Which Chronic Illness Phase Are You In, and How Does It Affect Your Business?

Welcome to Crafted to Thrive, the globally ranked podcast for entrepreneurs living with chronic illness. I'm your host, nikita Williams, and after being diagnosed with multiple chronic illnesses myself, I figured out the surprisingly simple missing links to growing a profitable business without compromising my health. Since then, I've helped dozens of women just like you learn how to do the same. If you're ready to own your story and create a thriving business that aligns with your health and well-being, you're in the right place. Together, we're shifting the narrative of what's possible for entrepreneurs with chronic illness. This is Crafted to Thrive. As chronic illness warriors, we get a lot of advice, and for all of us who live with invisible chronic illnesses, one of the biggest things I have found that's challenging is knowing whether or not a piece of advice when it comes to business strategy, when it comes to living with chronic illness and trying different mythologies or different protocols, is for you, and I have been seeing this in the different coaching containers that I have invested in, and I have seen some of the frustrating things that are shared with different people with good intention, and it's not that the advice is wrong or bad, but what I have found is that it's not in context with the different phases or different places we are all in when it comes to living with chronic illness. So in this episode, I want to share with you three different lenses to consider about how to take advice that is tailored to where you are with your chronic illness and how to use it in your life and in your business. Now, there are different lenses and perspectives of this, so please take it from the fact that I'm just sharing from my own personal experience and expertise of working with multiple different women in the chronic illness world who are at different stages and phases of their journey, and there are definitely medical research out there that talks about the different quote unquote emotional phases of living with chronic illness. But specifically in this I'm going to be talking about the different stages of awareness when it comes to living with chronic illness and circumstances and how those circumstances and awarenesses affect how and what we do in our life, in our business, and who we should decide to listen to when it comes to growing our business. So these three different types of chronic illness warriors are experiencing awarenesses in a very different way, and if you've listened to this podcast a couple of times and if you're a client, you have heard me refer to myself as baby chronic illness, me like the baby chronic illness version of myself, and this is the first place we're going to start. This is the person who likely has lived with chronic illness. Just recently it kind of abruptly showed up in their life. So they have lived in their life, live in their normal life, like I was living my normal life, dealing with my normal so-called things and one day realizing something's not right, something's wrong, it being in constant pain, just thrown into a whirlwind of what the heck is going on with me. Right, and for all of you who don't know my story a little bit, I started this back in 2009, when I, literally every time I share this, I always feel like some kind of weirdness talking about it, because my husband always says, yeah, it happened when we got married and I have some thoughts about it, and I have thoughts about it too, but it's the truth. It's literally the truth. So once we got married, shortly after our wedding, I got sick. I got sick with pain and things I didn't even understand at the time. So for about two and a half years, I was going in and out of hospital visits, out of doctor's appointments, and I just didn't know. I didn't know what was wrong with me. I didn't know what was going on. All I knew was I was in a lot of pain. I had my new husband, my best friend, doing things for me that no person wants their husband doing for you when you're first married. And instead of worrying about the socks on the floor, I was worried about having a go-bag for the hospital right. And so, baby, chronic illness me which might be, you might be in the phase of an undiagnosed chronic illness. You don't have all of these symptoms. You don't exactly know what's going on. You don't even realize what's happening in the medical realm of things. You don't know how the medical system really works. You don't understand you might even be shocked and like appalled to some degree that the way you're being treated while you're in pain is, dare I say, just like baffling and ridiculous and trauma filled experiences. And you're dealing with the frustration of like knowing something's wrong but being told no, it's just in your head being gaslit. You didn't even know the term of gaslit, right. You are like dealing with all of these different kind of things going on in your world. So you're learning to operate in a world that doesn't fully accommodate you living with chronic illness, and at this point you don't even know you have a chronic illness. You just know that you are in constant pain and chronically dealing with something you don't know why. Okay, so this is what I call baby chronic illness. You, during this time, you're experiencing a