Welcome to Healthy Entrepreneurship For Women

Key Components of Healthy Entrepreneurship

1. Mental Well-Being: Nika discusses managing stress and recognizing feelings of anxiety and burnout, sharing her own struggle with PTSD and depression. 
      > "I cannot reiterate enough that if you are struggling with depression or anxiety, please seek out support."
2. Physical Health: The conversation shifts to the importance of sleep, nutrition, and movement. Nika highlights the need for recovery and rejuvenation to maintain energy levels while building a business. 
3. Emotional Healing: Addressing perfectionism, people-pleasing, and past traumas is crucial for entrepreneurship. Nika encourages listeners to reflect on their emotional health and its impact on decision-making. 
4. Self-Trust and Alignment: Building a business that aligns with personal values is essential. Nika urges women to trust their instincts and redefine their self-image as confident leaders. 
5. Sustainable Growth: Nika stresses the importance of creating supportive systems and clear definitions of success that prevent burnout and promote focus. 

Transcript

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Nika Lawrie 0:18

Hey and welcome to the very first episode of This Is How We Rise. I, of course, am your host, Nika Lawrie. And in this first episode, I want to tell you a little bit about myself and then tell you what my plan is with this podcast. I really want to focus on teaching women healthy entrepreneurship. I think it's so important and it's a huge gap in the industry that is not being addressed. And so I'm here to fix that problem. So first, let me tell you a little bit about myself. Again, my name is Nika, and I started a business about eight years ago, right before the pandemic, a couple years before the pandemic, I started a communication and marketing business. And I've kept that going the whole time with different clients on the side. At the same time, I was working to get my certification in functional nutrition and health coaching. I went through several different certification programs and different school programs. I also have a degree in strategic communication and psychology. And so I have a pretty well-rounded background when it comes to both business and health and wellness. And for a long time I was running the two businesses separately. And while that was okay, I kept having this feeling inside that there was something missing. I could feel in my core that it didn't feel right. There was something just off. I kept trying these different pieces, but nothing ever truly felt right until one day I realized that there really is this gap in the business coaching industry, especially for women, where all of these coaches are teaching strategies and systems and all these different things to launch a business, but nobody is teaching the behind the scenes, the inner core issues that need to be addressed for a woman to feel confident, healthy enough, have the energy and the focus and the clarity to grow and launch her business. And so that's where I've decided to come in. My goal is to help women grow their businesses by building them from the inside out. So, what does healthy entrepreneurship actually mean or look like? Healthy entrepreneurship for women is about healing and strengthening the women behind the business. That includes mentally, physically, and emotionally, so she can grow from the inside out without sacrificing her health for success and without losing the opportunity to grow a business and design the life she dreams of happening by having her health hold her back. So there are different pieces of this, and we'll go into a lot of them in different episodes and coaching programs and things that I have available. But the main part is really thinking about those internal pieces that we need to address in order to feel our best and then launch our business. So let's think about mental well-being. This is where we manage stress, we quiet self-doubt, and we recognize when we have anxiety, overwhelm, burnout, or in my case, depression that really required support to help me get out of my own way. I'll tell you a little bit of my backstory. So as I was growing my two businesses, I had come through a severe amount of trauma. I was actually diagnosed with PTSD. And a lot of that trauma caused depression in me that was keeping me from really being able to focus on growing my business and feeling my best. And it wasn't until I started to address that and really get the support I needed to manage that PTSD that I was able to get out of my way and really start to grow my business. And so throughout these episodes, I'll have experts on trauma, on mental health, on confidence, on depression and anxiety, all sorts of things helping you understand what might be going on inside your heart and your soul and your mind to help you work through those issues. I cannot reiterate enough that if you are struggling with depression or anxiety, please seek out support. There are so many options out there. You can see your primary care physician. You can call 988. It's the national helpline in the United States, and they will connect you with resources in your community as well as provide somebody to speak to on the phone at that time. They also have a chat option that you can connect with. But please seek out support. There's tons of different ways that you can get help and you do not need to suffer alone. I personally suffered too long by myself without getting help. I wish I'd gone sooner. So if you're struggling right now, please find help for yourself. It's so worth it. The other piece that is really important to talk about is physical health. So this is where my functional nutrition passion really comes in. So we're gonna talk about things like protecting our sleep, looking at nutrition, looking at movement and exercise and the joy of like feeling our bodies actually get the movement that we need. We're gonna talk about recovery so our body is supported after doing long hours of work or going through a stressful event. What do we need to feel rejuvenated so that we have the energy and capacity to build the business and life of our dreams and not feel depleted and burnt out by the business or our external life issues? Another place that I think is sometimes overlooked is really looking at emotional healing, working through perfectionism or people pleasing. I know for me it was fear of visibility that was an issue for a long time. Dealing with past experiences, no, those past experiences that caused my PTSD. Those past experiences can affect our leadership skills, they can affect our decision-making skills, which is so key, especially as an entrepreneur. You have to make so many decisions. They can also impact our feeling of isolation and not having the support we need to grow our business. So we really need to consider emotional healing when we go through this process. The next piece is self-trust and alignment. So this is really about building a business around our personal values. It's also about thinking about things like our uh intuition or our self-trust, our identity, the way we see ourselves. Do we see ourselves as a struggling entrepreneur or do we see ourselves as that calm, confident CEO? We have to think about capacity instead of just our outside expectations. Really thinking about who we are and how we're showing up. If we're thinking that we are lazy and not committed and are afraid to be seen, we're gonna have a really hard time growing this business. But if we start to believe in ourselves that it's safe to post a social media, that it's safe to go make that introduction to the person who might open the door that's gonna change everything for you. If we start to have trust in ourselves to show up and do the work, to be consistent in doing the work, those pieces matter more than you can even imagine. But so many entrepreneurs, especially female entrepreneurs, struggle with this. It's so important that we address it and support everybody in the process. The other piece, and this, I don't want to say this is the last piece, but it's the last one for this episode that I'll address, is sustainable growth. So many times we go in all these different directions. We have all these ideas, right? Or we build this huge business that is not supported by systems, and it causes us to burn out, it causes stress in our lives, or we feel scattered, we don't feel clear and focused on our pathway forward. Things like this are really important. We have to learn to create boundaries, we have to learn to create supportive systems and have a healthy definition of what success is for both the woman and the business she is thriving to build. It's so important that we have these clear, focused definitions in our heart, soul, and mind as we go forward. So, like I mentioned in the trailer, every episode is going to be a little bit different. We'll have some episodes that are solo episodes with just me talking like I am right now to you. We'll have some episodes that are a little bit longer where I go in depth on a specific thing, issue, topic, whatever. Some of them will be teaching episodes, other episodes will be addressing, you know, current events, something that's relating to healthy entrepreneurship or women founders or how AI is going to impact women over the next two, three, five, 10 years, and why it's so important for women to build now. We'll also have episodes with guest experts coming on talking about all these different topics to help you thrive in your life and grow that business that you've always dreamed of. So if you haven't already, please take a moment and subscribe on whatever platform it is you're listening to. If you liked this episode, please leave a comment. I would love to have your support. And check out the show notes. I always have details in there, especially for my guests. But I also have an opportunity there for you to send me your idea or tip or something that you want to learn more about. There's a little thing where you can leave me a voice memo, and I would truly love to hear from you. With that, my friend, I am wishing you a happy, healthy hustle. And I will see you in the next episode. Have a great day.