What I’m Actually Doing When I Work With You | EP 617

I'm telling you what I'm actually doing when I work with someone, because I don't think the sales page version captures it. It's not me teaching from a soapbox, it's me guiding you back to yourself.

You'll hear why receiving has moved my highest value work more than pushing ever did, and what that actually means for how Expansion Season and Seasons Circle both work.

Full show notes, transcript, and chapters at sheilabotelho.com/617

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Transcript

When The Old Method Breaks

Sheila 0:01

People can come to a point where the methodology that got them here stops being the thing that can take them further. And most of them can feel it before they can name it. In this episode, I'm telling you exactly what happens in the room when you work with me and why receiving has become the skill that moves my highest value work. I've spent over two decades building businesses and sitting across from women at this exact inflection point. And I'm bringing you the identity work underneath the strategy, not just another framework. Listen through to the end, and you'll know exactly what you're actually getting when you step into this work with me. Hi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sheila Botelho, and I believe true success is built from the inside out. I'd like to take some time today to actually tell you what I'm doing when I work with someone because I don't think the sales page version of it comes close to the truth of it. And I think you deserve the fuller picture.

The Hidden Cost Of Success

Sheila 1:02

So here's the pattern I keep watching play out over and over with founders and leaders who end up in front of me. On paper, they're doing really well. The revenue is there, the business works. And from the outside, everyone around them would say they've made it. But underneath that, they can't sustain the pace that their life is asking them in order to keep holding that success in place. Something's being paid for in that growth. And it's almost never showing up anywhere that you'd think to look for it on a balance sheet, let's say. It actually shows up in their relationships. It shows up in their bodies. It shows up in how they present and how present actually that they are. It shows up in how present they actually are for the life that they've built a business to support in the first place. And usually by the time I'm sitting across from them, they're the last one to have said any of that out loud, even to themselves. And that's the moment I think of as the inflection point. And I want to walk you through it slowly because I think it's really easy to misunderstand if you've only glanced at it. It's the moment when someone realizes that the exact way of working that built them to their current level of success isn't going to be the thing that carries them into the next one. And let's be really clear this is not a story about someone hitting a wall because they've run out of capability. Because most of the people that I sit with could absolutely keep pushing, using the exact same approach that's gotten them to this point in their life and business. And that's actually part of what makes the moment so disorienting. It would work on some level. It just comes at a cost. And the work I do is helping someone get honest about what that cost actually is, instead of letting them keep pretending it isn't there.

Presence Over Pitching

Sheila 2:58

So when I'm in a conversation with someone, standing right at that edge, here's what I don't do. I don't turn it into a pitch. I don't say, well, here's the container, here's what you need to join, and this will fix it for you. Because that kind of certainty dropped into a moment like that tends to land all wrong. Because what that moment is actually asking for is presence, not a solution being handed over. So instead, I share what I'm noticing. I let them hear very clearly maybe that the season that they're standing in is worth honoring exactly as it is. And then I leave it there, like a seed, and I let it grow on whatever timing is actually theirs. And more often than you'd think, that's enough. That's the whole offering. And it works for me because it isn't trying to force anything. And here's the piece underneath all of it. The piece I think that explains this work better than anything else I could tell you. This is not me teaching from a soapbox. It's me guiding them, reflecting them back and guiding them back to themselves. I want to slow down on that line because it's easy to hear it once and let it slide past you. But what I mean by guiding someone back to themselves is that I'm never handing anyone a formula and telling you to go execute it. Instead, I'm helping you find what's already true for you, what's already sitting there underneath the noise, waiting for enough space to actually surface. And I hold space for that. I act as a mirror for that. And I know that those are phrases you've probably heard a hundred times in this industry. So let me actually make it concrete for you. It means that I help you uncover what could come next. And then I show you a handful of different ways you might actually get there using a different method, a different energy than the one that built you to where you currently are standing. Of course, I have frameworks for that part, plenty of them. But the identifying part, like the part we figure out where you actually are right now, where you actually want to go and how you want to feel while you're getting there, that has to come first. It absolutely must. The frameworks only work once that groundwork is in place. And I'm never up on a pedestal in this work directing your life from somewhere above you. My role, as I understand it, is to remind you of who you are underneath everything that you've built, to guide you back to yourself and to who you're actually becoming and to how you truly want your life to look once all of this comes together.