lot of different things outside of just the medical experiences. Your relationships have changed. Your friends have probably been like you're too much or hopefully not, but if they have, they don't understand you don't understand. Your family is looking at you like what is going on? They're asking you questions that you don't have answers to. This is around that time where it's just like you have so much uncertainty and you have no answers and you're frustrated, you're tired, but then you're also still operating in your life. So, like for me at that time, I was still doing my side hustle which at the time I think was Mary Kay or tastefully simple In my photography business, while working in a corporate environment doing executive, administrative stuff, things like that and a pharmaceutical company. You might have experiences where you're working for the people, for the man, and working your side thing, or thinking about working a side thing, while also dealing with the embarrassment of maybe having to go to the hospital in the middle of the work week, or calling out, or having someone take you to the hospital in the middle of the day. All of these random, weird things you have never experienced for yourself are the baby, chronic illness, you there's lots of stories, there's lots of trauma, there's lots of non-awareness around why your body is doing what it's doing. Why are the doctors talking to you the way that they're talking to you? So this might be the stage you're in Now. If you're in the stage and you're growing a business, right, your constant frustration is just trying to figure out how to operate. Every moment, every hour, every minute of the day, you're trying to figure it out. You don't know what to do. So, when it comes to your, like, making an income or making a livable income, you don't know how that's going to work out. So you are grasping at straws. You're trying different things. You're kind of throwing everything at the window, or what do they call it? Throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks and finding that it doesn't stick. Because today you're at the hospital, right, so you're in all of this kind of unearthed mess and everything is like chaos, right, and so you might, at this point, have decided you want to start a business because you want to have some kind of control over your livelihood. Or now, at this point, you've stopped working because of all of these weird things that's happening. Maybe you're on leave from your job and you're like what am I going to do, even after this, if I don't have answers and all of that jazz? Right, so you might be in that container. So this is baby chronic illness. You like literally baby chronic illness. You we refer back to baby chronic illness you a lot when you get to the next two or three phases, especially in the phase three, like the different awarenesses. So this might be you. Okay, it's okay. I have been there. So many of us are still there. I want to share my love and my heart with you. If this is where you are, please DM me, instagram me. I don't mind just giving you words of wisdom and things that I've learned along the way that have helped me find some peace and understanding. But this phase is really difficult. Okay, and how is this phase really difficult? If you come into a coaching container or you invest in a program to learn such and such, is that this phase of being a chronic illness warrior. And investing in your business is even more frustrating for a couple of different reasons. One, you don't understand what your flow of life is, because it is constantly an uncertainty and an upheaval and you don't know why. Okay, and so then you have people giving advice. So you might have a coach or business strategy or model where someone's coming in and saying you just need to do, did, did, did, did and you'll be good. And you're like I don't know how to do, did, did, did in the middle of my life being in the way that it is right. You might even get advice like just rest, you know, just chill, rest. Like take care of what's going on with you before you get to your business, just don't worry about it. And you might also be frustrated with that advice because you're like but I need to make a livable income, I need to support my family, I need to figure out how I'm going to support all these medical bills and everything that's going on here, so that sends you down another spiral. So this is a very delicate yet frustrating place to be at times, and this is oftentimes where you might feel extremely unheard because people don't understand what it's like to be living in this circumstance. Okay, so this is, this is that picture of baby chronic illness? You now we have what I like to call the awareness phase, the transition phase, where at this point you may have gotten some answers. You've learned a lot. You've learned that the medical system is not designed for you to feel better, is designed to help you survive. That's it. That's all they care about. Is design like Western medicine is designed for that. You've learned that in order to articulate what you need, you have to find different ways to talk about what you mean. What's going on? You have become really fully aware that the system is not meant for you, especially your woman of color, if you're a woman at all. Like you have understood that in the world of medical taking Western medicine, you