Thriving Through the Pain: Celebrating 200 Episodes of Resilience

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 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.

I wanted to start the 200th episode and thank all of you who have listened to the show, who have been a part of the journey from the beginning. Who have been a part of my community and my business and have been cheerleaders and have been guests. I just want to thank all of you so much. It has meant so much. This journey has been a long time. It's massively crazy how this has transpired and grown over the years. And I just want to honor all of you and thank all of you. I also am just reflecting on how I have shifted, how I have changed, how this show has changed. But always at the core of it has been my tagline that you will continue to hear is the beautiful fact and truth that we are all so uniquely designed and crafted to find ways to not just survive, but to thrive in whatever season and version that might be. And I have gone through a metamorphosis over and over again, I feel like, doing this show. And I want to share with all of you what that has looked like. And before I do that, I was just— I was just reflecting on when I had my 100th episode, I had past clients and guests on the show. We did a panel, and I still want to do that, but I just want to honor this moment for all of you and honor it for me, because this is a long journey that hasn't been perfect, that hasn't been, you know, the exact way you see people show up when it comes to podcasting. It has looked messy at times. It has looked incomplete. It has looked like Nikita ain't doing this no more. Like, this has looked so many different ways. And I just want to honor anyone who's doing it messy, doing it imperfectly. I hope my body of work of 200 episodes reflects that for you, that you can stop and start, you can keep going, you can tweak and change, and It's okay. It's okay. It's the persistence. It's the grit of continuing on and slowing down and pausing and resting and how powerful a collective set of actions can create a, a bank, an asset of your legacy when it comes to your work and just who you are as a person. So I hope that gives you that space. I wanted to, like I said, root this specific episode in just where Nikita is right now. If I could bottle this moment up and share with you what it feels like in a very tangible way, it is like getting ready for a trip and it's a surprise and you don't know where you're going. But on the journey there, you discover so many things you never thought you would discover. And it tastes like sweetness, it tastes like saltiness, right? It feels like a breeze, it feels like a summer tan, it feels like a winter with cozy socks on, and it smells like vanilla, it smells like chocolate, it's smells like the sea breeze. This journey has been so much of that. It has been so many different layers and has helped me so many different ways around my own healing, my own reclaiming and retelling and redefining of my story, and hearing of other women do the same thing. Podcasting has been a mirror in a way. It has helped me discover who I am in a sense of what I'm learning. If I play it back, if I go back to the very first episode, which I did recently, I'm just in awe of some of the same things that still are hold— that I hold true today. And some of the things that I noticed in my voice then that I don't notice now, it just shows the bank of growth. This journey started off as a way for me to just connect with people while I was recovering from my surgery, living with chronic illness. This was a way for me to market and brand my business and connect with the local community in a new state that I didn't know that many people and to grow my business. And also a way to kind of have fun while living with the newness and the updates of my health with chronic illness. And also reflecting on the story, chronic illness, my definition, my identity around chronic illness has changed. I think it started a couple episodes ago. I want to say about 10 or 15 episodes ago, I shared with you that I no longer identify as being a woman who is like, I'm a chronic illness warrior. I much more identify as a chronic illness advocate for myself and for other people who need support. It took me a while to figure out what that word would be if it wasn't warrior, but advocate. Is very much aligned with who I am outside of living with chronic illness. Right. And so I truly am embracing that as an advocate for myself. In so many different lanes do I need to be an advocate for myself outside of chronic illness, but also within my business and also reflecting on how chronic illness can change. And it has changed how I create, but it hasn't lessened what I choose to create. My capacity is not about how capable I am. It's about what I persist in, what I do. And it's just a really powerful thing to think about. I also have really appreciated the power of marketing and sales when it comes to my podcast. I know we talk a lot about volume when we're talking about growing a business, and I think there is a space for that. But I still believe in the conversation and the truth that connection creates the abundance that we need. And connection can happen one-to-one. Connection can happen in a 45-minute conversation with someone. It can happen in a 10 or 15-minute episode where it's just me sharing my thoughts. Marketing is about repurposing or restating or repeating recreating and going deeper. It's not just about always having to do things new. And I think when I first started my podcast journey, one of the fears that I had was, I don't know if I have enough content to talk about or enough questions to talk about or to ask. And I have learned there is always like a line of a story that keeps repeating itself. And there's power in the repetition. There's power in the relearning, unlearning that happens in telling your story and connecting with other people. And that is a fear that I no longer fear. I used to have a fear about I'll never have anybody on my show, like I won't have anybody interested on telling their short story. And have there been times? Absolutely. Getting people to tell their story or share their story specifically The not so good parts can be sticky and icky, but it has taught me a lot about myself in finding common ground and finding ways to respect and really lean into what it looks like to allow people's stories to be their stories and still hold my values and my truth for myself and be respectful and kind and understand that not everyone has experienced experienced the same, you know, foundations, and that's okay. I think in general I have learned that anything can work for a business owner if you give yourself permission to. Uh, it doesn't mean that a strategy is not working for you. It might just mean that the strategy is not right for you. So it's just like a certain food may not be right for you. Maybe a certain way of eating is not right for you. But I think a lot of the things that I've learned with the podcast is just that we're all uniquely different and all uniquely the same. We're all trying to figure some things out. And I personally have just really appreciated hearing other people's journeys and their stories. And so I want to share with you what's going to be coming up with the show. So Business with Chronic Illness has been like— I've been saying this has been like a background singer. She's been my unsung hero. I don't know how they say that. There's a phrase around that, but she's been in the background. She's been the place where many of you have found me and have found support and help in coaching. It's been the place where I've connected and grown my network in such a vast way. One-to-one, one conversation at a time. It's been what has led many of you to be my clients, and I'm so grateful for that. And it's been a real work of persistence and determination to continue doing the show. It's not all of the time do I feel like doing the show. As much as Business with Chronic Illness is a show that I love doing. I love podcasting, y'all, I really do. But it's not always— I don't always come to the mic super excited to record a solo episode or to even have a conversation with someone because I'm human. And I used to feel— I used to beat myself up about that, but I'm realizing that the energy that we expend and the things that we even enjoy can over time have its own space of like depleting you, but not in like a bad way, like just of like, hey, you might need to take a break from this too, into your creative juices for this. It's okay. So you can have a more fun, different approach to doing things, even though it is your jam, the thing that you enjoy. And I, for a while, was viewing my podcast as just one thing, a way for me to connect with people and for people to connect with me and to find me online and for them to find how I can coach them and support them. But this show is so much more than that. It's a community. It's a space where it has really grown to be a place that people look for support and asking questions. And so I kind of have downplayed the success of the show. We have been rated around the world in multiple different places, all the way to places like the Netherlands and Australia. We've been in the top 100 of a lot of those charts. We've been in the top 500 of the United States charts for the podcast a couple of times. I am the top 2.5% of globally ranked podcasts. And I say all that not to brag, but to share that I have been imperfect in doing this. There have been times where you guys, I've disappeared from you. I've just stopped posting because I needed to rest. I needed that mental clarity for myself. And I still have that success, and that's still been a part of the show. And the long-form content has been such a way to help me continue to market and grow my business when I am resting, when I am just sitting here. I have gotten clients from people who found me on the show when I didn't post a new episode, I wasn't active on social media, but they found me because of this show and of this body of work. And I'm very excited and proud and thankful for all of that. And now it's time for Business with Chronic Illness to have a new age. We're working on some new rebranding. We're also working on having her be her own stage, her own product. So you're going to hear some more ads here from businesses and communities that I'm really proud to know and connect with and have been a part of. We are going to start bringing back gifts and gift boxes to our guests. We're also going to be featuring more of you. Keep a lookout on your email of opportunities to be a sponsor and to be featured on all things Business with Chronic Illness.

