How to Get Unstuck When You Feel Burnt Out, Overwhelmed, and Behind

If you feel stuck, burnt out, scattered, or afraid to take the next step in your life or business, this episode is for you.

So many women think they need more discipline, motivation, or strategy. But the truth is, you cannot build a thriving business, a healthy body, or a powerful life on top of exhaustion, brain fog, self-doubt, and survival mode.

In this episode, Nika breaks down the 8 foundations that help you move from stuck, burnt out, and overwhelmed to calm, clear, energized, and confident. These are the deeper pieces most people skip, but they are the very things that help you finally get out of your own way, build momentum, and become the woman who can lead the life and business she dreams of.

You will learn why health, energy, identity, nervous system regulation, habits, clarity, structure, and support matter more than forcing yourself to “just try harder.”

Because the goal is not just to build a business. The goal is to become the woman who can lead it.

Transcript

Nika Lawrie 0:00

Hello and welcome back to another episode of This Is How We Rise. I, of course, am your host, Nika Lori, and I am so grateful to have you here. I'm always so grateful when you join and listen in or watch on YouTube, whatever it is. I just appreciate your support and your participation

Welcome And The Real Problem

Nika Lawrie 0:18

in growing this community that I'm working on growing with all of you. So today I want to talk to you about something that I think is really fundamental. It's kind of funny because it's what I call the foundations and it's the eight foundations of becoming a successful female founder or a successful CEO. So I'm going to go through all eight with you, but I want to tell you a little bit of a story before I get started so you understand why I think these foundations are so, so important. So I started a business years ago. I am probably, gosh, eight or nine years into growing my business. I started part-time while I was still working at the Alzheimer's Association. And then I left there and launched my business full-time

Burnout Patterns Female Founders Share

Nika Lawrie 1:08

and have been growing it ever since. And my business has kind of gone in two directions. It wasn't really intentionally supposed to be that way, but it's just, you know, life works out that way. So part of my business was helping businesses do marketing and communication and business development. And then the other side of it was I was a functional nutrition counselor and health coach. And so I would see private clients and work with them on their health and well-being. And what I kept noticing, both for myself and with clients that I was working with, many of the clients I was working with were female business owners and they were struggling with burnout and overwhelm and imposter syndrome and fear visibility and all of those pieces. And I realized I was struggling with the exact same things. And for years, I just pushed harder and harder and harder. I felt like I was falling behind. I felt like I was letting myself down. I felt like I wasn't contributing enough to the world, you know, like proving myself out there. I felt sad and depressed, honestly. And it was very, very hard for a long time. And I had the privilege of being part of a large group of entrepreneurs, a large group group of course creators. And I would go to like annual conferences, or for a while I was going to like quarterly events where we'd all get together and kind of share stories and, you know, talk through the battles we're facing and all those things. And I made a bunch of really incredible friends with other female entrepreneurs. And what I witnessed sitting in those rooms with all of those people, predominantly women, there were men too, but predominantly women, and talking to my fellow female entrepreneurs or seeing what my clients were going through when I was doing functional nutrition counseling, who were also female entrepreneurs. We were all struggling with the same thing. And none of us seemed to be able to get out of our own way. We knew that we had a great idea. We knew that we could grow the business if we could just show up and do it, but we couldn't figure out how to show up and do it correctly. And so I decided to take some time and really research that and understand why this is happening to all of us? Why are we struggling so, so much? And what I realized through this research, through this process was that there are eight foundations that women really need to have. They need to have the solid foundation, these eight pieces in order to show up as the calm, confident CEO that they dream about being. And then by showing up as that calm, competent CEO, they get to be the CEO of not only their business, but also their life. So that they can build the freedom, the security, the wealth, the access, the leadership, all the stuff that they want to have, they can build that by making this foundation solid first. So one of the metaphors that I always tell people is that you cannot build a skyscraper on a cracked foundation. If you build a skyscraper on a cracked foundation, eventually everything will fall. And so in this metaphor, building your business and your

The Skyscraper Foundation Metaphor

Nika Lawrie 4:33

dream life is that skyscraper, right? It's putting all of those pieces, all of those layers on top of each other to become the skyscraper of your business and life. But if your foundation is broken, all of those pieces will eventually fail. And when they fail, that's when you see women with burnout. That's where you see women struggling with anxiety and depression. That's when you see women struggling with severe health issues or autoimmisses or hormonal dysfunction. You'll see people have sleep issues, all kinds of things. Brain fog is a big one. There's so many facets that women struggle with. Because of this, because women need these foundations, I felt it was my duty to start sharing this with the world and really start talking about it. So what are the eight foundations? And that I've kind of explained, you know, why this was so important. Well, the eight foundations are health and energy, nervous system regulation, identity and self-trust, mindset and belief architecture, structure and capacity,

