The Sheila Botelho Show: Business Strategy and the Inner Work of Leadership
The Sheila Botelho Show is a business and leadership podcast for founders, CEOs, and women leading at the highest level of their work, who are ready to build the next decade of their business with more clarity, more profit, and more of themselves in the room.
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The Sheila Botelho Show: Business Strategy and the Inner Work of Leadership
How I Stopped Feeling Like I Was Doing It Wrong | EP 605
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High-achieving people keep feeling like they're doing it wrong, and human design often reveals exactly why. In this episode, Sheila shares what her own design as a 1/3 Manifesting Generator showed her about her natural work style, and why the pattern she spent years trying to fix turned out to be the one she was built for. If you've ever felt like you should be more linear, more focused, or further along, this one's going to land.
Full show notes, transcript, and chapters at sheilabotelho.com/605
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The Shame Of Working “Wrong”
SheilaA lot of high-performing people carry this low-grade feeling that they're doing it wrong. Not the work itself, but the way they work. Too scattered, too many tabs open, too hard to stay in a straight line from start to finish. In this episode, I'm sharing what human design showed me about my own patterns and why the style I spent years trying to fix turned out to be exactly how I'm built to operate. I've been studying this for over a decade, and I'll take you through the specific things that landed for me and what it might open up for you. Stay with me until the end because the real takeaway here isn't about human design specifically. It's about what happens when you finally stop working against yourself.
Scattered By Nature And Still Effective
SheilaHi, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sheila Botelho, and I believe true success is built from the inside out. I want to tell you something I noticed while I was pulling this episode together. I had multiple ideas coming in at once. I was capturing things really fast as they moved on, and I was bopping between threads, connecting them as I went. And I realized partway through that this is exactly what this episode is all about. So if you've ever felt like you should be working in a more organized, more linear, more proper way, you're going to feel very at home here. I have always worked this way. And it's not until recently that I uncovered that. I mean, even at home, I'll have the laundry going and then I'll move something to another room. And then I'm dusting something over there and I've got eggs boiling because I like to have my hard-boiled eggs ready in the fridge. And the flowers need water. And here's the thing: I still get everything done. Every single thing. My husband's the opposite. He starts one thing, finishes it completely, perhaps with breaks, moves to the next. And I will say the level of excellence he brings to each task is genuinely something I benefit from. Everything he does is just done well. But I don't work that way. No, I do things well. That's not what I'm saying. But I don't work in that linear fashion. And I used to think that that was something I needed to fix. And for me, books are the same. I'll have several going at once. I'll read a little bit of one and then feel pulled to start another. And unless a book is absolutely captivating, the kind where all I want to do is keep reading it and it happens to be fiction, I'll finish it quickly. Nonfiction, though, well, I typically have several nonfiction books going at once. And I move between them and I've made my peace with that. The point is, I've been this way in every area of my life. And for a long time, I measured that against a standard that was never actually mine.
Human Design Makes The Pattern Click
SheilaI first started learning about human design probably around a decade ago. I heard the whisperings of it in the ether around me. And when I did a deeper look a little later into my own design, several things just clicked. I'm a manifesting generator with a one-three profile, which is what's called the establisher of knowledge and truth. And when I read that, first I was like, hey, go deeper on it. But I honestly, as I looked through it, I felt something subtle. The because the first number in that profile is the one, the researcher, someone who goes deep, who wants to fully understand things, who really digs in before they move. Totally me. And the three is the one who takes what they've learned, tests it, practices it, lives it, and then shares the findings with others. Whatever comes up, whatever the experience reveals, that becomes what they teach. And I realized that's what I've been doing my whole life. I love books, I always have. In fact, one of my favorite book memories is being around seven or eight years old, sitting in front of my mom's two massive bookcases filled with vintage books and pulling out, I don't know if it was an original copy, but it was close to the original copy of A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens. I held that book in my hands and I thought, if I read this, I'll feel so intelligent. So I started reading it. And I read that first page over and over. I think I got actually about a page and a half in before I said, Yeah, I'm gonna need to come back to this one. And I did come back to it in my early 30s. I was shopping at a local store called Indigo Books, and I saw a beautiful edition in a bookstore, and I thought, I never did finish that. I barely started it. So I read it and I absolutely loved it. Seven-year-old me would have been very, very proud. But that's the one three in action. Plant the seed, come back when the time is right, learn it fully, or steep in it fully in this case, and then share what you found. The
Sacral Yes Versus Gut No
