The Gap Between Where You Are and Where You Want to Go Isn't a Strategy Problem | EP 601

You know what your next move is. You've known for a while. So why does it feel like you're still searching for the thing that's going to make it finally click? This episode is about the real work underneath the gap, and why focus and depth are the two things that will actually close it. Full show notes, transcript, and chapters at sheilabotelho.com/601.

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The Clear Move You Still Question

Sheila 0:01

You're clear on your next move. You've been clear. And still, you find yourself looking around, wondering if you've missed something. Whether the landscape has shifted enough that what you know is no longer enough. That feeling is costing you more than you realize. In this episode, I'm sharing what I see underneath the gap between where experienced founders are and where they want to go, and why closing it has very little to do with finding a better strategy. Hi, welcome to the show. I'm Sheila Botelho, and I believe true success is built from the inside out. I want to start today with something I've been hearing a lot lately. And I want to say a lot because I mean in almost every conversation I'm having with founders and business owners right now. The pattern is the same, even though the businesses are different, the industries are different, the stage is different. Here's how it goes someone gets clear, and I don't mean surface level clear. I mean they do the work. They look honestly at what they've built, they look at their capacity, their numbers, their energy, and they land on something. They know what the next move is, they feel it. It makes sense and it's aligned with where they're going. And you know, they feel for a moment genuinely settled. And then a few days pass, maybe a week, and something shifts. They hear a conversation, or they read something, or they're listening to a podcast, and they start to wonder, did I miss something? Is there a piece that I haven't considered? What if the landscape has shifted enough that the move I was so clear about is actually the wrong one? And they're back to scanning. I want us to sit with that for a minute because I think it's one of the most important things happening in the founder space right now. And I don't think it's getting named really clearly because we're in the midst of it. And what I'm describing is it's not that we're not clear about what the direction is, right? It's not confusion, but there's a sense of hypervigilance happening. And there is a difference between those two

Confusion Versus Founder Hypervigilance

Sheila 2:25

things. Confusion is when you genuinely don't know. And hypervigilance is when you know, and the fear of being wrong keeps pulling you back to check again. It feels responsible. It feels like it's very diligent of you, or staying informed, or being strategic about not moving too fast. But what I found it's actually doing, and I found this personally as well, is it's keeping you from the one thing that would genuinely move you forward, which is sustained focus on the thing you already know. Now let's explore why this is happening. Because I think the context matters here. And I want to be thoughtful about this because the last thing I want to do is add another layer of overwhelm to something that already feels heavy for many of us. The pace of change right now is unlike anything most of us have navigated in our personal or our professional lives, especially. And I've been in business long enough to have navigated many different shifts and have watched major technological transitions, economic contractions, entire industry models turn over. And each time there was a period of genuine recalibration, a moment where the old map stopped working and people had to figure out how to build new ones. And what's different about where we are right now is

Why The Noise Feels Unavoidable

Sheila 3:55

the volume of conversation happening in real time around the changes that are happening moment by moment. It's not just that things are shifting, it's that there are thousands of voices, many of them very smart and very credible, talking about what the shift means. And so staying informed has become a full-time job for all of us, layered on top of an already full-time business. And I've had conversations with people recently who are therapists, founders, consultants, people who run studios and practices. And one of the things coming up consistently is the sheer weight of trying to keep up. And this isn't like the old school, like when social media came on board and just chasing trends. This is that they genuinely care about being in the right conversation for their industry, these clients, because they don't want to make decisions that are going to be obsolete by the time they execute on them. Does this feel familiar to you? That is a legitimate concern. And clearly, I must say, burying our heads in the sand is a real risk. Choosing not to engage with what's changing is a decision that will cost us. So I'm not going to tell you just disconnect and trust your gut and trust the process, you know, and ignore the noise. That is not the answer. But here's what I am going to say. There is a difference between staying aware and outsourcing your focus to the information stream. One is strategic and the other is absolutely exhausting. The more founders I know have crossed from one into the other without fully realizing it happened, that list is growing. You only have so many hours in a day. You have a business to run, you have a team, clients, customers, or both, right? You have decisions to make that are requiring your full capacity of thinking. And then you also have a constant feed of long-form content, expert takes, and landscape analysis asking for your attention. Something's going to give. And what usually gives is the deep focused work that actually builds the business. And I want to name the real cost here because I think it's easy to dismiss the scanning as just a habit or a personality tendency

