What Commitment Actually Builds | EP 607

You made the decision. Weeks later, nothing on the outside has changed, and it's easy to start wondering if it actually took. In this episode, Sheila walks through what's actually happening in that in-between stretch, and why patience might be the most underrated skill in your entire toolkit.

Full show notes, transcript, and chapters at sheilabotelho.com/607

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Transcript

When The World Still Looks Same

Sheila 0:01

You made the decision. You felt the shift. Then Tuesday looked exactly like the Tuesday before it. And part of you wondered if you imagined the whole thing. I've lived that gap more times than I can count in my life and in client rooms. And there is a specific reason nothing changes right away. Today I'll show you exactly what to watch for instead of waiting on proof that isn't ready yet. 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 what happens after you recommit to something. Last episode, I talked about the reset, the moment you decide again. And I got messages after that, quite a few actually, all circling the same question in slightly different words. Okay, I decided now what? What actually changes? One message even said, I feel like I did the hard part already. So why does everything still look exactly the same? That question deserves more than a quick answer. So I want to spend meaningful time on it today. I'm not going to rush this one. I want to actually sit in it with you because I think the gap between deciding and seeing it show up is where most people give up on themselves without ever consciously deciding to. And I don't want that to be you.

The Laptop Pattern That Returned

Sheila 1:36

I want to take you back to about eight or nine years ago, to something that happened to me more than once, which is truly the part worth talking about. Not the one time it happened. It was the fact that it kept happening. So picture this dinner's done, dishes are more or less handled. And I would sit down at the kitchen table, laptop open, tell myself it would just be 20 minutes. Answer a few emails, close a loop, just get ahead of tomorrow a little. And that was always the story I told myself. Just a quick 20 minutes. Then I'd look up and it would be 10 o'clock, an entire evening gone. Gone in a way that tended to surprise me, even though it truly shouldn't have surprised me any more by that time, because it had been three or four times that it had happened already. An evening I told myself I was reclaiming, spent in the exact pattern. I thought I'd already changed. And here's what used to frustrate me the most about it. And this is very important to note, because I think this is the part people can relate to the most. I wasn't unaware of the pattern. This wasn't some blind spot I hadn't noticed yet. I'd actually already named it. I'd had the conversation with myself more than once. I'd already decided, out loud, even with myself, sometimes to my husband, that evenings were for closing the laptop and being present with my life. And in the moment I made that decision, I believed it completely. It was permanent. I'd solved it. We were done. And I remember the feeling of certainty attached to it. Then a few weeks later, there I'd be again, same table, same laptop, looking up at 10 o'clock, sometimes 11 o'clock, wondering how I'd got here. A little annoyed with myself. Because hadn't I already decided this? That happened to me on more than one occasion in that season of my life, not just once or twice. And I've come to understand it as one of the most honest illustrations I have of how deeply rooted behavior actually changes. It isn't a straight line, no matter how much we wish it were. You can make a genuine decision, mean it completely, feel the conviction in your whole body, and still find yourself unconsciously back in the old groove weeks later or even days later. Not because the decision wasn't real. We really made that decision. But the reason is that the groove was carved a long time before that decision ever showed up.

Commitment As The Starting Signal

Sheila 4:30

I've worked with a specific founder who described this version of the same pattern in her business. And when she told me about it, I remember thinking, that's it. That's the exact shape of the thing. I've been trying to put language around. She'd made the call to raise her prices in this case. Finally, after two years of knowing that she needed to, she was dealing with an exclusive market and her pricing needed to reflect that. So two years. She'd talked about it in our sessions more than once, always circling it, always almost ready. And then one day, she was ready. She told me the three weeks after were the strangest part of the whole thing, though. Weeks where everything on paper still looked exactly like it had before. Same clients, same rates on old invoices, because those contracts were already signed. So she didn't change those prices. She had the same conversations that she'd been avoiding, still sitting there, waiting for her, though, patient as ever, completely unbothered by the fact that she'd finally made her decision. And she said something to me in one of those sessions that I've thought about since, more than I probably should admit, actually, because I can relate to it so much. She said, I thought commitment was the finish line, but turns out it is the starting signal. And that is the whole thing. And that's basically the entire episode in one sentence. And I could stop here, except I don't think one sentence is enough to actually change how you experience the waiting. We need to spend a little time here. Commitment doesn't build the outcome by itself. Commitment starts the building, and then the building has to actually happen in a hundred small moments that don't look like much from the outside. Moments that nobody's applauding you for, moments you might not even notice yourself. This is simply proof you're human, by the way. I want to say that because I think a lot of people start to believe they're broken or undisciplined when this happens to them. And they're comparing themselves against this excellence they believe exists, this perfection that doesn't exist, and thinking other people are not having this challenge. But unlearning deeply

