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The Founder’s Pivot: Letting Your Body of Work Guide What’s Next | EP 515

• Sheila Botelho

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In this solo chat, I’m sharing a story I’ve never told quite like this before—about the season when I knew I had to evolve beyond the niche I’d spent decades growing. What started as a whisper turned into a calling: to serve founders across all industries while staying rooted in my self-care for business methodology.


You’ll hear how I made this pivot while allowing my existing business to continue growing, and how it unlocked greater clarity and results—for me and my clients. I walk you through the surprising ways personal alignment, and creative bandwidth shape business success (regardless of your niche or revenue level). And I share client stories to illustrate how foundational shifts can catalyze next-level growth.


This episode is for the founder who senses something needs to change—but doesn’t know where to start. If you’ve outgrown part of your business, or if you feel like your calendar no longer reflects your capacity, this is your invitation to pause, listen, and lead yourself forward. Because your next season won’t look like your last one—and that’s exactly the point.



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Sheila:

A decade ago, I made a bold pivot in business. I stopped working only in the wellness space and started serving entrepreneurs across industries, from tech to coaching to creative work. But I brought one thing with me a commitment to well-being as a business strategy. Here's what I learned and how this shift freed me, expanded my impact and helped my clients scale with clarity. Hi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sheila Botelho and I'm committed to help you reconnect to your purpose, elevate your wellbeing and build your version of a happy, successful life. So here's a story I've never told quite like this before.

Sheila:

Years ago, after spending decades in the wellness space, I began to feel a shift. I had built a body of work I was really proud of. I'd helped countless wellness professionals launch their businesses, serve multitude of clients globally and find their voice. But something inside me started to stir. And find their voice, but something inside me started to stir. It wasn't dissatisfaction, it was actually a sense of completion and a whisper saying you're meant to serve beyond this lane. Now I want to be clear. There was nothing wrong with the work I was doing. In fact, I have many wellness professionals that I still do business with and I love it so much because it has been so deeply fulfilling. But what I realized is that I kept do business with and I love it so much because it has been so deeply fulfilling. But what I realized is that I kept having the same conversations over and over again with a variety of people who I was working with and those who I was in contact with in my network. It wasn't just about launches or lead magnets, but it was about exhaustion, emotional depletion magnets. But it was about exhaustion, emotional depletion, the guilt that people feel around rest. It was about nervous system overload and the feeling that, even when things were really working well, something still felt off. And I realized this wasn't unique in just a few different industries. Every founder I knew, regardless of industry, was experiencing the same exact patterns. So I made the shift quietly.

Sheila:

At first, I stopped exclusively working with wellness professionals and began opening my calendar to founders in all industries product creators, coaches, designers, consultants, artists, executives. And here is the wild part Even though their businesses were different, their energy patterns were very, very similar. When they weren't sleeping, their launches stalled. When they were overwhelmed, their messaging felt muddy. When their personal boundaries dissolved, their client boundaries tended to follow the things happening in their personal boundaries dissolved. Their client boundaries tended to follow. The things happening in their personal life impacted what was happening in their relationships, in their business. When they pushed through exhaustion, they pushed away aligned opportunities and the powerful truth I saw over and over again kept coming up, and that is this the health of the founder shapes the health of the business. And I don't just mean physical health, I mean nervous system health, emotional capacity, creative bandwidth, clarity of purpose.

Sheila:

Now let me give you a few examples from behind the scenes. One founder I worked with had a gorgeous offer but she couldn't quite seem to write about it clearly. She felt really blocked. There was a lot going on in her personal life and as much as we love to say, just compartmentalize and get focused and everything will work out, we know that that's not always real life. So that was impacting her and it was more than us just having to work on the clarity and the actual words she was using. We didn't start there. We didn't start with the content. We started with helping her get some sleep, hydration and moving her body daily, because she needed to move through this energy and move the energy through her. Within several weeks, her next launch actually did so well because she had gained the clarity from a grounded place.

Sheila:

And another client, a creative entrepreneur, was stuck in just constant analyzing and going back to the drawing board. Every decision felt heavy, to the point where I asked her one day what is really at the root of this, do you think? And then she opened up to me. She realized that she had really really high standards for herself and this idea of putting something out into the world without it being absolutely perfect was holding her back. She didn't know how to let go and realize that, no matter what business we are talking about, there are always going to be pivots once things launch. There are always going to be pivots once things launch. So what we did was she started a morning journaling ritual just so she could get her thoughts onto paper, and we combined that with a breath work practice. So she got into her body a bit and then she did some light movement and over time she found her clarity come back and this beautifully accelerated her decision-making.

Sheila:

And a third client in the coaching space was constantly reinventing what she was offering to her clients until we realized it wasn't the offer that was burning her out. It was that she was burned out. She physically had given so much and not given herself any recalibration time, any refreshment time in between serving that she had really reached her limit. So what we did here was we had her clear space on her calendar and take time away from her business altogether, and she was able to do it in a lovely way with her clients, because they really enjoyed working with her and they wanted her at her best as well. They actually had homework to do while she was off, taking care of herself, and it worked out beautifully because when she came back to work with them, they had been doing some growing on their own and were able to really have a new set of eyes looking at their business, because she was so refreshed Once she actually came back to it. Everything was far more aligned for her.