are siloed. Every part of your body is not connected and you are trying to figure out how to navigate that world. You're still even trying to figure out how to navigate, but you're fully aware at this point that there is something wrong. You're not crazy. You know it so deep down in your gut that you're not going to stop until you find someone will listen, right. You're not going to stop until you get a diagnosis, and usually in this phase is when you do get a diagnosis, is when you figure it out. This is probably the longest phase I find for chronic illness warriors is because we are probably in a mix of several different diagnoses that need to be diagnosed or need to be re-updated because we were diagnosed with something that was misdiagnosed. So this is that time frame where you're kind of like realizing, and almost to almost at an acceptance level of like this is how my life is going to be. You're also seeking holistic ways because you really realize that Western medicine is only for what you need to survive and you know that you have to find a better way, a more line way, a more holistic way in order to live. And let me say this real quick about this point Probably between baby chronic illness, you and this transition awareness, you you want it to give up At some point in between these two phases you have been like laying in bed praying to God. I know I was saying if I don't wake up today, I'm okay with that, because I have a hope and I'm very happy about that hope and I won't be in pain anymore. Or you may be in a different place of like, just in a really dark place of wanting to give up or feeling really just depressed in the deepest low. So in between phase chronic illness, you, and then this transition awareness, you there's probably that something that's happened. You have been validated to say you're not crazy, there's something really wrong. You have found some type of community that has shown you well, I experienced some of this too. So you now have even more validation around. Okay, I'm not alone in this. Also, in this phase, you have a more clear understanding of the importance of the whole mind body connection. You've learned a lot about this. This is over probably months, years of understanding of awareness. That starts happening in this phase. So in this phase, instead of being always frantic, you are kind of more grounded in being like. This is what it is and I'm learning to navigate this and I'm learning the different tools I'm searching and I'm learning to get used to this being my life right. I'm going to come back to everyone who's been like living with chronic illness their whole life. Okay, this is going to be a little different. So you likely are at this phase of like. Maybe at this point you've gotten a diagnosis, maybe you've got multiple diagnosis. You've kind of started to learn your ebbs and flows of living with chronic illness. You've kind of learned what some of your triggers are. You've kind of learned how your body responds to certain medications or modalities that you're using to support you through different flare ups and things like that. You're kind of coming to this awareness version of chronic illness you. Now, what also starts to happen in this phase is that you start realizing that all the trauma that you experience as baby chronic illness you is affecting how your body is responding to different things. In this awareness phase and this is the time that you might start going through therapy. You might be doing some coaching, life coaching at this point, because you're looking to, almost like in our child work with baby chronic illness version of you. You are trying to see like you didn't know you didn't have, like you did the best you could in those circumstances, you did everything you thought you could do. And here you are. It's finding some forgiveness, some compassion for that version of the upheaval of baby chronic illness you and how that actually season serves you in the season of awareness and healing as a whole person, not like the disease or the chronic illness or the autoimmune thing, it's more like healing who you are from the inside out of being like. I can still be a whole person that matters and has a full life with the acknowledgement of like. I just went through something really big and I'm still going through something really big. But this different phase of like I can forgive even some of the people in your world that may have left you or maybe have not understood because you didn't understand. There's so many different things that happens in this awareness phase. This phase to me, for me personally, was a has and continues to kind of be something I go in and out of. It's such an interesting world being in this phase of like, realizing that it's not your fault. You didn't, didn't do anything specifically to create this reality or the circumstance. You didn't cause, you couldn't, you didn't do, you did everything you could. There was no doing it, all right to avoid this rate. This is the world we live in. So there's a lot of acceptance coming in here and from my studies recently. This is part of acceptance the act therapy, which is acceptance, commitment therapy, and this is something I didn't even know I was going through. But a lot of chronic illness warriors at this time start to kind of just start accepting their circumstances, they have found some