Identity Work Under Strategy

Sheila 5:47

Because this is the truth sitting underneath the whole conversation as I see it. This is the reason any of us build businesses in the first place. We have something worth sharing with the world. And we want to build a certain kind of life for ourselves while we're sharing it. Somewhere along the way, though, in the middle of building, so many people lose sight of that second half of the sentence entirely. I've sat across from so many founders who know without a shadow of a doubt that something in their life or their business needs to change. And they still can't see what that next step actually is. And truly they could see it in someone else, but it's very challenging sometimes to see it in themselves. They can only truly see what they've already done, what they already have evidence for. The next step lives just outside the frame of that evidence. And it stays completely invisible until someone helps them turn their attention somewhere else. That's identity work at its core. We're turning attention to see what you are actually capable of, what you consider yourself worthy of, what beliefs about yourself are keeping you exactly where you are, even while part of you is aching to move. These aren't easy questions to sit with on your own from the inside without someone else in the room. I still get help with this myself, even now, even after decades of doing this work from my own mentors. And that is not a gap in the process. That's actually how the deepest version of this work actually happens in relationship, never in isolation. And I've noticed that this shows up a little differently depending on who's actually sitting across from me. So someone who's built something digital is usually wrestling with a slightly different version of this question than, say, a corporate leader operating inside of an organization that they don't own. And both of those look different again from a woman stepping out of senior employment for the first time and maybe into consulting or fractional work on her own terms. The businesses themselves can look nothing alike. But the identity question underneath all of them is exactly the same one. Who am I now? And does the way I'm currently operating actually still match that? Which brings me to something I think is worth walking through as well. Because

Choosing The Right Container

Sheila 8:23

the question I get asked most often, and I really want to answer it properly instead of just like sliding past it, both of my containers, expansion season and season circle, run on this exact same principle. And I think it helps to understand why they're built the way they're built. Because the difference isn't about which one is more serious or more advanced. It's truly about how you are actually wired to move through this kind of work. Expansion season is a self-guided path. You move through it on your own structure at your own pace, and you have bi-weekly access to me through Voxer along the way. So you're never doing it completely alone, but you do have my eyes on it. However, you're doing the identifying work directly in your own hands, using the frameworks that I give you and coming back to me with what you're finding. It's built for the person who needs the room to think through on their own terms first. Now, Season Circle takes that same work and holds it in community instead. It's proximity. It's a room full of people who are each moving through their own version of the same inflection point held together over time rather than passing through it once. And there's something that happens inside that kind of container that a self-guided process simply can't replicate on its own. And of course, only you know whether which one is actually the right one for you. But being witnessed by other people who are building at your level changes the pace at which you're willing to tell yourself the truth. You'll hear someone else finally say a fear out loud that you hadn't found the words for yet. And something in you loosens just enough to say your own. And neither one of these is a starter version of the other. And I really want to be clear about that because both of these programs, I don't think of them that way at all. They're actually built for different seasons of doing this work and for different ways that people are genuinely wired to move through change. What actually matters is knowing which one you're standing in right now. And there's one more thread I want to pull on before I let you go today, because I think it ties everything else together.

Receiving Instead Of Pushing

Sheila 10:33

The skill that has moved my own highest value work, the work that's actually changed the entire trajectory of what I've built, has come through receiving far more than it's ever come through pushing, like receiving the vision, receiving the assignment, taking inspired action from that place instead of the heavy, forceful kind of action I used to associate for most of my career with how you get results. It's one of the most profitable skills I've ever developed in my life. And honestly, it's one of the hardest because everything in me was trained early on and very thoroughly toward pushing, push, push. And I watch this play out constantly with the people I work with. They come to me having built everything through force, long hours, sheer will, pushing until something finally moved. And it worked, which is exactly what makes it so hard to let go of later. What I help them find is instead a different way of getting the same results, sometimes far better results, from a place of alignment instead of force. And that shift never happens through a pitch or a formula or a clever piece of advice. It actually happens through being genuinely witnessed, reflected, and guided back to what they already know, but simply haven't had the room to hear themselves say out loud yet.

