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 End-of-Year Pause: Why Slowing Down Is a Wealth Strategy | EP 555
🔗 Mentioned on this Episode: Show Notes 👈
As the year winds down, there’s a quieter invitation available to you. One that has nothing to do with pushing, finishing, or proving. In this episode, I’m sharing why slowing down at the end of the year is not a loss of momentum, but a powerful wealth strategy.
I reflect on my travels and what they reveal about leadership energy, guilt-free rest, and the kind of softness that actually strengthens your next level. This is a conversation for high-achieving women who understand that expansion is not created through intensity alone.
If you’re feeling the pull to pause, recalibrate, and enter your next season from a grounded place, this episode will meet you exactly where you are.
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There's a point at the end of the year where momentum and exhaustion start to sound the same in your body. You're still producing and leading, you're still showing up, and yet something quieter is asking for your attention. This is not about stopping or stepping back. It's about recognizing when your leadership is ready to be replenished rather than pushed. And when you learn how to pause without losing ground, you build a kind of wealth that compounds long after the calendar turns. Hi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sheila Botelho, and I believe true success is built from the inside out. Today I want to talk about slowing down. I want to talk about slowing down as something that's different than this escape kind of feeling. And not the kind that is related to some kind of reward system because you don't need to earn slowing down. I really want to talk about slowing down as a strategy. I'm recording this as I get ready for my time in California with my loves. And even getting ready for it puts me into this essence. It's like a different kind of vibe I'm feeling in myself because there is something so different about that environment that always brings me back to myself. The pace, of course, when you're on vacation or holiday time, the pace is different. And the conversations are spacious. And there's an ease to how people move through their days that reminds me of who I am when I'm not performing productivity. And so even as I'm preparing to go, and there's a lot of things to accomplish, and there were some last-minute things that I had to address in my personal life, just like logistical things that kind of came out of the blue. And sometimes that happens, as I mentioned in the last episode. And yet I still have a lightness in my spirit as I'm preparing to go because I know what it feels like to be in that vacation spacious time off time. And I find that also every time I return from a trip like that, I notice how clearly I can see my life and my business and my leadership. It's really, really grounded. And I'm feeling that now because I've experienced it before. So it's kind of fun to have that vibe before I leave. What becomes obvious to me is that the women who build long-term wealth and influence are not the ones who are staying in intensity year-round. They truly know how to rest without guilt. They know how to step out of urgency without losing the momentum they've been building. They just trust themselves enough to pause. High-achieving women often think that rest needs justification, though. It's something that's somewhere deep in our DNA because of what's been modeled for us over the years in the business space, in the corporate space. And it's like we need to follow everything through to completion and everything has to run efficiently and everything has to fit inside a system. And I love my systems. I love efficiency. And I love it because it does give me spaciousness. So there is a place for that. However, even as we are nearing the end of the year, we get this feeling like we need to tie everything up so neatly with a bow before we can actually relax and turn the calendar over into a new year. And I'm here to remind you, or tell you perhaps for the first time, if you've never thought about this, you don't need to do that. You get to rest right now. You get to turn things off right now. You get to choose because everything will be there for you when you pick it back up, once you return. Because I found in my experience, the leaders who last are the ones who allow restoration to happen before they feel depleted. This is self-care for business. You don't need to earn rest. Rest is the fuel to what you're building. And rest is actually what regenerates your leadership energy. Certainly, it's not sleep alone or time off alone and not just doing nothing. It is internal permission to soften. Now, softness is often misunderstood at this level. Softness is not passive or disengaged. And it's not the slow pace that makes people get a little afraid about what could happen next or how they're perceived. You know, the optics of slowing down can mean many things when you're in business and when you're in the spotlight or public eye. But when you think about it, softness is responsive and perceptive. And it allows you to feel when it's time to move and when it's time to listen and slow down. And as I'm getting ready to slow down during this end of your window, as many people are, and I feel like it's a rush right up to the end. Although this year I'm feeling less of an anxious rush and more of a deep knowing that, of course, everything's great when I just allow things to move and when I allow myself to just slowly and slightly put on the brakes to relax. And it helps me look into the next version of business I'm creating to take shape without as much pushing. I'm already finding my ideas are landing more gently and decisions that I'm making feel clean. Have you ever had that experience where your body actually feels like it's cooperating with you instead of keeping up with you? Because my mind moves really fast, my body can be slower to respond. But right now, things are sinking much more beautifully than usual. Because that's how you know you're doing it right. Right in the way of not pushing yourself constantly. Because your next level does not require intensity. It requires your full presence. It requires work, of course. It requires commitment and intentionality. But the energy that you are operating in is so important because it's something that colors everything that you touch and all the connections that you make along the way. The pause at the end of the year is not about reflection alone. Because I know we spend a lot of time talking about the end of the year, like, oh, let's reflect over 2025 and let's set our intentions for 2026. And I love that. I think it's great. But it's so much more than that. It's about recalibration, it's about letting your body settle into the identity you've been building all year. Your entire system, just letting it sink in. Because when you do that, you're not starting the new year scrambling. You're actually starting really rooted. And this is why I see slowing down as a wealth strategy. You're smart enough to know, you've been around enough to know that wealth is not only financial, it truly is energetic and relational. It's physiological, and it's the capacity to hold more responsibility without sacrificing yourself in the process. And the women who master this certainly aren't announcing it. They don't even need to defend or explain it. You just simply see them moving differently. You kind of watch them and think, oh, I'll have what she's having. And as we move toward expansion season, this pause really matters. It's the bridge between who you've been and who you're becoming and where your vision settles into your body before it becomes action. First, of course, we do reflect and then we settle. And then we create space. And inside of that space, you're gonna find the most beautiful downloads come to you, the most interesting ways to cull and prune the list of things that you do, perhaps even the types of offerings that you have. If you have a product-based business, maybe you're looking at not growing a certain product line as quickly, but rooting into the depth in your marketing and creating even more loyalty with your current clients before you scale larger. Alignment truly happens when you allow yourself to slow down enough to hear yourself again. And when you step away from what your organization is screaming that is the next priority or what your team is grappling with in terms of next steps, you need to have perspective. And sometimes that perspective lands when you step away from it. And this is exactly why this moment of the year is such a powerful entry point into expansion season. The program that I open for 12 weeks starting in the new year, mid-January. And this allows us to enter it not like we're sprinting or as a push, but really as a grounded beginning. Because for too long, I found that January was just that. It was like, okay, let's get ready for the next big push over the next three months. And then it was quarter after quarter after quarter of push, grow, push, grow. And so many clients of mine were just finding that they couldn't keep up. And they started to find the things they were offering feeling a little bit hollow because they were just growing and expanding for growth's sake. But when you look at your expansion from a place of what the whole year is looking like and also how you want to feel and what you want your days to look like, it's so different. It is rooted. Expansion season is built for women who understand that sustainable growth really starts on the inside of you and that leadership matures through regulating yourself, through getting really, really clear with where you're headed and with building your self-trust. That wealth expands when your internal world is supported. If you feel this conversation landing in your body, you're already in the energy of it. And so I invite you to check out the show notes. All the details are waiting for you there in terms of what expansion season is, where we go over 12 weeks, what you can expect to experience, and if it's for you. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate the way you come, you listen to these episodes, and I hope it has a beautiful impact on the way that you lead, the way you reflect, and the way you choose to grow. Have a beautiful rest of your week, and I'll see you on the next episode.