Sheila:

And so all of these examples are of people, human beings, running businesses, and often we look at a business and we think about it as being this entity. But really, who is running these entities? Human beings who are experiencing life, who have things they're going through that you will never know anything about, things that are running in the background, with their family, with their personal health, with the health of loved ones with causes and things that are very, very important to them, with world events happening, and they're navigating all of that while holding so dearly to them their clients and the results that their clients are getting with either their products or services. And so, yes, we need to be investing so much more time and intention in taking care of our wellbeing every single one of us, especially business owners because it's not just about them, it's about the whole ecosystem they've created and the clients that they serve. So here's what I've learned from serving across different industries being niche in your values and methodology is actually far more important than being niche in industry.

Sheila:

Once you've built your body of work and what do I mean by this? I really believe that clarity creates expansion, and the clearer, in my case, I became with my belief that wellbeing is a business strategy, the more aligned clients began finding their way to me from every imaginable space. So it wasn't so much about me serving a specific type of founder. It was about me serving founders who wanted a specific type of result. Do you see the difference? And, honestly, it felt incredibly liberating, because I didn't feel like I was putting myself in a tiny little box anymore and I didn't need to be explaining why I could only help one kind of business owner as I approached my content, as I approached my marketing, and I also didn't feel anymore like I had to speak a certain way to be on brand, because I realized that my brand is me and the through line I have going on is this transformation through self-leadership, self-trust and embodied well-being. That's it. It's pretty simple and I love simplicity.

Sheila:

So if you're a founder, listening right now, here's what I want to offer to you. You can evolve and it doesn't need to be hard, but you do need to listen. Listen to yourself and listen to what your clients are wanting. If you're feeling the tug to shift your niche or your offers, your content, your schedule, even just the pace of your life, don't ignore it, that whisper coming from within you that you keep hearing. It's actually not something that's here to distract you. It's something that's here to direct you, because you're allowed to serve a broader range of people. If you're clear in how you can help them and you're allowed to change your positioning, if your soul is really craving alignment, you really can bring your full self into your brand, especially the part of you that has grown and evolved. You have so much more to give the longer you've been in business.

Sheila:

So I want to ask you something no-transcript, let that rise inside of you. You don't need to have all the answers now, of course, but you do need to stay honest with yourself, because your next season will not look like your last one, and we don't want that anyway. And here's one more layer that I want to speak to before we wrap, because what I've found is that when you're scaling a business or moving through a pivot, every single new season of business demands a new level of capacity from you and of your team. So what worked in your first year and your first five years will not carry you into the next ones. If you're actually wanting growth to happen, into the next ones. If you're actually wanting growth to happen, what helped you manage a smaller group of clients is not going to help you in the same way as it would reaching far more people, and the version of you that said yes to doing everything will really burn out before they break through.

Sheila:

So if you've ever trained as an athlete or been coached by one, you'll know what I mean. Like I'm talking, even if it's way back in school. Okay, let's think about this. A runner doesn't train for a 5k the same way they train for a marathon. An artist doesn't prep for a local showing the same way they prepare for a museum exhibition. And a tennis player doesn't go to Wimbledon without a coach analyzing every single swing, every pattern, every weakness to optimize it. And that is what high performance requires. And founders, well, they're no different. In fact, if you're a founder, you're wearing more hats You're the visionary, the decision maker, the sales engine, the content creator and often the emotional support system for everyone around you.

Sheila:

As you're building the dream, and what I've seen is you can't see your own blind spots when you're in it. You can't spot the moment your strategy becomes outdated, or when you're defaulting into familiar instead of effective, or even when you're confusing momentum with alignment. That is where our coaching comes in and that's where I come in. In the work I do during VIP days, we peel back the layers of how you're operating, and this isn't just what you're doing, but how you're being. While you're doing it, we talk about what cycles you're stuck in that you might not even realize where your body and nervous system are signaling burnout long before it hits. It's such an important piece and when your genius is actually asking to lead, but your calendar has not caught up yet and you're just jammed.

Sheila:

All the time I have sat with founders of businesses who have the best teams, the best strategies and they're still stuck. And it's not because they don't know what to do, but it's because they're too close to see that the version of themselves running the business is outdated. That's the work we do together in my VIP days. We create space for the truth to surface without judgment. We zoom out to see the patterns, we map out systems and structures that support your next evolution and, more importantly, we build a version of success that feels good in your body, that feels light again, that feels rooted and realigned. One of my clients actually described her time with me saying it was like finally stepping off the treadmill. She didn't realize how much noise she was carrying and how much clarity she actually had. Once someone helped her access it, she finally started to feel like the CEO again. And that's what this work is about. And the timing couldn't be more important, because the business landscape is shifting rapidly.

Sheila:

If you have not noticed, audience behavior is changing. Strategies that worked even last year are not converting the same way Energy management, trust-based marketing and true leadership are the new currency, and if you're still operating from autopilot, if you're only relying on what's always worked, you might miss the signs your business and your body are trying to send you. There are a variety of ways you can work with me and stay connected, all of which you'll find in the show notes, and whether it's a private VIP day or group coaching or any other kind of content that I have for you, there is a path for you if you're ready to evolve with intention. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you are soaking up this season and taking the very best care of yourself, and I'll see you on another episode. Big blessings.