You’re Not Broken—You’re Building Your Business the Hard Way

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.

I am so excited that you guys are here today. We're going to be talking about something that I think gets in the way of most of us. Oftentimes when I meet clients and when I have even met myself in the past, when I'm feeling the most stuck is when I'm feeling that I am not normal. It is when I am pushing aside or trying to operate as if my reality is not my reality, and I'm punishing myself, I'm pushing myself versus finding the angles that allow me to flourish and owning and honoring those things. And so oftentimes we're stuck because we're trying to grow our businesses like we don't have chronic illnesses. We're trying to grow our businesses like we have never experienced trauma. We're trying to grow our businesses like we're not really this overly bubbly creative person. Literally everything we see, we touch, we can think of an idea and just go with it. We are shame sometimes about that, right? We talk down about ourselves about that, right? When we're highly sensitive people, which often comes from a past or experience of trauma, we tell ourselves that we're being too much. And so when we're looking for strategies, for all the formulas, thinking, if I just do all the things and push myself harder, I'll get there. We're often saying that as we think about all these things that we're experiencing and thinking we can put them in a box on the shelf. Now we're actually not able to do that, but in our subconscious and the way that we decide to work and decide to grow, we often do operate in that reality. We operate in two weird places, and this is what I see for most of my clients. We see clients— I see us women trying to run our businesses opposite or detached from our current reality of where we are with our body, our mind, our health, right? We're trying to push those things down. We're trying to ignore those things. We're trying to say the only way that I'm going to be successful is if I push harder. I do things regardless of how I'm feeling and what's going on in my reality. I just do it hard, right? But here's, here's the truth. Until you accept that your life experiences, your chronic illness, your trauma, your unique way of processing the world and how it affects you and the way that you show up in your life and your business, you're going to keep hitting walls. And not just small bumps in the road, but full-on life set yo butt down and I had no choice but to stop moments. And every time that happens, even though this is not true, you may feel like you have to start over like you're failing, when in reality you're just not building a business that actually works for you. You haven't actually tuned in and collected all of those experiences that you have to create a business that works for you now and helps you see past the now, right? Because we can't be— for example, I could not have had my business when I first started my business thinking I can't work for a person. I'm gonna work for myself and then believe that there was no other way for me to do that other than working for someone else. I had to have a dream. I had to have hope and a possibility to look ahead to, and I had to have some vision of self-worth and capability. And for me, that pulled from all the things that I have been accomplishing, even though I'm currently in my pain, in my situation. I had to believe that I, if I could operate in my pain and in my situation for things that were not for me, I could do that for things that are for me. Okay, but why is this idea of us feeling like we're not normal and trying to push our circumstances in the background— why is this even a thing that we just automatically do? It's a conditioning, you all. It's a conditioning that we all experience. And I'm here to say it because I've been thinking about this and talking about this a lot with my clients and within my community. But a lot of this comes from the hustle culture trap. And I wanna talk about this for a second because we've been conditioned to believe that success comes from pushing harder, doing more, following the exact strategies that work for someone else. But here's the problem with that. Those strategies, those dreams, and those goals that those strategies work for those people. Right? We're designed for the people who can function at the level that isn't always accessible or actually in your capacity to do. And that's not a bad thing. It just means you need a different way. You need to do it in your way. And what I see happening in the cycle of stopping and starting because of being burnt out from pushing through this hustle culture— and even when we think that we're not in hustle culture, it can creep in. I've experienced that where I'm thinking, oh, I'm not. I just literally I just literally experienced that recently. I had a, I somehow I got in my head, I was so excited about something and it wasn't that I was excited, it was that I didn't direct it into the lane that would best fit my circumstances and my capacity as well as for my clients. And so before I even realized it, this hustle culture conditioning that is constantly around us crept into my thoughts. Which were really brought on by fear of things being— of me not being enough or leaving people behind. Right. And so what I see happening in this cycle of constantly pushing ourselves and almost operating, even though in reality, we, we have to live with our circumstances, we're trying to like outrun them. Versus running with them and unloading them as we, as we run, right? We go all in when we're feeling good, and then sometimes, or something eventually and always will happen, we have a flare-up, we have a life-altering circumstance happen, your energy crashes, life hits you with something unexpected. And suddenly you're out of the game for weeks, maybe months. When you come back, you feel like you're starting from scratch again, and it's exhausting. You feel like you're having to catch up to what you believe everyone else is doing and where you are behind. And because you feel that way, you don't actually take