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 impactāwithout 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
What Finally Made My Business Sustainable Without Burning Me Out | EP 562
š Mentioned on this Episode: Show Notes š
This episode is for the leader who feels the internal tension between the version of them that built their business and the version thatās emerging.
You know something has to change, even if you canāt yet name what it is.
Iām sharing what I see again and again with high performing founders. You may be missing a support structure that matches your next level. One that regulates your nervous system, protects your energy, and gives your leadership room to breathe. Not more hustle or another āproven system.ā Something deeper and far more sustainable.
If youāre ready to expand without sacrificing your well-being, your relationships, or your life, this conversation will land. I also share what this looks like inside Expansion Season and why your next chapter requires more support, not more pressure.
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If you're in a season where your business is expanding but your system feels stretched, this is for you. I see a pattern among high performers that has nothing to do with strategy. It's something deeper that's rarely addressed until it becomes unavoidable. In this episode, I'm opening a conversation that could change how you approach growth from here forward. Hi, welcome to the show. I'm Sheila Botelho, and I believe true success is built from the inside out. Today's conversation is one I've been sitting with for a few weeks because it's the place where identity, self-care for business, and the next level of your leadership all intersect. And in a season where so many high capacity individuals are quietly hitting their edge, this conversation matters a lot. We're in a moment globally, economically, and personally, where the tension is just beneath the surface. A kind of subtle internal awareness that the way you used to operate cannot hold who you're becoming. And that's exactly what we're exploring today. And I want to start with something that happened recently in my own life. And it wasn't like incredibly dramatic or Instagram worthy, but something I wanted to share that highlights something and that revealed something from a normal moment that was pretty massive in my own life. So an unexpected situation popped up in my personal life. One of those logistical things that impacts the household, the rhythm, the emotional temperature of everyone in the space. And years ago, that would have been my cue to overfunction, to hold everyone's emotions, rearrange the day, calm the environment, take responsibility for things that truly were never mine to carry. But this time I didn't do any of that. Well, she doesn't run the show anymore. And I was celebrating that big time because I could recognize it. And it's something that it's been like a journey, a process I've stepped out of over the years. But it was just so poignant when I noticed it that I was so excited to see that. My capacity, um, like my nervous system, my identity, and my internal architecture, had finally expanded into the woman I have been stepping toward for years. And that's the level of transformation that self-care for business actually creates. It reorganizes you from the inside. And I see this in my clients constantly: people who are brilliant, seasoned, wildly capable, yet still confusing pressure with progress. And it really shows up in subtle ways. So it could look like a calendar that's packed to the brim, but nothing truly moving the needle in the business. It's a super common one. Also, it could look like exhaustion mistaken for doing the work, because so much of the exhaustion comes from having things spinning around in your mind because we're so used to doing business in a way that is familiar, that no matter what level of business we're in, when we want to expand, we can distract ourselves because expansion can feel scary. And it can also look like emotional labor disguised as leadership, or adrenaline being used as fuel instead of true ambition. And adrenaline, when you're just going for it and thinking you can keep going and going, going, you realize eventually you hit a wall. Because we have been conditioned to believe if I'm stretched thin, I must be growing. But think about that, is that true? Like, let's question that because there's no wisdom in depletion. And when you're dysregulated, it's really challenging to actually be strategic. So if the version of you who is leading your business is constantly in survival mode, they can't build what your next level requires. And this is why so many women, especially women, hit the revenue plateau. It's not that they don't know what to do next, but it's because the identity doing it is absolutely exhausted. Five years ago, if you asked me what support meant, I would have given you a logistical list. Help with my kids, outsourcing tasks, hiring contractors, and that's fine. That's definitely support. But today, if you ask me, I would say something different. I'd say support means something like a space where your vision doesn't shrink the room. A structure that regulates your system, your body, rhythms that help you truly be brilliant and just let your brilliance breathe. A community that holds the person, not just the business. And definitely looking at boundaries and strategy that protect your life force and honor your humanity. Support used to be about taking things off of my plate. And while I am a big advocate for that, for everyone to be able to really see when that needs to happen. Now it's more about strengthening the person who's sitting at the table. That kind of support. This distinction is the difference between scaling and self-sacrificing. The moment I stopped carrying everything alone, like truly stopped, everything shifted. First, my decision making became cleaner. So I didn't have the emotional fog that I used to have. And I wasn't stabilizing everybody else first before I came to my decisions. I just had clarity. Also, my body came out of survival mode. My sleep, creativity, and my vision, it all returned in a new way. And also, my leadership softened and strengthened at the same time. I wasn't performing calm, right? Like the actual performance of being calm. I actually was calm. I don't know if you catch that difference. Like performing calm, meaning, okay, I need to be calm now. I actually was calm on the inside. Like I didn't need to think about it because I had resourced myself. And that's the energetic frequency expansion season is built from. It's not