peace of finding their normal, accepting that what things are and still seeing what is possible in this season. So that's what I love about this awareness season. So what happens to this? When you're in a coaching container, right, the things. It's so funny how this kind of shifts when you are investing in your business and you realize those other investments as baby credit killers, you probably you don't even remember them all. Right, you don't remember all of the things you learned there because, let's be real, your brain was in other places and your body was in other places and you were just trying to survive. So, let's, let's give context to that. But now you're like, hey, I'm finding my stride, I'm kind of figuring some things out. There still ebbs and flows. There, always will be ebbs and flows, but now I know that this is a part of my life. Right, I might have a flare up tomorrow and it might last for three months, it might last for a full year, if you're anything like me. I have found this to be true for a lot of chronic illness warriors. We go through cycles of like doing really well and then having it okay, and then having a year of like new understanding new pains, new flare ups, new diagnosis or new changes and shifts in our body, because the environment change, our body changes, whatever things, all the things change. Our age change, our chemistry changes to a degree, so all of these things start changing. So we go through these phases and cycle. But if you're in the acceptance phase, you understand that you're kind of aware that you kind of go through those things and actually you don't really understand the cycles until the last, the last phase that I will share with you. But at least in this awareness phase you're aware that you can do everything right, quote unquote and still end up in a flare-up, still end up at the hospital, still something right. And so when you're deciding to invest in a coaching program or a learning or a course or a membership, you go into those containers looking for ways to find sustainable ways to grow your business, even through Different situations. So I'm gonna go back to that same advice. If a coach says, or membership or of course, says, just do Duh-duh-duh-duh, just do a, b, c and d, no matter what, just you know, maybe it's not necessarily hustle culture, but it's just like you got to do this in order to create this result and then you're sharing with them like, hey, I have this circumstance in my life where I deal with chronic illness and things just kind of Come and go and they may well they may likely still give you the same advice that they gave baby chronic illness you, which is Just rest. You know just, either just rest and like don't worry about it until you can come back to it, or they might say something like well, you got to figure out how to do it. I don't know how to tell you how to figure out how to do it, but you got to figure out how to do it right. And so a part of you is gonna Be a little frustrated with this advice for a couple of different reasons. One you are now in the awareness phase, knowing that a flare-up Can last anywhere between one to three months to a year, if not more. So you know, like just resting and waiting till you feel better, it's not necessarily an option if you want to create a livable Income. Like it's just not really realistic, it doesn't make sense. The other piece of advice you know Like, okay, I had to figure out a way to do it, but how do I do that Right? How do I do these steps while I'm dealing with a flare-up. So then there's like a lot of trial and error and you're frustrated. And you're irritated and you don't really know how to tweet that out Between all the things that you're going through, even though you know you have to. So you get kind of burnt out. You almost get frustrated with the business because you keep trying all these different ways to do it, the way that they they're telling you to Do it, and try to sprinkle it in quote-unquote and you're like this is still not working with me. You still feel like you stop start and you lose momentum. You're not growing a business. So during this time, if you're getting advice like that, it makes sense why you might be feeling frustrated. So that is the awareness phase of chronic illness you now. The last stage is what I like to call the oh G chronic illness warriors. These are the warriors who have been Living with chronic illness for a while. Like for me at this point it's been almost 16 years and I am an OG. I really do feel like an OG. I really feel like I'm not surprised too much by things that happen. I'm kind of like, when things happen, I kind of know to slow my roll. I kind of know how to check in with my capacity. I kind of know my cycles really well, that it's like usually like a three-year kind of thing. I'm like doing horrible and then I'm doing great, and then I'm not doing so good and then I'm doing horrible and then I'm doing great. Like there's a little bit of cycles. There's even cycles for me within the month that I notice that I bought my body and my capacity and my awareness and I'm so much more tuned into things that fill my cup of capacity and things that deplete it. I am very attuned to my body. I'm very attuned to the situations that are happening around me and at this point I'm doing a lot of holistic Things to support me. I'm doing a lot of