The Hidden Costs Of Scanning

Sheila 6:38

or something to manage around the edges. But I've watched it play out in businesses many times over. And the cost is significant. The most direct cost is depth. Businesses that stay surface level aren't usually the way because the person running them lacks ideas. Right? They're that way because the person running them never had the sustained focus to really go deeper, to really develop one thing, to build that expertise and take it to the next level, to build those relationships and the reputation that compounds over time. And depth is what separates the businesses that grow in a real lasting way from the ones that keep producing results that feel like they should add up to more. Depth is what makes you unrepeatable. It's what makes you be the person who has an offer or someone who has something that someone wants to come back to, who refers their colleagues to you, invests at the level where the conversation changes. You can't build depth while you're scanning. It requires the same resource, and that is you. That is your mind. That is your focus. And everything is competing for it right now. So every hour spent trying to figure out what you might be missing is an hour not spent going deeper into what you already have. The second cost is decision fatigue. That is one that has climbed, climbed, climbed, climbed on the focus of so many people in recent years. Decision fatigue. When you're constantly in recalibration mode, every decision takes more energy than it actually should because you're not making decisions from a settled place. You're making them from a place of monitoring. And that's a different mental load entirely. I see this show up in how long it takes founders to move on something that they've been clear about for months. They know what to do, they could do it, and they keep cycling through the decision because some part of them is waiting to feel certain enough. But that certainty isn't coming from getting more information. It was already there. The scanning is actually the thing getting in the way of accessing it. And the third cost, which is the one I think is the most underappreciated, is that it takes you out of your own knowing. Every time you go looking outside for confirmation of what you already know inside, you are practicing just a little bit the habit of not trusting yourself. And again, I'm not saying don't be aware of what's happening and don't, you know, do your research. What I'm saying is you know the work that is meant for you and what you are meant to be doing next. And this lack of self-trust or this habit of not trusting yourself, that compounds also. And over time, that practice makes it harder and harder to land in your own clarity and stay there. Because you've trained yourself to expect that something external is going to either validate it or disrupt it. For business owners who are building at a high level, that relationship with your own judgment is one of your most important assets. The ability to make a call, stay with it, execute it fully, and then be able to extrapolate later what happened and is it something to continue running with? That is what separates the business owners who scale from the ones who keep almost getting there. And here's something I want to bring in that

Stop Skipping The Season You’re In

Sheila 10:32

I believe is at the heart of this. And it's a piece I work on with almost every founder I sit with. Most people who are stuck in the gap, right? That gap between where they are and where they want to go, are stuck there because they're being honest with themselves about where they want to go, but they're not being honest about the season that they're actually in. And here's what I mean by this: you have a vision, you know what you're building toward, and that is something that is real, it matters, and it belongs in your thinking. But the season that you're in right now has its own specific constraints, its own specific capacity and conditions. And the move that belongs to this season is almost never the same as the move that belongs to the season that you're building toward. When founders skip over that honesty, when they try to make the moves that belong to a future season without the foundation that their current season requires, they stall. And then they wonder what's wrong with the strategy? When truly nothing's wrong with the strategy. The strategy is misaligned with the season. And this is something I've thought about a lot because I've seen it come up for people across every industry, every revenue level, every type of business, the salon owner who's ready to franchise, but whose core model still has a real structural set of leaks. The consultant who wants to scale to group programs, but has not yet built the audience that would fill one. You know, the CEO who's ready to step back from operations, but whose team structure isn't built to hold things without them yet. In every case, the vision is right, the direction is right. The gap, though, exists because a season is being skipped over rather than built through. And that work, getting honest about the season that you're in and understanding what it actually requires, making the one aligned move that belongs to it, that's not the glamorous work. It doesn't have a great headline. But it is the work that makes everything else possible. Now you may believe this already, but I always like to share this because while you may think this goes without saying, sometimes people's actions

Focus Needs A Weekly Container

Sheila 13:00

tell a different story. And it is this focus is a business strategy. I know, sounds obvious, right? And yet I watch really intelligent, really experienced founders treat it as a personality trait or a discipline issue or something to aspire to once they have more support, more structure, more of something that would make it easier. But focus is not a reward that you get when the conditions are right. It's actually a decision that you make, it's a choice. And then you build the conditions to support it. And the thing about focus is that it requires you to stop doing something. That's the part nobody loves. Because the things you stop are almost always the things that feel legitimate. Staying informed, staying networked, staying across the landscape. Those are not bad things to do. They only become costly when they don't have a container, a structure, or a defined place in your week so that they're not leaking into the hours where the deep work lives. One of the most valuable things that I help founders build is that structure, not a rigid schedule or productivity system that's actually more confusing to run than actually be able to run their business. But this structure that says, here is where I scan, and here is when I'm inside my own work. Here is when I take in what's happening externally, and here's when I execute on what I already know. Here's where I'm oriented toward the landscape, and here's when I'm oriented toward my vision. When three orientations don't have their own distinct containers, they bleed into each other. And what you end up with is a week where you were always doing something, always on, always engaged. And at the end of it, the thing that actually needed your full attention didn't get it. Your business can't go deeper than you can go. If your attention is distributed across 50 inputs, the business reflects that. It stays broad, it stays reactive, it stays surface level. And this is because the depth never got to the conditions that it needed to develop.