Sheilaother piece that really resonated for me in human design was understanding sacral authority. As a sacral being, the way I make decisions is through a felt sense in my body. When something lands in front of me that I'm meant to respond to, there's a pull, a physical excitement, like a magnetic draw toward it. That's my yes. And when something isn't right for me, I feel it differently. A heaviness, a pang in my gut, that low grade sense of something's off here, or this isn't for me. And when I looked back at my life through that lens, I could see that so clearly. Every time I followed the pull, the excitement, the magnetic yes, something opened up. Something good came from it too. I want to say, in almost all of the cases, I'm I'm trying to think of a time where good didn't come from it. And some of the most meaningful things of my life truly have been things that I didn't plan. They just presented themselves and I got to choose. One of my friends described it perfectly when I said this on a walk once, that the best things of my life have kind of just landed in my lap. And that was the moment that I understood what it meant to respond rather than initiate. Not saying I never initiate, but I'm just saying it's a very big part of my design. And every time I overrode the no, that gut pang, the heaviness, and said yes anyway, out of obligation or because I thought I should, I'd find myself down the road thinking, why did I agree to that? And now that's not a mystery anymore. And of course, everything that we experience, I believe there is a lesson to be learned and everything is for us. You know, we hear this all over the all over the place, and I truly believe it. However, I also believe that if I'm truly tuned into myself more, I'm going to take less time to get to the destination that I'm trying to go to because I'm not going in circles doing things I'm not meant to be doing, that are not the best use of my energy. And so again, it's not a mystery. I know what happened. And with those pang times, I ignored what I already knew. And that's big because for a lot of us, especially those of us who were raised in environments where saying yes was just what you did, where saying no felt like it needed some kind of defense. Learning to trust that gut response is work. It's big work. And I've done a lot of it. I'm in a place now where I can say yes to what I genuinely want and no to what I don't. And I feel really steady in that, but it took time. And it took understanding that the no was simply information. In my design, I know I'm on track when I feel satisfaction. And what I mean about satisfaction, because we all love feeling satisfied, but this is a felt sense of, oh, yes, this is it. And
Satisfaction And Frustration As Signals
SheilaI remember a specific stretch of time when I was home educating my boys. They were maybe six and eight at the time. And there were months and months where everything just felt like it was in flow. The rhythm of our days, the way we moved through learning and exploring and just being together. We were well rested, we were nourished. There was this deep sense of mutual respect and care that we still have today, but it was just like everything was elevated. And I was doing exactly what I was meant to be doing. I really felt that. My whole being absolutely knew it. And that feeling has shown up throughout my life. When I'm in the right work, the right relationships, the right environment. There's this settled sense of yes. And the opposite for me is frustration. And of course, frustration is a human emotion. Everyone feels it. We're not going to get out of this life without feeling frustrated. You're going to feel it even when you're living fully in your purpose. But when I'm frustrated more of the time, consistently hitting walls, that is information. That's my design telling me to look at what I've agreed to, to check whether I've been saying yes to things I should have let go. Because sometimes it's not that it was never a yeah. Sometimes it's just the timing is meant for me to move on. Sustained frustration is something that we all experience, as I mentioned, but it is also, especially for me, a compass. So,
Borrow Your Natural Rhythm At Work
Sheilawhat does this mean for how you work? I want to speak to the person who is trying so hard to fit their work style or their leadership style into a mold that was never designed for them, a structural mold from the organization they're in or from what they've learned in school or what they were raised to believe is the right way to work. If you're constantly thinking, I should be done with this already. Why can't I stay focused? Why do I work like this? I'd invite you to stop trying to fix yourself for a moment. And instead, look at your life outside of work. Look at a weekend when you have no obligations. Look at how you move through your home, your hobbies, your reading. Are you linear? Do you have multiple things going at once, like me? Do you need long stretches of solitude before you can move? Are you energized by constant movement? That's your design. And you can borrow from it. Because when you work in a way that's actually yours, you get better results. You're authentic to you and your energy. And you have more energy at the end of the day. You're more present with the people around you. Your team experiences a different version of you, and you're more magnetic. Because the energy we bring to everything we do transfers into what we create, and it transfers into every conversation we have. Now,
How To Explore Your Chart
SheilaI'm not a human design expert. What I'm sharing is what I've found through studying my own design, through conversations with friends who also have different designs or similar designs, through having people on this podcast over the years who have gone deep into human design work and gene keys. And if you want to explore more, search the Sheila Botello show Human Design or Sheila Botello show gene keys, G-E-N-E, and you'll find some episodes that go into more depth. And if you want to start from scratch, just search how do I find out my own human design and go from there. Your chart is free to pull up. It's your birth time, is that's a very important thing. If you have it, it's not a big deal if you don't. What I care about most isn't that you become a human design enthusiast. What I care about is that you stop spending your energy working against yourself. Because what's on the other side of that, and I felt it, is a way of working that's more efficient, more joyful, and more sustainable than you've probably let yourself experience before. And one more thing before I let you go. Notice the pattern. Write it down if that's useful for you. And then ask yourself, what would it look like to bring even a small piece of that into how I work? That question alone can shift so much for
A Simple Practice And Next Steps
Sheilayou. If you want to go further, I'd love to see you in Sheila's notes, my weekly letter where I go deeper on things like this and the behind the scenes. And if you're ready to build or rebuild your business around your actual design, take a look at the ways to work with me. The link is in the show notes. This week, look at how you naturally move through a day that's entirely yours. And let that be your starting point for understanding how you're actually meant to work. Thanks for being here. Take good care of yourself, and I'll see you on the next episode.