What Is Your Time Actually Worth? How To Choose Which Rooms to Enter | EP 599

If you've hit a point where the rooms you're entering are starting to cost more than they're returning, this one's worth your time. Sheila names the pattern she's watching across founders at the top of their work and asks the one question that recalibrates how you make every decision from here. Full show notes, transcript, and chapters at sheilabotelho.com/599

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Transcript

When The Old Map Stops Working

Sheila 0:01

You've invested in the rooms, followed the model, and shown up the way the industry said you should. And somewhere in that process, you started to sense that the map wasn't drawn for you. Today, I want to share the pattern that I'm watching right now across the best people I know. We're talking about time, trust, and what it actually costs to keep following someone else's playbook. In it, I share a question worth sitting with. Hi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sheila Botelho, and I believe true success is built from the inside out. I want to talk about something that I've been sitting with since a walk I took earlier this week. Of course, all the best stuff happens on my walks. So a friend of mine is in a new program. She's learning some technical content, some well-taught, really generous curriculum. And it's fabulous that she's doing it. She's really grateful for it. And she told me that. And she said she's been relying heavily on the replay feature, which I think is fantastic to go back on because it's highly technical in nature what she's learning. Because let's face it, life doesn't pause and these live events don't pause. Now she runs several businesses and also enjoys having freedom and flexibility in her life. The style of learning that she thrives in is one where she can stop, come back to certain parts, process it in pieces. And the replay lets her do that. Perhaps you can relate. But the brief conversation we had about it has stayed with me because what she described is more than a learning format preference. It actually names something that I've been watching build for a few years now. And I wanted to share it here.

The Event Room Economy Corrects

Sheila 2:05

And that is the model that the online business world has been selling for the last several years. Get on the plane, get in every room, attend every live intensive, be on every stage, is starting to correct. The pendulum swung really, really hard during COVID because freedom was taken. And then when it came back, people went all in on access, proximity, presence, which is so good because we are creatures that need to connect with others. And that made so much sense. I mean, this was a real response to real deprivation if we all think back to 2020. It's quite amazing when you consider it. Like, did that really happen? But now we're in a different moment. And the founders I most respect are asking different questions than they were asking three years ago. And that's what I want to talk about today. So there are several other conversations that I've had recently that I also keep returning to, the substance of which I believe is important to highlight. One was with a founder who has invested heavily, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars in events, rooms, and stage opportunities over the last few years. And they got real results and are so grateful that they went all in for the timing that they found themselves in. And they made those investments in a season of their life where they really fit when they were building, expanding, reaching. And the access was worth what it cost. In fact, she'd do it all over again. But then she was ready to get grounded on her home turf again and tend to some events happening in her personal life while also pouring into her client base. It had really skyrocketed during this time, which was the whole point of her doing this event rollout. And what she told me is that she can see now, looking back, that the model she was following had a season. It wasn't her forever strategy. It was the right strategy until it wasn't. And the transition point came before she had language for it. And the other conversation I've been thinking about is with another founder who said something similar, but it was from a different angle. She'd followed a particular model of investing her time in the infrastructure that it required, and she built her team around it. And then she found herself in a period of burnout that didn't match the results that she was producing. On paper, things were working, but in her body, something had been running too hot for too long. And what both of them were describing is the correction that I'm watching now at scale. The events sphere has been compounding for three years. More events, bigger events, more expensive events, more pressure to be in the room, more urgency around proximity to the right people. And that pressure created a culture where opting out felt like falling behind. And that culture is shifting. The founders at the top of their work are now getting more discerning about what rooms they're stepping into, the timing of this as well. And I'm watching them move from how do I get into more rooms to which rooms are actually worth my time? That's a fundamentally different question. It's a question that comes from a more grounded place. And it's a question with a longer time horizon built into it. Because when I see a whole industry cohort asking a different question, I pay attention. Because the questions people ask at scale are a leading indicator of where the real work is about to be. So here's what I think the real work is about right now. It's the return to our own knowing, not pulling back from growth. Of course, growth is the constant, but I'm talking about growth that is chosen from the inside rather than prescribed from the outside. Growth that fits the season that you're actually in rather than the season the marketing said you should want to be in. It's a really clear distinction there.

How Marketing Creates The Gap

Sheila 6:47

And I want to say something direct about how a lot of marketing works because I think naming it is more useful than leaving it unnamed. We often don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about really how we're being marketed to because we're really busy running our businesses and we need strategies to move things forward, right? So the key to understanding this is every single one of us, every business has a narrative attached to that business. And so what you will find in marketing is people push a narrative that creates a gap in someone's mind. They say, Here's what you're missing. Here's the distance between where you are and where you could be. So the people doing it are not always manufacturing something that doesn't exist, of course. Sometimes they're naming something that their audience is genuinely they've been unable to put language to. And the entire premise is around truly all kinds of businesses, right? This this premise of business is that we serve to fill a gap that consumers and clients are needing filled. It's a beautiful symbiotic exchange of value for money. And with that said, here's what I want you to hold on to. Just because someone named a gap doesn't mean their solution is your solution. Just because the gap is real doesn't mean you were missing something before it was named. Okay. Just think about that for a moment. We always have a choice, and we have to really be discerning about what's truly happening in our own life and business. So I'm gonna name a gap right now.