How Good Routines Erode Quietly

Sheila 6:55

rooted behavior takes more than one good decision. It takes a decision followed by a hundred smaller decisions, repeated well past the point where it stops feeling remarkable, past the point where anyone would notice you were still doing this work. And it shows up everywhere. Once I started paying attention to this pattern in myself, I noticed it all over the place. Not only with laptops and pricing decisions, but everywhere. And it's comical when I think about it, because once you start looking, you see it everywhere too. Think about the way we eat. How many times have you decided with total utter conviction, standing in your kitchen on a Sunday, feeling very inspired, that you're changing how you cook or how you nourish yourself? And a few weeks later, you're back in the same rhythm you started with without ever consciously choosing to go back. Nobody sits down one Wednesday and decides, actually, I'm undoing that health decision now. Nobody does that. It just happens gradually, one convenient exception at a time. Or a new exercise habit works the same way. You feel it in your body after the third or fourth session, that little spark of, oh, this is actually working. The shift is undeniable. And you tell yourself, this is the one that finally sticks. This time is different. And then life gets full for a week, one week. That's all it takes sometimes. And the habit stops being a habit, and you don't even notice the exact day it happened. There's no dramatic moment where you quit, it just sort of stops. And you look up a month later and realize you haven't been doing the thing you promised yourself you'd be doing. And I've experienced this many times in my life, most recently, after a recent ependectomy surgery where I needed to slow down, I needed to do all of that, and it's great and I'm feeling wonderful. But getting back at it was more challenging this time around. And now I'm back at it. So it's good. But it wasn't like we go through life without these blips happening. Even sleep does this. And I think this one hits almost everyone listening because you can commit to a wind-down routine, an earlier bedtime, um, the phone charging in another room instead of next to the bed or turned off completely, like mine is. It works for a stretch, sometimes an impressively long stretch. And then one late night becomes two, becomes the new normal, and you're right back where you started without ever deciding to go back. Nobody decided to abandon the routine. It just eroded one exception at a time, until the exception was the routine. And this shows up in relationships as well, which I think might be the one that stings the most. For instance, you decide you're going to build a rhythm with the people who matter to you, a standing call with your sister, dinner with your closest friends every other month. Something you actually put in the calendar because you meant it. It holds for a season and sometimes a good long season, and then life gets full. I'm thinking of a few people in my head right now who, once I'm finished recording this, I'm going to be messaging them right away. Because that's happening to me too. Because months and pass and then the rhythm dissolves without you noticing exactly when. And one day you realize it's been five months since you actually sat down with someone you love. You're building against a current that was already moving before you decided to change a direction. And redirecting a current like that takes more than a single good decision and a good mood, no matter how good that decision felt in the moment that you made it.

The Trap Of Looking For Proof

Sheila 10:49

And here is what I think actually derails most people. And I love to talk about conviction and the importance of it, but it's not that you have a lack of that. It's very important that you understand that I don't think the problem is that people don't care enough or they don't want it badly enough because often we've been told this. Oh, if you're not doing it, you just don't care enough. I don't think that's true. It's what happens to that conviction over time. We have these powerful experiences, like a moment of total clarity, the kind that feels almost physical, visceral, a decision that feels different. It feels deeper, more certain than the ones before it. And you can usually feel the difference in your body, honestly. And in that moment, we have a genuine motivation, the emotional fuel to make a genuinely big change. It feels unstoppable in that exact moment. But that emotional peak doesn't last. And it's not designed to. Nothing about human emotion is built to stay at the top of the mountain forever. What happens next is we get impatient and we look for the evidence too early, checking for proof, the way you'd check a pot of water you were impatiently waiting to boil. And we expect the outcome to show up on a timeline that matches how big the decision felt instead of the timeline that change actually takes, which almost never matches how dramatic the decision was. And yes, some things can change on a dime and for the long haul. And more often than not, some time is involved for that shift to happen. And when the evidence then doesn't show up fast enough, we lose the emotion before the structure underneath it has had time to form. We give up right as the foundation is starting to set. And this is why patience is such an underrated skill. Genuinely underrated. Nobody puts it on a vision board. I want to be more patient. Nobody feels inspired talking about it at a dinner party. It doesn't photograph well, it's not very Instagrammable, but it might be the single most valuable capacity that you can build because it's the thing standing between you and giving up three weeks before something would have actually clicked into place. Three weeks. That's often all it is.