The Eight Foundations Explained

Nika Lawrie 5:41

business clarity, money and ownership. And one of the most important ones that is usually not thought about is community and supports. So when I talk about health and energy, what I'm really talking about is your body, your health and your energy levels. So how are your hormones working? How is your sleep? How is your diet and exercise going? Really looking at how we support our overall health so that we then have

Health And Energy As The Baseline

Nika Lawrie 6:09

the energy to build the business and life that we want to have. The next one, like I mentioned, was the nervous system regulation. So this one is so, so key. This one is the reason why so many of us kind of get in our own way and we procrastinate or we feel lazy or we know we need to do things and we don't do it. And what's happening is that doing something new or different or stepping out of our comfort

Nervous System Fear And Procrastination

Nika Lawrie 6:37

zone triggers that nervous system and it tells the nervous system, fear, fear, fear, slow down. This is something different. We need to be cautious and doing it. And the way that we show up as being cautious and doing it is procrastinating or coming up with other things to do in place of that. So, like my go-to was always like cleaning the house, like, oh, the laundry needs to be done, or oh, let me just put the dishes away, or oh, let me go run these errands and then I'll get to work. And by the end of the day, I had no time to actually do the things that I needed to do because I did all the other things that needed to be done, but weren't scary because they were already part of my normal routine. So in the nervous system, calming the nervous system and managing that regulation, that is the key piece to not having that fear of showing up, the fear of visibility, the fear of taking the action, the fear of doing the work. So once we can calm that nervous system and let our nervous system know that success and taking actions is not dangerous, it's actually safe and better for us, then we can start to move forward. The next piece that I want to talk to you about is identity and self-trust. When we talk about identity and self-trust, this is really how we think about ourselves and how we show up in the world. So if we think about ourselves as somebody who is lazy and

Identity, Self Trust, And Beliefs

Nika Lawrie 8:03

inconsistent and confused and doesn't know what to do and is afraid of doing the things, then we're going to continue to be that kind of person. We're going to continue to have those habits and show up that way. But when we start to redesign what our internal identity is, we start to build self-trust with ourselves. And then we show up as a different person in the world and things start to happen much easier. So this is where we have to start thinking about ourselves as the calm, confident CEO instead of the chaotic, overwhelmed figure it out or wantpreneur, right? And so it's not just as simple as like, oh, I'm going to think of myself as a different thing. You really have to start building that structure in and thinking about yourself differently every single day. This is a habit or routine that you have to build into yourself. But the more you do it, the more your body starts to feel that way subconsciously. So you don't even have to think about it. And then you start to show up differently. And when you show up differently, that's where you build the self-trust. So the next piece is the mindset and belief architect. And this is really, really important for so many women. We have been ingrained by the patriarch to believe so many crazy things that we're not even actually usually aware of that just aren't true. So I see a lot of women struggling with the fear of being seen, the visibility showing up on social media because it's dangerous or we might seem egotistical or people are going to judge us. I see a lot of women struggling with money and their relationship with money and their beliefs around money that maybe asking for the sale or promoting something is icky. Charging is icky when you're supposed to be of service and give things for free. But if you're going to try to run a business, you have to make money. So we have to change the belief architect around how we move through the world. And there's so many facets of this, but there's a couple key ones that we'll really need to work on and rebuild in our thought processes to show up differently. So the next one is structure and capacity. This one is really, really important. Once you have the other ones in place, so your health and energy, your nervous system regulated, your identity is rebuilt, you have better beliefs, right? You've architected new belief system. Then

Structure And Business Clarity

Nika Lawrie 10:33

from there, you want to build structure so that you have more capacity. So structure means system. So you need to start thinking about how do I delegate all of the tasks that I'm using to other people or programs or software so that it unloads a lot of that pressure from me, allowing me to have more capacity to do other things, to grow the business, to show up differently, to go speak on podcasts or stages or whatever that is, right? So we have to start thinking about the structure of how we're doing things. We have to build new systems into that structure so that we have more capacity. So once we have the structure and capacity, and these two can sometimes be interchangeable, but we really want to get clear on our business. So that's business clarity, right? We want to really simplify things. We want to know exactly who our target market is. We want to know the ins and outs of the emotions of that person. So thinking about their fears, their wants, their desired transformations, their ups, their downs, their, you know, what do they think about at 11 o'clock at night in bed, trying to fall asleep and their brains wandering too much? We really need to have that clarity on our target market. We need to be very, very clear on the problem we're solving for that person, like exactly what it is we're doing to help that person transform into the person that they want to be. We're solving that problem for them. And then we need to be very clear about how we're providing that service. Is that a course? Is it a product? Is it coaching? Is it a software? Whatever that is, we need to have that very, very clear. And then we need to make sure that it's simple and something that we can explain in basic human language without boring somebody. You really need to be able to say, you know, John or Sarah or whoever is having a problem with XYZ. Oh, you need to send that person to Nika. You need to send that person to Sally because they know how to solve that problem. People need to be able to have that recognition that quickly. So you need to be able to explain your business that quickly. So you need to have that type of clarity. Once we have all of those other pieces, the next thing we need to think about is money and ownership. And this is so, so key, especially as we're moving into the AI era. AI is moving so rapidly. And the biggest problem with AI is that