stock in the lessons that you learned during this time where you had to pause, the things or who you've become in this pause. You're too busy thinking about how you're behind to even embrace who you are now and what is for you now and where you wanna go. And it's exhausting and it's frustrating when we do this cycle over and over again. And it's why so many business owners either quit entirely or reach success and then realize they built something that they can't even sustain. Now I'm gonna say something about this, and this is a little bit of a hot tea. About this topic. I don't know about you, and I, I, maybe I will feel differently at some point in the future, but I have found that there's this narrative or this experience of those of us who, who have reached that 7 figures or more or whatever, whatever the number is for success. And the narrative is like, I was doing it because I had to, and I had to shouldn't, you know, I had to do all this and survive, and then I burnt out, or then I broke down, or then my life blew up. And now I'm realizing I don't have to do that. So I want to build a business that's more sustainable for me. And I'll be glad for the day when there are more businesses who start out with the thought of, I want a sustainable business now and forever. And even though it may take me a longer time— and I don't believe it takes a longer time, I honestly think that when I see people who have reached those those numbers and those big things, and they may have taken a break, or maybe they have disappeared for a while, right? They come back and they're more like ready and in the space of being able to grow a sustainable business, and they are rearranging their values and the way they want to run it. It's— they run at a different speed, but they create greater results, right? And a faster amount of time, even though technically they're moving slower. So I would I would differ that going slow in the beginning is the actual way to create the momentum and the fastness, quote unquote, of reaching your, your goals. Now, why do I say this? I recently have been reflecting over some of my clients that I've had that have joined my program recently, Chronically You and Profitable, which Chronically You and Profitable is my group coaching program. Where I help women who are creative, who want to start and grow a business. You don't have to be a creative. You can just be a woman who's in a space who wants to grow a coaching or service-based business without sacrificing your energy and your wellbeing with chronic illness, neurodivergency, highly sensitive, whatever it might be. And we teach you how to leverage on ongoing personalized coaching to you. We teach you how to take your strengths, and your abilities and your challenges to craft a sustainable sales strategy that works for you on 24/7, that gives you some holistic mind and body tools to help you have better days even when you're having crappy ones, and have a supportive community as you transition from surviving to really building a sustainable, thriving business, right? And I want you to start that way. I want you to start building a business because oftentimes we start businesses out of necessity. Out of survival mode, right? And because of that, we start making some of those decisions that aren't necessarily in alignment with a sustainable goal in mind. And you want sustainable goal in mind so that you don't end up back where you were or where you started from, which is burnt out and frustrated, right? And broke, right? And so inside of, inside of my program, what I've noticed is some of the women that come to me often are the women who come to me, and there's no shame in this. I was you once. Where you were looking for the thing that says, I'm, we're gonna help you make 10, you know, $10,000 a month, or I'm gonna help you make, you know, 5K in 2 weeks. I'm gonna make, help you make all these promises, right? And they have done it potentially. A lot of these clients have created those results, but once they create that result, they're burnt out, burnt out. They don't really know themselves anymore. They feel like they've lost themselves. They've been hurt. There is trauma, uh, from their experience or from them neglecting listening to their inner voice. They can't hear their own voice. And it hurts me to my core when I hear this, when clients come to me who've been like, I've been following you forever, but I decided to invest in this person or this program and it worked, but then I ended up being in this really bad situation as far as my overall mental state, my overall financial state even. And I wish I had come to you because I needed this type of coaching. I need this type of strategy that helps you with this missing piece of why you're feeling stuck now or why you're currently stuck. Right. And it's acceptance. It's the simplest thing, but it's not the simplest thing. What's missing for all of us when we feel stuck. Oftentimes it's not another strategy. It is not another how-to, even though at times it is. It's more of acceptance. If you accept your current situation, if you accept and become content with where you are and vision yourself of where you can be, when you accept that your body and your mind and your nervous systems do not operate like someone else's who can hustle their way to the top without any consequence, which I would argue that that's impossible, but some people feel that way. That if you can accept that your body is not against you, but is for you, if you can accept that your current circumstances might suck, right? But they are teaching you things that you can learn that help you to create a reality different from today. Those things are not weaknesses and those are not things that should stop you. And I don't like saying should, but those are not things that will stop you from reaching your greatest strengths of success. These are actually parts of your greatest strengths if you learn how to work with what you've got going on instead of against it, instead of hating it. Because when you try to ignore these parts of yourself You, your need for rest, your energy fluctuations, your