Inward Seasons, Outward Seasons, and What Gets Built in the Hard Ones | EP 603

Some seasons pull you inward before they send you forward, and what gets built there tends to be the part of you that carries everything else. This episode is about that rhythm, and why the hard seasons often produce the most essential version of who you're becoming. Full show notes, transcript, and chapters at sheilabotelho.com/603.

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Transcript

A Hard Season You Cannot Share

Sheila 0:01

If you've ever felt like you were building in the middle of something hard, something you couldn't fully talk about, something that was asking a lot from you under the surface, this one is for you. I want to share something about the inward seasons that I've moved through and what I've come to understand about what gets built there. I've been studying this in myself and in the people that I work with for over two decades, and the pattern is consistent. So stay with me to the end because there's something I want to leave you with about what you're producing right now that I think will genuinely reframe the season that you're in. Hi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sheila Botelho, and I believe true success is built from the inside out. I want to start with something I've noticed across a long time of doing this work. Most of us are caring more than what shows up in the work. And we're building alongside all of it. The strategy, the offers, the team decisions, the revenue goals, and also the grief, the transition, the identity shift we haven't fully named yet. The chapter that ended before we were ready, all of it at the same time. I've come to call these inward seasons.

Grief And The First Inward Season

Sheila 1:22

And I think most high performers either push through them without naming them, or they feel like something's wrong because they can't maintain the output they had before. Like the season itself is a problem to be solved. And I want to offer a different frame today. What if the inward season is exactly where the most essential part of your next chapter gets built? My first real inward season when I was in business started when I lost my sister. Something cracked open and something new started to come through in that opening. That was 2013. A part of me that I hadn't yet met. Before that, I'd been in corporate sales and marketing, entrepreneurship. I was on all the time. And that was the expectation in business. And honestly, it was also my own standard. Now, I had stepped back quite a bit when I was raising my kids around the time my sister got sick. So I had that spaciousness and still I showed up. It was just in my DNA. I was busy, my life was full. I was good at performing, high output, always moving. And I was getting sick regularly because of it through the years until I figured it out. My body knew what my ambition hadn't admitted yet, that there was a cost to staying in permanent output mode with no real rhythm underneath it. See, I'd come from a background that had already given me a deep interest in how people work. My father's mental health, the way I grew up, watching someone I loved navigate the world from inside a mind that didn't always cooperate with him. That gave me an early education in human behavior that no program or course could have replicated. I wanted to be a therapist before I knew what a coach was back in high school. And that orientation, that deep curiosity about why people do what they do and what they're carrying underneath the thing they say they want, well, that's never left me. So when my sister passed, I didn't just grieve. I went inward in a way I hadn't before. And what came out of that season was my path into a different type of wellness. My background in it, my deep study of the body and the nervous system, all was expanded during that time. Understanding what happens to people who override their own cycles in service of their goals was not an intellectual decision. It truly was born from experience, from loss, from a season I could have dismissed as just grief. But that was actually reforming me. And that's what I mean by identity birth. The hard seasons, if you let them do what they're there to do, actually produce a new part of you, a part that's more solid, more grounded, more you than what you were before. And that part doesn't disappear when the season ends. It comes with you into everything you build next. I want to stay with the concept of inward and outward seasons for a minute because I think it's one of the most useful frames I've ever worked with, and one

Outward Success Versus Inner Integration

Sheila 5:08

that does not get named nearly enough in business. See, we've been sold a version of growth that looks like a straight line upward. Even though I know you've probably had the conversation that you know success is not a straight line. We still seem to expect it. More visibility, more momentum, more output, always more. And for a stretch of time, that can feel true. The outward season is real. It's energizing. It's when the pitching happens, it's the networking, the visibility, the connection, the momentum you can feel in your body when things are clicking. But that is not the only season that exists. And treating it like it should be permanent creates a particular kind of exhaustion that I've watched take very good, very capable people out of the game. The inward season is the one where you're integrating, you're processing, you're letting something that happened actually land. You're doing the work underneath the work, the kind that doesn't produce a deliverable and doesn't look like progress from the outside, but is absolutely essential to what comes next. When I was in sales and marketing early in my career, I was a near permanent outward season person. Always on, always moving. And then I'd get sick. My body had this way of making the decision for me when I would not make it myself. So what I've learned since then is that the body is always keeping score. This is a fabulous book. We must read it, all of us. And as the saying goes, and the score it's keeping has nothing to do with your revenue goals and everything to do with whether you're honoring the rhythm that is actually yours. I moved into wellness partly because I lived that lesson myself early on, and partly because I kept watching it happen to other people. Incredibly talented, incredibly driven people who were paying a price they didn't know they were paying until the invoice arrived in the form of some kind of diagnosis. Fortunately, the illnesses that I had were the type that you could get over in a couple of weeks, but they often knocked me right down.