The Real Question About Time

Sheila 8:58

And this is one that I'm seeing growing all around me. And then I'm gonna suggest to you what an option is for what you could do with that. And the question is what is your time actually worth? I'm not talking about the productivity framework timing sense. I've heard that conversation a lot. I'm sure you have too. That's not where I'm going. What I mean is in the most literal, most senior founder sense of the question, at this stage of your business and of your life, your time is your most irreplaceable currency. Your judgment, your attention, your creative capacity, your energy in a room. You can hire a lot of things. You cannot hire more of yourself, and you cannot manufacture more hours. So, where is your time actually going right now? And my follow-up question for you is where it's going to a decision you made or a structure you inherited from someone else's model, like is that something for you? Is it going to something you've inherited or someone else's model? Because what I keep seeing is people build their operations, their offers, their timelines, their schedules, and their sales structures around frameworks that they learned from someone else very often. And then years into it, they're surprised that the thing doesn't feel like theirs. And the answer isn't always that the framework was bad, actually. Sometimes it was excellent. The issue is that they never stopped to ask whether it was designed for their season, their capacity, their actual goals. The women I'm in conversation with right now, founders in their successful businesses, are at a stage where following a generic playbook is one of the most expensive things that they can do. Because at this level, the cost of the wrong decision is not just money. It's time, it's momentum. It's the creative capital that doesn't regenerate as fast as it used to. Because your time is spread in so many different directions. The question, what's your time actually worth, is the question that reorients it. Right? It reorients everything. And I want you to sit with it this week. Sit with it as a strategic question. Where is your time going? And did you choose that?

Offers Built For Your Season

Sheila 11:48

When I designed Breakthrough Day and Expansion Season and the Season Circle, I was thinking about exactly this problem. The high-achieving founder who has outgrown generic frameworks, the leader who knows that the information is not the gap. They can get so much information. If anything, they can get too much information these days. And deciphering it becomes the challenge. The person who needs a room that matches where they're actually playing. That's the ticket. Breakthrough day is for the founder who needs to make one focused, clear decision and doesn't have three months to get there. It's one day. That is the breakthrough day. And then expansion season is for the founder who's building over a season or a quarter with proximity and structure. It's the program someone completes before or alongside entering one of my very high-level groups, which is Season Circle. And it's designed to help you find the one aligned offer for this season, do the honest profit and energy math and build from that clarity. And then, of course, Season Circle is my high-level group for the founder who wants a year, six months, depending, with other people operating at their level. It's real conversation, it's judgment, it's relationship. It's the kind of container that compounds over time because the people inside it are bringing their real lived experiences in their business and their real questions, not their polished ones. And what I want to name about all three of them is this I built them to be future-proof. The work I add to the resource library and the live portions evolves as the business climate evolves. So someone entering it isn't accessing a static framework that's already aging because everything moves so quickly now. They're in fact entering a body of work that compounds over time. And underneath every container is the same through line. I'm not handing you another playbook. I'm not asking you to follow my map. What I'm asking you to do is answer questions that bring you back to your own knowing. And from that place, we build the map that is yours. That's the whole thing. That is the work. The founder who knows what their time is worth builds with discernment. She chooses rooms that fit her season. And she doesn't follow a model because it worked for someone else. She may use that as a reference, but then she builds her own. And that is what's available to you. And whether you ever work with me directly or not, I want you to know that the question is already the beginning of the work. So please sit with that question for yourself. And here's what I want to leave you with.

The Third Way And Closing Questions

Sheila 15:14

Again, that question, what's your time actually worth? Rather than that productivity calculation, I'm referring to a values question, a strategic question. As the question you bring to every decision about where your attention goes next. And the follow-up, the one I want you to take into the rest of your week, is are you building the business you actually want, or are you following someone else's map? If the map is working and it feels like yours, go double down. That's the answer for a lot of people. And if something feels off, if the model you're inside doesn't quite fit anymore, if you're producing results that look good from the outside, but something in your body knows that they're costing more than they should, there's a third way. And the third way is your way, built from your knowing, designed for your season of business and of life, resourced by your judgment rather than borrowed confidence from a framework that was always someone else's. That's what I help people find. And I believe in it completely. So thank you so much for spending this time with me. If you want to look at any of the details that I was sharing earlier, you can see everything in the show notes or the description below. And I hope that you will sit with those questions because you truly deserve to feel good while you are building this beautiful business of yours into its next iteration. Have a really beautiful week, and I will be back with you soon.