little bit more work that I needed to do that was not going to be covered by insurance and it was going to have to be done outside of the scope that I had imagined. And it was about myself, like my mindset, how I felt about things. And it's interesting now that I'm in a place that I've consistently invested in myself when it comes to mindset and holistic coaching and stuff like that to help me along this journey as a chronic illness warrior. Man, am I aware of the things that I had not unpacked mentally and emotionally while going through all of the things, right? And if you're an entrepreneur like me, obviously we all know being an entrepreneur has its own, um, things that you unpack. I think in the last conversations I had with a couple of the ladies on the show, they even talked about how mindset is key to whether or not they have done what they want to do or whether or not they have not, right? So Why is it that we take so long to invest in ourselves? Right? Why does it take so long for us to realize that? I am 100% guilty of this, you guys. So do not feel like I'm not in the same boat. But for me, what that looked like was I was just really spent, right? I was spent on dealing with the thing. I was spent on what's wrong with me, what's going on with me. I was just surviving. And here is the key. The moment I realized that I was just surviving, or the moment I started to feel like this is it, like this is what my life is going to be, and I decided that I didn't want my life to just be this is it, I'm surviving, is the moment that I realized that there needed to be more. So obviously, if you're listening to this, you probably are a very spiritual and loving person. And sometimes we can just go through the motions. We can just get going and just going and going. And what happens though when the going stops? What happens when you're quiet, alone with yourself? What happens? Well, for me, that looked like, you know, probably crying or writing profusely of anger and frustration in my journal. You know, I would be crying and crying in prayer, um, and those things were helpful in the moment, right? They were helpful in the moment. Prayer consistently is something that I, I lean on consistently, as well as my personal Bible reading and studying. And all those things were helping me, right? But there was something missing. And I think it's a lot of times we forget the importance of the emotional work that we have to do on ourselves. And I don't know if I mentioned this in maybe in a live or maybe in a previous episode or something, that we have to the work, right? We have to do the work on ourselves in order to really live more intentionally, in order for us to really move past the blocks, move past the pain, and see clarity, see, see what's ahead, see what's going to happen, right? And so that can happen totally by yourself. I have met some amazing women who have like done the books, they've read the books, they've gone, they really were strict on themselves to really get to the nitty-gritty. But psychologically and scientifically, we do this better with accountability. We do this better with someone else. And this is where the question comes in. What's the cost? Like, what's the cost of not investing in yourself? The cost is less intentionally The cost is living just through the motions. The cost is more anger and more frustration. The cost is less time, meaningful time that's really truly connected with the people that you love. It's less money coming in for your business. It's less clients coming in to your business. I mean, you can do all of the things. You can buy all the courses. You can do all the, the strategies. But if you're not investing in your mental self, your emotional well-being of going through this journey as an entrepreneur, and if you're an entrepreneur living with chronic illness, even more so, I believe we need to invest in ourselves. What is it costing you? It's costing you more time. You know, there's a common thing that I talk to clients and I ask them, I'm like, you know, What is it that you want? They usually at some point is like, I just want to get to where I want to get to faster, right? They want to get to somewhere faster. And I always find that this is an interesting thing, right? We feel like if we move faster, somehow we can just skip a step or we can just run through the hurdles as if they're not there. So I think about this in the concept of stairs, like, and especially as older people versus like if you're young. How many of us as a kid, right? As a kid, we could look at stairs and like hop to like the 4th step. Or maybe if we're really daring as a kid, we would like slide down the railings of the staircase or hop past, you know, like 4 or 5 or the whole complete stair, depending the staircase, depending on where you landed, right? How many of us would be like, we've done that when we were younger, right? We kind of dealt with that. Like we were like, oh, that's easy. But how many of us How many of us would do that now as adults? How many of us would look at a pair of stairs and be like, you know what, I'm just going to skip those steps. I'm just going to like Superwoman my way up the stairs and skip about 4 or 5 of them. How does that usually turn out? Unless you're like one of those crazy athletic people. But normally we cannot skip steps. And even if you are an athletic person, if you hadn't always been and you decided to do that, Basically, we would all fall on our face. We would hurt ourselves and everything. Why do we do that when it comes to our businesses? Why do we do that when it comes to our lives? Why do we think that if we just keep going and get busy and doing the things, right? Hashtag all the things, but not do the work on ourselves mentally and emotionally. How do we not fall flat on our face? How do we not hurt ourselves even more? How do we not actually slow the process down? So after you fall flat on your face, you probably broke your foot, your leg, which now needs more time to heal, right? I know I talk about this a lot, this concept of slow— you have to slow down to go fast. I heard this by a woman named Kimmy Brooke, and she's one of the women in the world that teaches direct sales. Companies and women and people to grow their business. But she's like, a lot of times people are just going, going, going, but they don't realize they need to slow down so that when they get ready for that snowball effect, that they're actually capable of doing those things. And this is where, again, I don't think I necessarily understood