The Sheila Botelho Show
Sheila Botelho is a business strategist guiding visionary leaders to more profit, freedom, and self-trust. With decades of experience in wellness, sales, and transformational coaching, she helps founders grow businesses that generate wealth and impact—without burning out or dimming down.
On this show, Sheila sparks future-focused conversations about growth, leadership, and the shifting landscape of business in an era of rapid change. Her self-trust-centered approach equips founders to align strategy with soul, scale sustainably, and create a legacy of influence and abundance that touches every area of life.
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The Sheila Botelho Show
The Moment Everything Is Rising and Life Throws You a Curveball | EP 553
🔗 Mentioned on this Episode: Show Notes 👈
When you’re stepping into your next level, even the smallest inconvenience can feel symbolic. It can feel like resistance. It can feel like life is testing you. But what if nothing is wrong? What if this is simply what it looks like to expand your capacity?
In this episode I share a grounded perspective on why unexpected challenges tend to show up right when everything else is rising. Through personal reflections and lived experience, we unpack how meaning making shapes your emotional resilience, your leadership, and your ability to stay regulated while your business grows.
This is an episode to return to whenever life starts moving in unexpected ways.
For details about the Visioning Experience replay and how it connects to the Vision Map and Expansion Season, my 12 week program designed to help founders scale with clarity, creativity, and grounded self leadership, Start here.
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There's a moment in every founder's journey where everything feels like it's rising at once. Your ideas are flowing, opportunities are showing up, and you can feel in your body that something big is shifting for you. That's the proof that you're stepping into a new season. But here is the promise. Right before those breakthroughs lead, life often has a way of sending things that look like distractions or setbacks. And the plan is not to avoid them. The plan is to learn how to meet them in a way that expands your strength instead of shrinking your power. I want you to picture how much lighter this next year will feel when you stop assigning the wrong meaning to life's little interruptions and start seeing them as signs of your capacity growing. The only real pain comes when we forget who we are and let inconvenience convince us that we are off track. We are never off track. We are being stretched for the next level we asked for. Hi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sheila Botelho, and I believe true success is built from the inside out. Today I want to have a very real, very human conversation with you. One that every founder in a scaling season eventually bums up against. And honestly, it's a conversation I revisit often in my own life because no matter how much inner work we do, and no matter how far along we are in our careers, the truth is that life continues to life. And sometimes it feels beautifully aligned, and sometimes it feels a little messy and inconvenient. And then there are times where it feels like all of that all at once. But here's the part I want you to sit with today. When you are in a moment of rising, when you are stepping into your next season, when you can feel new opportunities and new identity shifts and new levels of leadership moving through your world, the smallest inconvenience can feel like a derailment. Even things that would barely register during an ordinary month can suddenly feel amplified. They can feel symbolic almost. They can feel like you're interrupting your magic. And if you are a meaning maker like I am, which I believe most founders are, you might be tempted to look at these things as signs. Signs that something's off. Signs that you made the wrong choice. Signs that the timing is not right, and maybe even signs that you're not ready. But what if none of that is true? What if life is simply doing what life does? And what if the only meaning these moments carry is the meaning you choose to assign to them? That is where I want to go today. Let me paint this picture for you. I have had so many things in my world lately going on that I feel like arising, new creative direction, new opportunities, a deeper connection with the people in my community, a sense of clarity and alignment that feels like a breath of fresh air. And yet, right in the middle of all of this beauty, a few random things popped up that needed attention. Repairs that needed to be booked, replacements that could not be put off, big ones, unexpected expenses, inconveniences that landed on my plate without any warning. None of them are dramatic, though. Okay. None of them are life-altering. Again, it's just life being life. But because they landed at a time where everything else is feeling so expansive and so exciting and full, I had this moment where I thought, why now? Why when everything is going so well? Why does this have to show up today when I have a full schedule and a full heart and a full creative wave moving through me? And it would have been so easy to let these little ripples pull me out of the energy that I was in, to interpret them as resistance or the universe testing me. That's a fun one, right? Or maybe even a sign that I should slow down, or that I'm not as supported as I thought. But here is where my meaning-making practice has served me so well. And that's why I wanted to share this here today with you. I don't pretend that these things are not inconvenient, of course. And I don't bypass the emotions that arise when they come along. I don't force myself into positivity either. You may be