Move Loss Surgery And A Forced Pause

Sheila 7:37

So now I want to tell you about the more recent seasons because I think the pattern matters and I want you to see it the way I see it from inside it. So last fall and through the summer, I was in an outward season. I was visible, I was pitching, I was energized. In fact, that's when I rebranded the podcast. And then a series of things happened that pulled me inward again, the way life does, without asking permission. We moved and it was beautiful, but it was an inward season of just being able to enjoy the splendor of how it all came together with my loves. If you've bought a house recently, you know that a move is almost never just a move. It is a reorganization of your life, your space, your rhythms, your sense of home. And I was moving from a home that I had built 30 years prior. It was a lot. It took more from me than I had anticipated. And that's okay. I'm just telling you this so you can hear that I'm not immune to this either, because it was big. And then after just starting to begin to feel settled, there was a family loss, a loved one passing. And if you can imagine everything that comes alongside of that, the grief itself, and then all of the things that surface around it, the family dynamics, the things you suddenly have to hold for other people while you're also trying to hold yourself. It's a lot. And I was building through it, hosting the show, working with clients, showing up, building alongside something heavy that most people around me didn't know I was carrying. And then out of nowhere, several months later, my appendix, emergency surgery, my body once again making the decision for me to slow down and in this case stop entirely in the most direct possible way. A forced pause that I had no say in. And here's what I want to say about what came after that completely unexpected. Because I could have come out of that season depleted and completely finished. And for a stretch, I was depleted. And I wondered how long was this healing going to take? Because I guess losing your appendix in your 50s is a little different than when you're a teenager. But something else happened in the stillness of recovery that I was not expecting. I got quiet in my adult life in a way I hadn't been in a very long time. If ever. Not performatively quiet or strategically quiet. I was actually still. And in that stillness, I met another part of myself. Who knew? There was another part of me, a part that had been forming for a while, but hadn't had the space to fully arrive. And from that place, I decided to write my book. That decision didn't come from an outward season. It didn't come from momentum or a content strategy or someone telling me that it was the right time. It came from the inward one, from the part of me that got born in the space that difficulty created. Let me repeat this in a different way. So the book, the thing I'm most excited about in my work right now, could only have come from that season. The version of me who decided to write it is not the version who was running full speed last fall. She's the one who was forced to stop, who sat in the quiet, who let the heaviness land, and who came out the other side knowing something she hadn't known before about what she was here to say. That is an identity birth. And those only happen in the inward seasons. So I want to talk about what that means for you practically.

Name The Season And Reframe It

Sheila 11:42

Because I'm a strategist and I always want to bring it back to something you can use. I can't help it. Every single thing I experience in my life turns into a teachable moment for someone else. I think that's just my path. So when you're in an inward season, and you will know that you're in one because you'll feel that pull towards stillness, even when your ambition is telling you to keep moving. Say it out loud, at least to yourself. I'm in an inward season right now. This is integration. This is formation. This is not stagnation. The reason naming it matters is that the story we tell about what's happening determines the quality of what we're able to extract from it. If the story is I'm falling behind, because trust me, that was one of the stories I was starting to listen to in my own head, you'll spend the whole season in resistance and you'll miss what's right in front of you and waiting to come through. If the story is, I'm being formed, you'll stay curious. And curiosity is how you come out of it with something. I've watched people come through devastating seasons and build the most remarkable things on the other side. Not despite the season, but because of what that season made available to them. The depth and empathy, the grounded authority, the understanding of what people are actually carrying when they sit across from you. And all of that gets built in the inward seasons. It doesn't come from any training program. It comes from living it and then having the presence to bring it forward. That is the competitive edge that no trend can replicate. And it truly is timeless. That is the thing that cannot be generated from the outside. It's yours because you lived it. So let's come back to something that I said at the start about how most of us are carrying more than what shows up in the work. I've always believed that we need to have grace on each other for this reason. You are almost never fully aware of what the person across from you is holding. The client who seems distracted might be navigating a family crisis. The colleague who went quiet might be in grief. The person who looks like they're thriving on the outside might be in the most intense inward season of their life, doing the work that nobody can see, becoming who they need to be for the next chapter. And that goes for you too. The people in your life, the people you work with, the audience that you're building, do not know everything you're carrying. They see what you make visible. And what I want to say to you is that the fact that you are still here, still building, still showing up in the seasons that have asked the most from you, that is huge. That's everything. That's the evidence that you have something worth building toward. The hard seasons don't just test you. I've found that they really do equip you. They give you the actual lived material that makes your work unrepeatable. And truly, that is the case. The person who has moved through difficulty and kept building, who has integrated what the hard seasons gave them instead of pretending that they weren't hard. Well, that person brings something into every room that they enter that cannot be manufactured. So here is where I want to leave you today.

The Vision Map And Next Steps

Sheila 15:38

I created something called the vision map for exactly this moment. The moment where you're in a season of transition, where you've outgrown something when you can feel the next version of yourself forming, but you're not quite sure what to do with it. The vision map is a tool for getting clear on who you're becoming, on what this season is actually for, on the vision that's pulling you forward, and the values you want to build from. It's available in the show notes or the description below. And I want you to have it, especially if you're mid-season right now, especially if you're carrying something and building alongside it. Because the clarity it creates is the kind that holds, the kind that comes from inside you, from where you actually are, not from a template or a trend. So go get it and then come back here because there's a lot more of this conversation to be had. So I invite you this week, take a few minutes to name the season that you're actually in. Because building from an honest assessment of where you are is always more powerful than building from where you think you should be. Thanks for listening. Take good care of yourself this week, and I will see you on the next episode.