Business With Chronic Illness: Women Entrepreneurs Navigating Burnout & Autoimmune Conditions

If your marketing only works when you are actively showing up, posting, creating, and being visible, then every time your capacity changes, your marketing will slow down too. That is the reality for most women building businesses while living with chronic illness, navigating burnout, or simply trying to create space for the rest of their lives. And the answer is not to do more. The answer is to build a marketing system that keeps w...

You've heard it a hundred times. Post more. Get on video. Just show up. Nobody tells you what happens in your body when showing up feels physically unsafe, not just uncomfortable.

Anna Holtzman spent five years helping people with chronic pain while hiding her own migraines. She thought that's what it meant to be professional. By the end of every day? Headache. The concealment itself was feeding the migraine pattern. In this episode...

What if the way you measure success is actually what's burning you out? Erika Coleman thought she had it figured out. Give your best, maybe a little more, and things work out. It worked for years, until it didn't. In 2022, her mom was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. And for the next 14 months, she watched her business sales and her mom's health drop in tandem. She gave more and more and more, following every rule, checking ev...

Learn how to rebuild your business after burnout and create a more sustainable path to growth. Dr. Alicia Newsome shares her transformative journey navigating the challenges of Fibromyalgia while running a business. After pushing through a demanding schedule, including live webinars and sales calls, while seven months pregnant and battling COVID, she realized the unsustainable nature of her approach.

In this episode, she opens up ab...

The business advice you're following probably wasn't written for someone whose capacity changes with the seasons of motherhood. It wasn't written for someone navigating pregnancy, postpartum, chronic health challenges, or school pickup while trying to grow a business they love.

In this conversation, licensed perinatal therapist, keynote speaker, CEO, and mother of four Priya Rednam Waldo shares why motherhood doesn't make you less c...

You don't need to be on every platform to build a profitable business. You need one platform, a plan, and a list you actually own.

Tracy Beavers is a business and sales coach who built her entire coaching business while working corporate full-time, raising teenagers who played every sport with a ball, and honoring a promise to her husband that she wouldn't touch their retirement until she had proof of concept. She had 5 to 10 hours ...

If you've ever rebuilt your business from nothing after a diagnosis, a flare, or a crash you didn't see coming, you already know that "just push through" stops working at some point. The harder question is what you do instead.

In this episode, Laura Reeves shares how she answered that question for herself, twice. After Crohn's disease cost her nearly every client she had in 1997, she built a 30-year career as a professional dog hand...

What does it look like to build a business that works with your chronic illness instead of against it? This conversation with Gwendolyn Young will challenge everything you think you know about business design and capacity.

Gwendolyn Young is the founder of Your Virtual Admin Expert, a multi-six figure agency that provides administrative solutions for business owners. After 15 years of advising corporate executives, she made the bold...

Your energy crashing during business conversations is not random. It is your body giving you crucial information about who and what belongs in your life. When you're managing chronic illness while building a business, learning to trust these signals can be the difference between sustainable growth and complete burnout.

Alison Kero is a professional organizer who has spent over two decades helping people create calm, clarity, and bal...

What would it look like to build a multi-million dollar business while raising six kids, advocating full-time for a child with autism, and navigating everything that nobody put in the business plan?

That's exactly what Julie Cole did, and she didn't do it by following the standard playbook.

Julie is the co-founder of Mabel's Labels, a brand she started almost 23 years ago with her sister and two college friends when her eldest son wa...

Though burnout is often described as being beyond tired, and in a clinical definition, is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. Janet Diaz shares a perspective and practical insights for chronic illness management while building your dream business that completely reframes how we understand burnout, especially when you're managing autoimmune conditions while building...

What happens when you disappear from your own podcast without explanation? In this vulnerable return episode, I'm sharing the real story behind my unannounced break and what it taught me about the transitions we don't talk about in business.

I'm Nikita Williams, your host, and after running Business with Chronic Illness for years, I found myself in a quiet transition that didn't come with announcements or pretty bows. Sometimes some...

You've been posting daily. You're showing up in stories. You're creating reels that disappear into the void. And yet—it's taking more and more content just to be seen, let alone convert followers into paying clients.

If you're exhausted by social media and wondering why it's getting harder to turn all that effort into actual business growth, you're not alone. The game has changed in 2026.

In this episode (originally recorded du...

Not everyone started this year with "new year, new you" energy. If you're a woman entrepreneur navigating grief—from a loss, a diagnosis, a relationship, or a version of yourself you had to let go—you're probably wondering: can I grieve this AND still show up for my business? Can I hold both grief and growth while building a sustainable business?

In this replay of one of 2025's most downloaded episodes, I sit down with A...

This year, expect empowering conversations with business owners navigating chronic illness and autoimmune disorders. Learn from their experiences, strategies, and lessons, with a focus on sustainability and health. Episodes will feature guests discussing new diagnoses, caregiving, and adapting business practices. Join the community on Substack for exclusive content and stay connected. Tune in for inspiration, support, and practical...

The journey of entrepreneurship can often feel at odds with the realities of living with chronic illness, particularly when it comes to the concept of capacity. In this episode, we tackle the often-misunderstood idea of capacity, shifting the narrative from a relentless push for more to a compassionate understanding of what we can realistically manage. Capacity isn't just about productivity; it's about how much our bodies and minds...

What if your business didn’t fall apart every time your life asked you to slow down?

In this episode of Business with Chronic Illness, we’re naming a hard truth many entrepreneurs live with quietly: most businesses are built to work only on your best days.

When you rest, everything stops.

When life gets real, momentum disappears.

And you’re left feeling like you’re starting over again.

That’s not a you prob...

Does your marketing disappear every time you take a break? You're not alone, and it's not a consistency problem. It's a systems problem disguised as a marketing problem.

In this solo episode of Business with Chronic Illness, I'm sharing why so many women entrepreneurs with chronic illness, burnout, or unpredictable capacity feel like they're constantly restarting their marketing from scratch. The truth? You don't have a marketing st...

In this replay episode, I’m sitting down with certified coach and first-gen eldest daughter Nikkei Lamodi, to talk about what it really looks like to be an eldest daughter or late bloomer living with chronic illness and running a business.

We get into the invisible pressure of being the “strong one,” why eldest daughters are so prone to people-pleasing, perfectionism, and over-responsibility, and how all of that bl...