about, of course, outsourcing your life, but it is about reclaiming the identity of the person who is steering it. So let's get practical now. Like, let's think beyond five steps to do anything. And let's talk about some grounded examples of what this actually looks like in your life. So here's an old pattern. Let's say you wake up and you immediately check your emails or Slack messages or client messages. Okay, that's the old pattern. The new pattern, this is the self-care for business version. You start your day regulating your system, your own body, your mind, your soul, not reacting to someone else's. So this might be like a five-minute grounding practice, a slow cup of tea, or your beverage of choice. And one question: Who am I being today? Like that's your first step. Here's another old pattern. You build offers around what the market demands. Okay, that's the old pattern. The self-care for business version is you build offers that you personally can sustain and bring to life, and that your identity can hold, that really honor the season of life that you're in. There is true alignment. Another old pattern could be you're pushing through fatigue because leaders do hard things. And while that's wonderful, I really like the self-care for business version. Because what it looks like is you honor the signal fatigue gives you and you shift the strategy instead of forcing output. So you actually make the changes so that you are leading the charge from the filled up version of yourself instead of just being performative and trying to keep up. And one last old pattern. This one involves you holding your partner's emotions, your clients' projections, your family's expectations. The list goes on. And you just you're holding it. You are the person who's holding it all together. And then there's the self-care for business version. You remain steady, you take care of yourself, and you're not suppressing your emotions, but you're remaining steady in spite of everything going on because you are regulated and you're not overfunctioning by feeling that you are in control of all of these things. You become the emotional thermostat instead of the emotional sponge. So, regardless of what's going on, you remain steady and steadfast. And this is what we practice inside expansion season. It's not performative self-care, it's actual identity expansion. Because any growth that you want to experience in your life, achieving the life, the success, the joy, the fulfillment, it's going to involve shifting your identity. And this is what we practice inside expansion season. It's not performative self-care, but it's actual identity expansion. If you make one shift this week, I invite you to let it be this. Say to yourself, I no longer lead from depletion. I lead from devotion to myself, my vision, and the life I want to build. Because when you shift into that identity, your strategy becomes clearer, your execution becomes cleaner, your boundaries become firmer, your leadership becomes more magnetic, and your success becomes inevitable as a result. This can be the foundation of your 2026. Now, if this conversation is landing for you, if you hear your own evolution inside my words, and if you feel that pull toward a new way of leading and living, expansion season is where we build this. It's a 12-week identity recalibration for high-capacity women ready to move from pressure into power. Inside, you don't just learn strategy, you become the woman who can hold the strategy. You can join the wait list so that you're the first to be invited in. You'll see all of the details in the show notes. And really, when you think about it, your next level begins with who you decide to be right now. And you may not realize it. You're doing this all the time, often subconsciously. But when you are being present to what you really, really want and walking alongside of others doing the same, there's just something so powerful that happens because you become more intentional. And as a result, start to see the shifts that you've been wanting to see for so long. Recalibration is the moment you realize you've been building from an outdated internal operating system. And you're a very capable person and you've got so many things together. And at the same time, you look back and realize that you haven't paused long enough to feel what your next level actually needs from you. You're just kind of going on autopilot. And when you finally pause, you notice that the person you've become has different requirements from the person who built everything you currently have. Recalibration is not self-improvement. And it's not about like optimizing, hustling, or performing a new version of yourself. What it is, is it's the quiet realignment of your inner architecture so that the life you want and the business you're ready for can meet you where you actually are. It truly is, as I mentioned last week, it's the work behind the work, the internal grounding that makes external results sustainable. It's where clarity replaces all the chaos that can come up in your day-to-day. And instead of just being disciplined, you truly are devoted to the vision without pressure leading the show. Most high achievers don't fail because they choose the wrong strategy. They fail because they try to execute a right strategy from a dysregulated identity. Recalibration rebuilds your internal foundation so your next season can hold its own weight. And inside of expansion season, that's what we practice this identity recalibration in real time. You'll learn how to shift your emotional baseline, stabilize your energy, make decisions from power instead of urgency, and build momentum without betraying your body or your boundaries. And there's a lot more to the experience as well, but this is the foundation. And here is the part that most people don't realize until they're moving. Recalibration isn't about slowing down. When your identity reorganizes, your results do, your relationships, your business, your entire ecosystem responds to the steadiness that you begin embodying. And this is the true expansion. It's not in the doing, it's truly in the becoming. If your body is telling you it's time for a different way of leading, a different way of succeeding, a different way of holding your life, trust that. Your next level isn't waiting for you to do more. It's waiting for you to become the person who no longer abandons themselves to create it. If you're feeling the pull, I invite you to join the wait list for expansion season in the show notes. You'll know if it's for you. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your week, and I'll see you on the next episode.