Selling Without Chasing

Sheila 11:59

I want to be honest with you about something else too, because I think this is really important for you to hear. This same principle governs how I approach the business side of my own work, including the way I talk with people about working with me. I don't chase people. I share what I'm building. I let people see the actual results in the people I've worked with. And I let the fit reveal itself instead of manufacturing urgency around it, which is so, so common in the coaching space. That's receiving in practice. And it can look slower from the outside. And some days, certainly, it does feel slower from the inside. But it's the only version of this that's held up for me over the long run because the people who arrive that way are the ones who genuinely do the work once they're actually in the room. And I know there's a version of this work that could look passive from where you're sitting. Maybe someone's sitting in a room reflecting a person back to themselves, letting them arrive at their own conclusions instead of handing them a tidy plan to follow. But I want to say that it really isn't passive at all. It takes far more skill to guide someone toward their own answer than it ever does to simply hand them mine. It takes restraint, it takes trusting the whole process, even in the moments when the fastest looking route would be to just tell someone exactly what to do. I mean, I've learned that in parenting, but you know, we could do it for them. However, the best way for them to learn is by doing it themselves. But the fastest looking route rarely holds up over time, doesn't it? The guided route does because it's built on something the person actually owns for themselves. And what someone builds their own conviction around tends to survive long after the conversation ends and everyday life resumes around them. So here is what you're actually getting underneath everything when you work with me. You're getting someone who holds space and acts as a mirror, who helps you uncover what's next instead of handing you a prescription for it. You're getting frameworks and strategy exactly when you're ready to talk strategy, but never before the identifying work has had the chance to happen first. And maybe most importantly, you're getting a way of working that models something most founders have simply never had modeled for them before. That receiving isn't the opposite of results. That guiding someone back to themselves creates movement that actually lasts in a way that telling them what to do never quite manages to. And I know all of this because I've watched it happen again and again in the founders and leaders I've had the privilege of working with over the years, and because I've lived it myself, in the slow, ongoing way I've had to rebuild my own approach to this entire body of work.

What Makes Growth Last

Sheila 14:56

I think it's worth saying that why all of this matters beyond any single conversation is that when someone builds to their next level of success from a foundation that they uncovered for themselves, they can actually hold on to it. They understand why it belongs to them. But when someone builds it because I told them the steps and they simply followed instructions, the moment anything shifts, whether it's a market change, a hard season, something unexpected in their personal life, they don't have an internal reference point to adjust from. They're just left waiting on the next set of instructions instead. And that to me is the actual difference between growth that compounds over time and growth that has to be rebuilt from scratch every single time conditions change. I'd rather spend more time in the uncovering, even on the days that it feels slower than I'd like, because what gets built on the other side of it doesn't need me standing next to it in order to keep it working. That's actually how I measure this work. I don't measure it by how quickly someone can tell me what they're going to do next or where they're going. I measure it by whether they land on something that genuinely sounds like them when they finally say it out loud. There's a specific quality to that moment. The pace changes and their tone changes even. And sometimes even the actual language changes from the polished answer someone offers at the start of a conversation to the one that they arrive at once they've been truly reflected back to themselves. That second answer, the one that comes later, is the one that holds. You don't need my whole story to get any value out of any of this. But what you do need to know is that this is how the work actually happens, start to finish. It's guided work, it's received work, and that's what I'm here to keep showing you week after week, episode after episode.

One Aligned Action And Next Steps

Sheila 16:54

One aligned action this week that you can consider as well is notice one place where you're pushing for a result and ask yourself, what would it look like to receive it instead? Now, to see more about the ways we can work together, go to the link in the show notes. You'll see all my links there. And thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your week, and I'll see you on the next episode.