modalities to really help me stay in the energy that I have to maintain it, even To increase it at some levels when I can. These are the OGs. These are the OGs who realize that the fuller impact of what it means to live with chronic illness and to try to make a living in your life, like we fully understand the different things. We know Really well how to advocate and speak about what it is that we need. We know how to talk about our pain. We also know how to research and discover the solutions to some of our problems. We're really great at creative thinking and solution solving at this point in our lives. Not that we know it all, not that we don't have bad days, not that that we don't cry in the middle of the day, not that we're just resilient and we never had these sad moments Like if I were to think about this for myself, literally just like two weeks ago is like sitting on the sofa and it just broke down in all of this tears, just being like I'm tired of being a pain for 15 and a half years. It makes sense, like all of these things make sense, but I don't allow those moments to define that I'm gonna like just be in that deep pit forever. I know there's there's light. I know there's light at the end of the tunnel and your awareness phase of baby chronic illness phase. Those times are Last a lot longer. When you're a baby chronic illness you, it's like you really don't see the light. Awareness you is like, okay, I know this sucks. You're kind of in that for a while. It's it's longer turnaround. But as oh gee, chronic illness, you you're like, okay, I'm gonna have my day, I'm gonna have my week, maybe, with this, and then we're gonna do what we need to do. So there's a lot of different things. We we know how to leverage our personal health insights From everything that we experience to also help us define and see what we need to do in our lives to make a living. We have learned how to be in so much alignment. We are looking at alignment as a core value of how we show up in the world, for ourselves and in other spaces. So, oh gee, you is all about alignment. Oh gee, you is like sustainable growth for yourself, sustainable growth for your business and your life, and so the oh gee you coming into a chronic illness space will know, okay, how. When a coach gives you this advice, you will know the different levers and tools you need in order to make what they're saying work for you, because you have creatively created that system for you in your own just health journey and you've learned how to take that life of how you deal with all of the things that you have to do in your life and how to translate that into your business. At this point, you feel you don't feel Overwhelmed by advice that a coach gives you. You feel like, okay, I just need to figure out how to do a thing. You also at this point are looking at different ways to Diversify how your capacity is being used. You are coming into your own full own of understanding that not all Ways work for you and you're okay with being a little bit messy to figure it out. But you know yourself, you know what will work when you figure it out. You are in such alignment I can tell you you're such a light man. So this is probably the place that we kind of slip. We get to, but we often then slip back into awareness because if you get diagnosed with a new Diagnoses, if you get more like new symptoms, we might slip back into like awareness, you where you're learning and you're kind of frustrated and you're trying to figure out how all these things work. But you don't stay in that awareness phase too long. You say you slip back in the og because we've gone through this probably three or four times. If you're like me, I have one, two, three, four, five, six, I think six chronic illnesses like Diagnoses at this point and so when I get a new diagnosis I'm not devastated, I'm really like, okay, I now know what I need to do or how I need to adjust this. So this is the kind of like the different stages of Chronic illness when you are a chronic illness warrior, and how it shows up as being an entrepreneur. Now, this is for the person who's been living with chronic illness their whole life. Okay, now this next part is for the chronic illness warrior who's been going through this their whole life. You likely you likely have experienced this and you likely have experienced this in different levels of just becoming the person you are today. It's not related to business in any way, shape or form. As a young child Maybe you were born with it you were kind of unaware of how much this affected your life. But probably around toddler to teenage life, you see how much your chronic illness or autoimmune disease or Disabilities affect you and a world that's not made for you right, in a world where, if you can't see your disability or chronic pain, it doesn't exist. In a world that, even if you can see your chronic pain and see your disability, we don't care. All right, like we kind of. You kind of grown up in understanding that this is how the world is. You probably hated it. You probably wanted to change it. You probably just had a resigned kind of experience with it, realized like this is just my life. There's probably a lot of depression doing that stage. There's probably a lot of things happening during that stage for you. When you get to an age where you're trying to decide what you're gonna do with your