The Long View Without Prediction

Sheila 15:28

I want to address something that came up in a conversation I had recently that I think is really worth naming here. Someone said to me, it's hard to think about building for the long term right now, because nobody knows what long term looks like anymore. And I understood exactly what they meant. I've had a version of that thought myself on numerous occasions. Because when the landscape is changing as fast as it is, the idea of making a 10 or 20 year commitment. I mean, goodness, could you even imagine making a 20-year commitment right now to a direction can feel almost naive. Like, how would you even know if that direction is going to hold? Now, here's where I've landed on that. The long view isn't about predicting the landscape. We never have been able to do that anyway. Hello, let's look back to all of the different things that have happened over the last decades. It's about knowing who you are in it. The business owners who are navigating this well, who are making smart decisions and who are building things that are going to hold, they are not the ones who figured out what the next five years look like. They're the ones who are clear on what they value, what they're here to build, who they're building it for, and what they're not willing to trade for growth. I'm going to repeat that. Let's see if I can repeat that. They're the ones who are clear on what they value, what they're here to build, who they're building it for, and what they're not willing to trade for growth. That clarity doesn't become obsolete when the landscape shifts. It becomes even more valuable. Because when everything around you is changing, the people who know their own foundation are the ones who can evaluate new information, new tools, new directions from a stable place. They don't have to decide whether every new development applies to them by trying to figure out if it applies to everyone. They get to ask a much better question, which is does this serve the specific thing I'm building in the specific season I'm in for the specific people I'm here for? That filter changes everything. It takes you out of the treadmill and puts you back in the driver's seat. And that is a long view move. Investing in that clarity, building that foundation, doing honest work that helps you know your season, your offers, and capacity, your next move from that grounded place, that compounds. It doesn't become obsolete. It becomes the thing you come back to every time the noise gets loud. So let me bring this back to the original question.

Three Real Causes Of The Gap

Sheila 18:27

The gap between where you are and where you want to go. Let's be specific about this. Okay. I'm not talking about a strategy problem. I'm not saying strategy doesn't matter. Obviously, strategy is very important. The right offer, priced and designed for your current season, certainly matters. The profit and energy math matters. Knowing which revenue stream belongs to this moment and which belongs to the next one, that matters. What I'm saying is that when a founder is stuck in the gap, the strategy is almost never the root cause. The root cause is usually one of three things. The first is what I've been talking about most of this episode: focus. The work that would close the gap is being diluted by the scanning. And the scanning is keeping things surface level when depth is what's actually needed. And the second is identity. Focus and identity. The identity is the move they need to make that requires them to show up as a version of themselves they haven't fully inhabited yet. And this doesn't need to be some kind of dramatic reinvention. It's actually usually something quite smaller. Right. It could be charging more, it could be saying no to the clients or the work that made sense two seasons ago and positioning themselves in a way that matches where they actually are rather than where they started. These are identity moves. And they're hard in a specific way that strategy can't resolve because you can have the perfect plan and still hesitate at the door because the person who walks through it doesn't feel fully familiar yet. And the third is the season mismatch that I talked about earlier, the right moves for the wrong season. And the answer there is to get honest about where you actually are, do the math, build the foundation that the current season requires, and then make the next move from that ground. When you can name which of those three is actually in play, the gap stops feeling like such a mystery and starts making sense to you. It starts to feel like a solvable problem. And that shift in and of itself is worth more than any single tactic. There's something I come back to often when I'm working with people who are in this place. You've already built something, and of course that matters. You have the experience, the revenue, the reputation, the relationships, the hard-won wisdom of actually running a business for years. That's a big deal because that's the foundation. The gap between where you are and where you're going isn't evidence that something's wrong. It's actually the place where the next version of what you're building gets shaped and how you navigate it, whether you spend it scanning for what you're missing or deepening into what you already know. Well, that determines a lot about what's on the other side of it. The business owners who close that gap aren't the ones who found the missing piece. They're the ones who stopped looking for it and went to work with what they had. They got honest about their season. They committed to the one aligned move. They built the structure that let them stay focused long enough for it to actually compound. And then they did it again in the next season. That's the work. It's not always visible from the outside. It doesn't always make for a great headline, but it's the work that

Expansion Season And The Five Day Focus

Sheila 22:16

builds something lasting. And if you're sitting with any part of what I've shared today and thinking, yes, that's exactly what I need to get honest about, I want to tell you about expansion season. Expansion season is a three-month private experience. It's the structure I use with my one-to-one clients, built so you can move through it at your own pace with direct voxer access to me throughout the three months. The work is organized around five pillars. You start with the landscape, which is an honest audit of where you actually are right now: revenue, energy, calendar, what's working, what's leaking, and what the real blocker is for this season. And from there, you go into the legacy lens, which is the identity and long view work, which is getting clear on who you're becoming and what this season is actually for. Then the aligned offer, the one revenue stream that belongs to this season, designed and priced for where you are now. The profit and energy math is where we get real with the numbers and the energy equation together. And then the integration plan, your 30, 60, and 90-day plan built from everything that came before it. And by the end, you have a single guidebook that is specific to your business, your season, and your next move. Not a generic framework, it's yours. The place to learn everything and claim your seat is at sheilabatello.com forward slash expansion. And it's something that I plan to be adding to over the years as things continue to shift and change. If you're at the point where you know you need to close the gap between where you are and where you're going, and you want to do that with structure support and someone who's going to see the full picture with you, that's what expansion season is built for. So this week, pick one thing that you already know is the right move and give it your full focus for five days before you take in anything new. I know it's going to be super challenging, but you can do it. Thank you so much for being here. I hope this lands where it needs to for you. And I'll see you on the next episode.