that fully and completely until I became an entrepreneur. To see that, and that kind of gave light into my own life as a woman living with chronic illness. If you live with chronic illness, yes, there is physical pain. Yes, there is a lot of trauma to the physical body, but there is a lot of emotional trauma. There is a lot of emotional things that we kind of just push through. For example, I was talking to a group of friends the other day, and I was telling them, you know, Whenever I go to the hospital, I feel like I have to get this like warrior face, which is crazy, right? Because if you think you have to go to the hospital, you are not in warrior mode. You're in like your most agonizing pain. You feel like this is it, I'm going to die. Like you're feeling all of those things, right? You're feeling pain, you're feeling uncomfortable, you're feeling uncertain, you're feeling stressed out, you're feeling worried. But over the years of being a woman who would go into the hospital and be told that I was not actually really feeling that much pain, or it's not really that big of a deal, or every test came fine, but I'm in excruciating pain. Or, hey, yeah, you gave me that medicine, but I still can't— I'm still in so much pain that my pressure is even up. It's not because I have high blood pressure. Look at— you hear what I'm saying? When I go into the hospital, I'm not only going because I'm in— I have to at that point, right? I'm in that much pain. And if you're with me on this, please let me know. But when I go in that kind of pain and that kind of agony and uncertainty, I also have to go in warrior mode, right? So I have to compartmentalize this pain and feeling and also be ready to stand and fight for what I need, for what my body needs. And that is mental trauma, you guys. That is mental emotional trauma. So that when I'm talking to a doctor and I have to correct them or I have to tell them, no, this is actually what's happening, even though I just explained that to you multiple times. Or when a nurse comes in and acts as if, oh, I'm drug seeking because I'm in so much pain, which, and I haven't been in a hospital in over 3 years or something like that. 'Cause you know, crazy things like that. But I have to be in warrior mode. And also warrior mode means I also have to be the kind peaceful person, right? To be like, you know what, I hear what you're saying, but this is really what's going on when you're in pain. Y'all, that's emotional trauma. That's emotional trauma. And to have to do that over and over and over again, and you don't invest on that, you don't take care of that piece, it creates a bottleneck of stress and overwhelm and uncertainty and the lack of being able to see clearly in your life and business because you have not dealt with the things. So the cost of not investing in yourself and your business means more time it will actually take you to get to where you want to go. It means more pain and agony while you're on your journey. It means less joy and happiness. It means less intentional actions. It means less connection. It means so much more than $1,500, $500, $3,000, whatever that number looks like for you. It means way more than that. It costs you way more. So I lovingly challenge you that if there is ever an opportunity for you to invest in yourself, and I don't mean necessarily in a course, a thing for your business, but for yourself as a person, So a business coach or a life coach or a health coach or a holistic coach, an aromatherapist or something, someone that can help you emotionally, mentally get clear so that you can like really get clear on where you're going and what your goals are. I really highly recommend you do that. As a business coach, I spend a lot of time in the, in the world of mindset. I'll let you guys in on a little secret. This year I will be— and I'm saying this on purpose because it's all about intention. I plan on getting aromatherapist certified, like, um, essential oil certified, because I have seen the power of how essential oils have helped me in my journey as a chronic illness warrior. And I've also seen the power of it from an emotional standpoint as well, as working with different people and different methodologies like Emotional Freedom Techniques and things like that. Those are things that I will be over the next, you know, course of this year be training and learning about because I have invested in that for myself as a chronic illness warrior and entrepreneur. And I have seen how it's made it so much easier and it's helped a lot in my life on all of the levels. For the last year and this year, 2020 and 2021, it's been a heavy, like, like I feel like the last, this year and last year, it's kind of feels like this huge weight that we're all going through, that we're all dealing with. And there's going to be a lot of baggage that we have to get through. But the one of the beautiful things about investing in yourself is that you become more aware of your thoughts, of your body, and of your thinking and how people interact around you and who you have in your space. And you become a lot more discerning on how you choose to allow those things to control or not control you. What a power is that, right? How, how priceless is that? So that's my encouragement to you. If you've always wanted or if you've thought about investing in a business coach, I would love to chat with you. I offer a free coaching session. You can always go to my website at sheescrafted.com to learn more, to join our tribe as well. Um, we have a membership group where you can join us and we kind of do a lot of this work together as a group. But I also do one-on-one private sessions as well. But most importantly, whoever it is, even if you have a friend or someone you've been thinking about and it's not me, and you're like, oh my goodness, make it a priority to invest in yourself, okay? Because you're absolutely worth it and you're more than enough to receive it. And it will just help you to thrive more. So with all of that said, my loves, I just want you to know that yes, you, you are crafted to thrive.
All right, ladies, that's a wrap for this episode of She's Crafted to Thrive. Thank you so much for joining me. Please share with your friends and be sure to like and subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes. In the meantime, check us out at sheescrafted.com to check out the show notes for all the goodies and things that we talked about. And there'll be links there for you guys. So in the meantime, just remember, you are crafted to thrive.