I'm so excited.

I have so many ideas because now Business with Chronic Illness is going to be its own product, its own lane. And starting in July, we're going to have weekly episodes and occasionally some bonus episodes. In the middle of the week or in the middle of the month. I'm not sure how that's going to look like. It's going to look messy because it's going to be very new. But we have a content calendar going into the new year. Please know that in the month of December and the end of November, we'll be doing some replays to reintroduce some of the— our best awesome episodes and things like that. But there's a new horizon happening, you guys. Also, I'll be starting a YouTube channel. To talk about some of my episodes that I had with some great and amazing people on the show. And just like things when I look back, hindsight, some of the things behind the scenes of what happened when I had a certain guest on the show. I'm trying, I'm on a way of trying to bring in the visual aspect of podcasting a little bit in a fun way by using the content from this show that has already been there. And I can't wait to take you guys on that journey. So be sure to go ahead and subscribe to YouTube with Business with Chronic Illness because we'll be posting some content or we're working on getting some content created there. It won't be full video episodes of things. It will be clips of parts of episodes and clips of me talking. We might have panels on there. We might have guests come back and talk about the episode that they were on the show. So, so many new and exciting ideas. And I hope you continue to bring your friends along with me on this journey. If you are potentially interested in being a sponsor of the show, please reach out to hello@businesswithchronicillness.com. That is our email. But most importantly, thank you. Just thank you for being on this journey, and thank you for being an advocate of this show. If you know of people who are wanting to hear about how to build a sustainable business without the hustle, without the sacrificing in a toxic way of the things that matter to you now and will always be important to you, even when you become the most successful, whatever version that looks like for you, invite them to the show. The other thing that's going to happen with the show is that we're going to expand a bit on our topics. It's not just going to be about business. We're going to talk about life and things like that. I have some really great guest episodes about some deep topics. But overall holistic living with life hurdles, not just chronic illness, just life hurdles and what that looks like and the stories that come from that and the empowerment and the inspiration that can come from that. So I'm very excited and I'm just very thankful and grateful to all of you for the show and for the support you guys have been giving me along the way. It has been great., and I hope you continue to move along with me. Next week, we're going to have an author on the show who is going to share a bit about her journey as a PR rep living with sickle cell and as being an author. It's a very interesting, different type of conversation. You'll notice too, in some of the conversations that we have, that our guests are asking me questions as well, and we're having a bit of more of a conversation back and forth in some ways. Some topics are very much directed in the guest's storyline, but some of these guests have just been asking me questions and I think it's a great format and I'm looking forward to it. And there's a new set of questions I've been asking at the end of every episode. So you've got to stay all the way to the end to those episodes so you can hear the fun new question that I believe will help reframe and reshape the way you're viewing your own expectations. And causing pain and stress for yourself when it comes to this journey of entrepreneurship and living with chronic illness. All right. I will see you in the next episode. And the next episode will be our guest. You're going to actually have a lot more guests on the show. When you have a solo cast for me, it might be during a week. It might be a bonus episode that you have. If you are listening to this up until this point, please reach out to me on Instagram to share with me what you think. Share your takeaways, your biggest your favorite episodes so we can feature you and the things that you enjoyed for the show ever since we've been around. And I'm celebrating this with you. I totally am celebrating this with you. And if you tag me or if you tag me and the show Business with Chronic Illness in your Instagram posts, you'll be getting a little digital gift. I'll reach out to you in your DMs to share you— share with you the digital gift that I'll be sending you for sharing and promoting the show and the things that you love about it.. But in the meantime, just remember, yes, yes, yes, you are crafted to thrive, and I am so thankful for everything and for you.

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 Making 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.