life, you probably have come to this point of realizing that I have to do things with this as my filter forever. Right? This is the difference between. I think for the difference between someone who's been diagnosed with chronic illness in the middle of their life versus someone who's lived with chronic illness their whole life. It's almost instantly a person who's lived with chronic illness their whole life at some point realizes that the decisions they make have to be filtered through. How am I going to do it with how I live, how it affects my life, right? How can I get creative to still live my life? Some of us do that really well and some of us don't. Some, some, some people I've talked to. It's taking them a long time to get to a place where they have not tried to like run away or hide or act like it doesn't affect their Life in any way. They've been out of alignment in some ways when it comes to living with chronic illness their whole life, and so they've been trying to prove that they can do anything and everything that everybody does and their chronic illness is like just not a thing right, and that works sometimes for a degree for most people, but at some point they realize that they do really do need to be in alignment with their life and Everything else that they decide to do with their chronic illness. So when you're living with chronic illness for your whole life, I I find that you probably get to this like filtering of what you do and what you decide to do a lot sooner than someone who is Living with chronic illness in the middle of their life. So the reason why I share all of these things is because I think it's really important for us to have some kind of language and understanding around what it's like living with chronic illness and trying to make a living in a business. Right, and you know, for many of the clients that I work with who are starting a business, our filter instantly if you're the you know OG chronic illness warrior, you already know you're starting a business through the filter of it has to be an alignment with my capacity and my energy. It has to be something that I'm either passionate about or I'm really good at. It's my strength, it's my zone of genius. It's not my strength, weakness, it's this thing that you really feel good about doing, even when you don't feel the best right. And if you are in the awareness phase of chronic illness, you may see the importance of having a business that supports you, but you may not realize the importance of it being in alignment with the things that you are good at that you are passionate about, because you haven't quite gotten there yet. And if you are baby chronic illness, you you definitely have not a clue. You definitely have a clue. You know that you're just trying to find something again that is somewhat flexible, because you just need to make a living and you just need to survive. So you're in different phases and I think through these three different phases we go through kind of like survival mode to being able to choose how to thrive right, learning how to not just survive with chronic illness but learning how to have a full life with chronic illness, and that's very different. And so when I coach my clients, I am very aware of the different phases that they're in and the next episode I'm going to share with you that these different phases actually affect expectations and, depending on where you are in these three different phases, your expectations can be skewed and then the way you think you're going to see results can create more pain and can create more frustration, and I want you not to be in that place, no matter what phase you're in, and I'm going to share with you how to manage expectations when you're trying to make a living and trying to start and grow a business. In our next episode. I am sharing this because I've seen just how this affects so many clients and other people in other spaces that I go in who are looking for support and trying to get answers to things like this living with chronic illness and feeling so frustrated around the aspects of like, how do I grow a business if I'm at this stage in my life and someone's not fully aware of what that might look like living with chronic illness at this point at the different stages? And so if you're looking for someone who supports you living with chronic illness and will ask you where are you in these different phases before they give you advice or before they give you the strategy so that it feels easy and in alignment, then I'd love for you to book a call with me so you can learn how I can help you, either one to one or in my new group program that I'm sharing with you all in my email. So if you're not on my email list, you should sign up. But if you want to learn how to work with me, go to the show notes and click the button on learning how to work with me. That's a wrap, y'all. Thanks for tuning in to Crafted to Thrive, the podcast that helps entrepreneurs with chronic illness to thrive and build a holistic business and life. Check out our website at CraftedToThrivecom for this episode show notes and all the gifts and goodies. Connect with me on Instagram at thrivewithnakeda for more tips and behind the scenes and more. Tag me to share what you loved about this episode and I'll feature you on an upcoming episode. So until next time, remember, yes, you are crafted to thrive.