deep sensitivity. You end up building a business that fights you at every turn. You set yourself up for burnout. You create offers and schedules that don't actually work for you, and eventually it either breaks you down or you tear it all down and start over. And that's why people either keep struggling or find success. But realize they hate the business that they've built, or is hating it, right? So what's the alternative? It's about working with yourself, not against yourself. And that starts with setting up your business in a way that supports how you actually function in the world. That means creating offers and services that work with your energy, not drain it. Maybe that's an evergreen product instead of live launches. Maybe it's a high-ticket offers because you only need 3 or 4 clients a year to make what you're looking for. Or maybe it's low offers because that requires a little less of you based on the type of offer you're looking to do, right? Building support systems so you don't have to be on 24/7, right? Automations and having a content strategy that works for you when you're not quote unquote on. And a community that supports you even when you need to take a step back or even when you need to pivot and shift things. This is something that I love about my community, about all of you and all of my clients. With this little hiccup that I had earlier, this, this currently as I'm recording this, this offer I was putting out there, I realized need to pivot, need to put this back into my, my program. And it was, it felt fine. I wasn't stressed out about it., but I was worried and concerned, but why was I? Because I built this amazing community and these systems and these offers that work with my energy. But of course I'm a human, so I'm concerned about saying I'm gonna do something and then changing how I'm going to do the thing. But it still is, it still is working. And that might be where you are too. You might be in the space of thinking, I cannot do this thing because some other people are not gonna be okay with it. But if you are not okay with it and it's not sustainable for you, it's not good for them either. The other thing this means, if we're talking about how to be working with and not against your reality, this means that healing and learning how to navigate the things that happen in your life and the things that you want to happen in your life starts with intention. Instead of feeling like every setback is a failure like you are somehow a failure. What if you built room for those moments inside of your life? For things being a mistake or for things not being so great, right? What if your business was designed to sustain you through those things because you accepted that life has its ebbs and flows? And this is why I focus so much on long-form content and community because if you're always relying on short-term strategies, for example, like, uh, social media trends, constantly launching high-energy marketing, you're setting yourself up for burnout in some way, shape, or form. But when you have a content system and other systems that work for you, even when you need to rest, that is how you create something sustainable. You cannot build a business by just copying what worked for someone else. I'm so sorry. I wish it worked like that. We can obviously take some strategies and things that someone tells us, frameworks. Even I have a framework, but we have to learn how to make it work for us. And which is interesting, within my program, that is something that I teach my clients. I teach you how to hear your voice and decide What is good for you? How do you need to tweak whatever you receive from me or from wherever to work for you based on your circumstances, your strengths, and all of the things we've discussed? Your lived experiences is going to shape how you show up, how you sell, and how you create. And when you accept that, and when you start working with your reality instead of against it, That's when things start to shift. That's when you stop feeling like you're constantly starting over, and that's when your business actually starts to feel good. And that's when you start to realize that you are normal and your circumstances are your superpower. So if you're listening to this and you're realizing that you've been trying to build a business like you don't have whatever your current circumstances is, chronic illness, like you don't have trauma, like you don't have unique sensitivities. This is your invitation to pause, to reset, to start building a business that actually supports you instead of one that constantly fights you. Because, because this is your life, this is your business, and you deserve to create something that you can sustain for the long haul. Something that allows you to thrive and not just survive. I want you to take a moment and ask yourself, am I building a business that works for me, or am I fighting against my own reality? And if you're ready to start building with intention in a way that supports you for the long run, I'd love to help. Inside of Chronically You and Profitable, we focus on creating sustainable, profitable businesses that honor your unique strengths and circumstances and your needs so there is no burnout, there is no beating ourselves up for pivoting or shifting and just starting over and feeling like nothing's worked. Just real, aligned, congruent, flowing growth. So if this episode resonated with you, send me a DM @thrivewithnikitawilliams or share this episode or tag me And if you want a deeper conversation about how to make a shift in your own business, book a call with me to learn how to work with me inside of Chronically You and Profitable. Until next time, be sure to take care of yourself. And in the next episode, we're going to talk about how to market your business without being on all of the time. So we're going to talk about the myth around being visible. We're going to also talk about a specific strategy that I use that can be helpful for you, that you can incorporate with your strengths in order to help you grow your business. So 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.