surprised at that one because I'm pretty much an optimist all the time. But in fact, I do the opposite. I allow, I let myself feel the frustration. I let myself name the disappointment. I let myself shake off the annoyance. And I just let myself be human about it. I have what one of my dear friends calls having a human day. And then once the emotion has space to breathe, I choose the meaning that empowers me instead of the meaning that collapses me. You see, we are all meaning makers. Whether you believe that or not, if you look deep into your world, you'll see what I mean. Every single one of us. We give meaning to everything that happens in our lives, whether we realize it or not. But somewhere along my journey, many years ago, I made a conscious decision that the meaning I assign will always be the meaning that strengthens me once I've had my human day. Because otherwise, what's the alternative? I could decide that I'm cursed or that I'm unsupported or behind or I should quit or I'm not meant for what I want. That is not empowering at all. And you know what? It's also not true. It's just convenient and it's just the easy way to go in our minds. You see, that is the path that drains your power, the path that slows your momentum, and the path that makes everything harder. So here is the meaning that I chose this week. These things are not here to derail me. They are here to show me that I can hold so much more than I ever have, that I can keep rising while life continues to move around me, that my capacity is expanding. I tell myself that I'm becoming the woman who can grow her life, her business, her vision, and still handle the unexpected with grace. When you look at life through that lens, I can tell you right now, everything changes. You shift from feeling victimized to feeling capable, from being discouraged to feeling grounded. You shift from feeling scattered to actually feeling spacious. And you shift from feeling alone to feeling supported. This is where self-leadership is built. And let's talk about something I wish more founders understood. Co-regulation. Co-regulation is the nervous system to nervous system support we receive from the people and environments around us. But it is also something we provide for ourselves when we are anchored in our truth. You know, when you're rising, when you are stretching into a new identity, your nervous system is doing something incredibly brave. It's recalibrating to a version of you that holds more responsibility, more visibility, more leadership, more creativity, and more everything. So when life throws a few curveballs at that exact moment, it is not a cosmic attack. It is your system being asked to stabilize at a level you never have held before. And the more you practice staying with yourself in those moments, the more regulated you become, even while life moves, even while emotions move. This is why self-care for business is not just about bubble baths and morning routines. It is about learning to inhabit your inner world with steadiness. It's about staying connected to yourself while the external world does what it does. This is the kind of leadership that makes business sustainable. This is the kind of leadership that builds legacies and that attracts clients who trust your energy more than your expertise. At the end of every day, every single challenge comes down to a choice. Will this take me out or will this grow me? Will this make me smaller or will this stretch me? Will this drain my momentum or deepen my resilience? I remind myself as often as needed that I always have a choice in how I respond to life. I can let the inconvenience collapse my energy, or I can let it remind me that I'm someone who walks through frustration and emerges stronger on the other side. Feeling the feelings is, of course, part of the deal. But letting them define you is optional. And here's something I've learned over and over again. When you look for the hidden blessings in any challenge, you will find them. I find them because I always am looking for them. Not because I'm avoiding reality or because I'm spiritually bypassing, but it's because the human experience is layered with gifts that only become visible when our perspective shifts. So the blessing could look a number of different ways. It could be clarity, a new boundary you develop, a deeper level of trust that you have, the evidence that you can handle more than you thought. And it might even be the thing that prepares you for what you asked for. Every challenge I have ever walked through has strengthened my capacity to hold the next version of my life. And I know the same is true for you. I'm recording this episode after hosting the beautiful live visioning experience that we had this week, which was powerful and beautiful and so full of the kind of clarity that only comes when you give yourself space to meet the next version of you. If you wanted to join but couldn't make it live, the replay is up and linked for you in the show notes. Inside the replay, you will experience the guided journey we moved through together. And if you want the full implementation process that we also did, but that didn't include in the replay because it was individuals sharing their thoughts, the parts that were not part of the replay because we did them inside of the vision map, you can access all of that through the vision map itself. This is the perfect place to start your next season. It's the gateway into expansion season, my 12-week guided program where we anchor your business growth in self-care, aligned strategy, and nervous system-grounded leadership. All of the links are in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being the kind of person who is committed to their expansion while honoring their humanity. I appreciate you. I see you, and I will see you on the next episode.