Money And Ownership In AI

Nika Lawrie 13:11

we don't really know what's going to happen over the next three to 10 years, even three to five years. You know, it could be anywhere between it's solving cancer to we're all dead and the apocalypse is hit, right? But somewhere in the middle of that is many, many people are going to lose jobs. Many, many people are going to be replaced by AI in the sense of their day-to-day work. And many, many people are going to struggle because of that. And so ownership, ownership of a business, ownership of your home, ownership of income, ownership of networks and relationships, that's going to be key to your safety going forward into this new era of AI. And so really starting to shift the way we think about things. We're not showing up as a worker bee working for somebody because that's where the danger comes in. You could be replaced anytime. But if you own your business and you're solving a key problem for somebody, it's much harder for you to be replaced by AI. And the thing that you're going to see really happen over the next few years is that people are going to long for person-to-person connection. And so the more that you can provide that person-person, person-to-person connection as we move into this more technological era, the better off you'll be as well, because people are going to crave that. So people are going to pay for that. So thinking about how we use money as a tool, thinking about how we use money to build more ownership for ourselves and really grasping the idea of how important ownership is going to be over the next, you know, five, 10 years, 20 years. And then the last foundation is community and support. And like I said in the very beginning, sometimes this one is really forgotten about. So many of us solopreneurs sit in our home office or our little studios all by yourself, typing at the keyboard, trying to

Community Support That Prevents Isolation

Nika Lawrie 15:11

figure out life, trying to figure out our businesses. And the problem with that is that people who build alone tend to isolate. And when you isolate, you're more likely to burn out, you're more likely to have depression and anxiety. You're more likely to feel insecure or overwhelmed or uncertain. So the key is to really build a community around what you're doing. So make connections with other entrepreneurs, make connections with networking groups, make connections with your clients or your colleagues that are working in the same kind of industry, really building that community. And then most importantly is to have one, two, three, five other people that you can turn to that maybe aren't doing the exact same thing you're doing, but are working in the similar world, the similar area of business, so that you can bounce ideas off of them, so that you can collaborate, so that you can share with your struggles, so you can, you know, share ideas, what's working, what's not. Having that support is so, so key. My life changed completely. I'd run my business by myself for years. And I had my clients and I had my family, but I didn't really have a community of other entrepreneurs to talk to. And my life changed completely when I built relationships with other entrepreneurs, other course creators, other people doing stuff in the online space. I cannot tell you how much that changed everything for me. And so that is one of the reasons why I'm building this launch pad, why I'm building a launch pad to help women start and grow businesses from the inside out, because so many women need to step up in this new era so they are safe and have freedom and security, but also so that they have community and they can support other women coming up behind them. So, with that said, I want to tell you about something that I'm doing now. I am launching a new course called the Next Era Accelerator. Doors open on June 15th, and I'm super, super excited about launching this because we go through every single foundation. We deep dive into all of them.

Next Era Accelerator Invitation

Nika Lawrie 17:24

So there's courses or there's classes and trainings that you'll see, but then I also do coaching directly with you and provide tools and resources. And so in this next era accelerator, I'm going to go through each one of the foundations with you to make sure that you understand how that works specific to you. This is not like a blanketed thing. This is specific to you and how that, how you can address it and how you can fix those things in your life to help you grow your business. And even if you haven't started a business now, this still is great for you because getting your foundations ready in the beginning before you launch makes it even better. And if you're one of those women who've already built the business and you're growing and you're burnt out, maybe you're, you know, you're a great business owner. You've done it for a decade, but you're burnt out or you're struggling, or you know that there's something that needs to be fixed or tweaked slightly, this course is great for you too. So it's really everyone in that picture can get supported by this course. So if you want to learn more, check out my wait list page. I'll put the link in the show notes below. But it's called the Next Era Accelerator. And again, I'm launching it on June 15th. So get on the wait list. I will send you lots of details, and I'm so excited to share it with you guys. With that, I hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you again for joining me here. This is the community, and this together, this is how we will rise. I'll see you next time, friend. Have a great day.