Taking The Long View With Legacy

Sheila 13:24

This is directly tied to something that I teach inside the vision map called the legacy framework. I mean, just that word. Think about legacy. What happens to your body when you hear the word legacy? And where does your mind go? I want to talk about it and walk you through it properly because I think it's one of the more useful mental shifts that I've come across in years of doing this work. And the idea is actually very simple to say and genuinely hard to practice. When you take the long view on a goal, the daily moves get easier to sustain, even on the days that you don't see any visible impact from them. Most people do the opposite without realizing it, though, myself included. That's why I created the vision map and the legacy framework. I needed it for me. It has happened, oh my gosh, more times than I'd like to admit. So people will ask, and I will ask, did this work today? And when the honest answer is, I can't tell yet, we interpret that uncertainty as failure, which is such an understandable but costly mistake. The legacy framework asks a different question entirely. It asks you to zoom out far enough that a single flat day stops meaning anything at all because you're measuring against a year or longer, not an afternoon. A single evening back at the laptop stops being proof of failure and starts being one data point inside a much longer arc. One that you're allowed to trust, even when you can't see the whole shape of it yet. And I think about it the same way I think about compound interest in investing, which is a concept most people in this room already understand instinctively when it comes to money. Even if you've never sat down and done the math yourself, of course. Nobody checks their investment account daily and panics because the balance looks the same as yesterday. I mean, maybe newbies to the market might feel that way, but you're smarter than that. Like you've been around, you've seen what actually happens in the markets, and you know somewhere in your bones that the growth is happening underneath the surface. Because think about it. The compound interest is attached to multiple businesses or one business that is out there growing, serving, selling, designing, manufacturing. So that takes time, and then people are buying it, and then it takes time for everything to compound, right? So if you're investing in it, of course it's going to take time. The business itself takes time. Think about your own business. Stuff doesn't happen completely overnight. So there's so much happening underneath the surface, and it's on a timeline measured in years, built from contributions that individually look far too small to matter on their own. Nobody gets rich off of a single deposit. The deposit that changes everything is usually indistinguishable from all the ones before it, right up until the end. And then there's no way to know in advance which deposit that's going to be. So behavior works exactly the same way. And I think this is the piece that it's very easy to skip past too quickly. The daily moves toward a goal are deposits. Most of them will look and feel exactly as unremarkable as the day before. Genuinely boring, really, on some days. The legacy framework is simply the discipline of making the deposit anyway, on the days it feels pointless, on the days where nothing about it feels meaningful, because you've already decided ahead of time that you're measuring in years and not in afternoons. That decision alone removes the need to feel something different every single day in order to keep going, which honestly is such a relief

Small Deposits And Compound Growth

Sheila 17:33

once it clicks. Now, there's a question I ask myself whenever I feel impatience or boredom start to pull me away from something I'm committed to. The quality of our life, I really believe, is determined by the questions that we ask ourselves and then we go deeper on. And I use this one often enough that it's become almost automatic at this point. So I'm going to offer it to you exactly as I ask it to myself. You can adjust it for what works for you. Six months or a year from now, how will I feel if the change I'm making right now has actually come to fruition? I like to actually sit with that one for a moment, picture it. I don't rush past it. I feel it. Like, what would I feel like in that moment? And then I ask it from the other direction as well. So, really the same question, but asked two different ways. Because this is the one that really moves me, the one that actually gets me moving some days. And it's this how would I feel right now if I had never done the things I committed to six months or a year ago, and instead was sitting here today wondering what would have happened if I'd actually moved on them. Like as I'm saying it, I can feel that one in my chest a little. Even just describing it to you. That second question, the way it's asked,

The Six Month Question That Resets You

Sheila 18:56

is the one that keeps me honest because I can always picture exactly how that regret would feel because I have regret. You have regret too, right? There's things, oh, if only I had done it this way. And we realize this is something in present time we actually have control over. I can feel it in vivid detail. It's heavier every single time than any amount of patience the waiting requires. So it's a powerful question to ask yourself. I have to tell on myself here because this one still makes me laugh. And I think a lot of you are going to recognize yourselves in it as you're listening. So for years, I had this beautiful vision of what the day before a trip would look like: a chill day, curled up with a good book, a cup of tea, a long, unhurried bath, lights out early, drifting into a peaceful sleep, waking up rested from a dreamy, easy ride to the airport. And I could see this vision so clearly every single time right before a trip. Like, oh yeah,

Packing Early And Unsexy Patience

Sheila 19:59

easy. It's gonna be great. But that's not even close to what actually happened. For years, what actually happened was me packing right up until bedtime, going to sleep later than usual, and then sleeping fitfully all night, checking the clock over and over, half convinced I'd forgotten something essential, uh, running through mental lists at two in the morning. Definitely not the vibe I was going for on a travel day, and definitely not the version of myself. I kept promising myself that I'd be this time. And this brings everything together based on what we've been talking about. I didn't fix this the first time I decided to. Not even close. I'm sure I decided more than once, sometimes out loud to myself, while I was frantically folding something into a suitcase, that this trip would be different, that I'd finally pack early and have my chill evening. And then travel week would come around again and there I'd be packing at 11 at night, wide awake at two in the morning, double checking my passport was actually in my bag for the third time. It took me years, genuinely, of that exact pattern repeating before something shifted enough to actually stick. And that shift came from making the same decision again and again, trip after trip, long after it stopped feeling like it was working, long after it would have been reasonable to just accept that this was who I was when it came to packing. Now I put music on, I start packing earlier in the week for a trip, a little each day, almost ceremonially at this point. And it's completely changed what the days before travel feel like, genuinely transformed them. And that is patience in its most unglamorous form. A few extra minutes of packing, spread out and repeat it often enough, trip after trip after trip, that the person who used to pack at midnight simply isn't who shows up for a trip anymore. I think about this most clearly, actually, the patients, through something that happened to me personally

Pregnancy Adoption And Invisible Building

Sheila 22:06

as well. And that is something a little deeper than packing lists. When I first found out I was pregnant with my first son. So the news itself obviously was completely intellectual because I knew it factually, as emotionally excited as I was, I'd seen the test, but I didn't feel any different. You know, not at all. Not at first. That disconnect was strange in a way I wasn't prepared for. The first thing that did actually end up changing was how ravenously hungry I was, which was not exactly the transformation I was expecting, truly. And I remember laughing about that with my husband. And eventually the physical changes became obvious to me and everyone around me. But in that early stretch from my first pregnancy, there was this lingering question sitting underneath everything, persistent and unresolved. Like, is this actually happening? I feel the exact same as I did before. And the whole time I was asking that question, an enormous amount was happening inside, cell by cell, all of it happening, whether or not I could see it yet, I wasn't doing anything about it. And I wasn't feeling any different when I looked in the mirror. And for those friends of mine who chose to become parents a different way or were forced to become parents a different way, like a dear friend of mine went through something similar while waiting through her adoption process. And her version of this has stayed with me for years because it's not too far from what I was experiencing. She knew what was happening. The decision was made, the process was moving forward, she'd paid the money. And somewhere in an office she couldn't see into, there was, you know, life looking exactly the same day to day while she waited. She needed the whole process to come together before anything would visibly change in her actual life. And the day she and her husband signed the papers, they became parents legally, completely, in every way that mattered. But their child was not yet home with them. And that gap between the decision that made them parents and the moment their child actually walked through the door, or was carried through the door in this case, it's one of the most honest pictures I know of what waiting through a genuine commitment actually feels like. She told me that gap played with her head more than almost anything else in the entire process, more than the years of waiting that came before it, oddly enough. But the steps she and her husband had already taken, the signature on the page, were meaningful progress, complete and irreversible, whether or not it looked like anything yet in three dimensions. So if you've made a decision recently in your business, in your health, your relationships, any part of your life. And you're standing in that strange middle where nothing looks different yet. I want you to hear this clearly, because I mean every word of it. You're exactly where building happens. Something's moving. Even on the days it looks like nothing is, even on the days it feels a little foolish to keep going. Practice patience like it is a skill, because it is one. And like any skill, it gets easier the more you use it. Ask yourself the six-month question in both directions. Whenever impatience starts pulling you off course, whenever the packing anxiety or the 10 o'clock laptop moment starts creeping back in. Now I

Keep Going Deeper And Closing

Sheila 25:42

write more about exactly this, the parts of the process that don't photograph well but matter the most every week in Sheila's notes. And if this landed for you, that's the place to keep going deeper with me. Thank you for listening. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your week, and I will see you on the next episode.