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The lessons of being divergent

At the February event, we gathered virtually once more to talk about this month’s theme: Divergent. We hosted the incredible Filipa Maia, who shared about how she has lived divergently her life and what lessons this approach has given her.

Filipa’s life journey has been all about divergency. She is a former scientist, having once worked in the development of new pharmaceuticals and now she has a career  as an online business mentor. This was a major change in Filipa’s life. However, she would say her first divergent act was to decide to write books. She had always believed that she wasn’t creative, so this creative act went against how she defined herself. Ultimately, however, she saw it was a misconception to think that as a woman of science she did not have the skills or the insights to become a writer. Through her first act of breaking the accepted narrative, she became a writer.

That first step led her to leave her job as a pharmaceutical scientist, but without knowing which business to start, nor even how. To Filipa, it was only important that whatever business it was, it should lead her to have time to write. She is passionate about storytelling and how stories are woven by characters, conflict and resolution, all being triggered by active decisions. She rapidly understood that the stories that she loved the most were dystopias, where the protagonists are active and divergent, like some utopia gone wrong. She admired each divergent protagonist and their commitment to break away from made-up and imposed narratives. Through dystopian stories and divergent protagonists, Filipa shared with us five lessons about how to be divergent creatives:

• Lesson 1: Don’t let yourself become numb. Wake up. Pay attention. Don’t just do what is expected, what everyone else is doing. Think and be critical. - Book: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
• Lesson 2: Blind obedience is not a virtue. It’s at the root of many terrible things that have happened throughout history. - Book: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
• Lesson 3: Don’t let others convince you that we are separate. Separation is at the root of all evil. Realize we are all the same, we are all one. - Book: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
• Lesson 4: Don’t believe everything you hear or read, even if it seems to come from a credible source. Information can be manipulated. Look into it, dig deeper, investigate for yourself. - Book: 1984 by George Orwell.
• Lesson 5: Don’t believe that you have to be just one thing, don’t accept labels - be divergent, be everything you want to be. Book: Divergent by Veronica Roth.

To Filipa the definition of being divergent is all about thinking for yourself, not doing what everyone else is doing, making your own decisions, asking questions, undertaking critical thinking and not remaining in a situation just because you’ve chosen it in the past. It seems a lot, but I think it all comes down to being true to your inner self and following your instinct. In that way,  you’ll have it all! Thank you so much Filipa for your sharings. It was such a cool and structured talk. Let us all be divergent!

Text by Ana Sousa

Photos by  Irina Konova and Sónia Ramalho

How to build your own community online?

On Friday, 29th January, we joined together virtually for the first event of the year! Following the global theme for this month, Promise, we had Helena Magalhães as speaker. She shared her journey to becoming a writer and how she gathered a book community online over the past several years. This event had a format different from the previous ones. It was an interview style with Rafaela, our amazing host, posing the questions and Helena answering and sharing her perspectives.

Helena studied Social Sciences and got involved in gender equality issues after finishing her studies. After working in the area of child protection and criminology for some time, she arrived to a point when she felt that it was no longer making her happy.The work was no longer fulfilling her inner self. So, she quit. With a passion for words, she always loved to write but felt that being a writer was something unachievable. To her, Portuguese writers were on some other level– too classic, too literary.

But Helena tried it anyway. She started with a blog in 2015 and simultaneously wrote a book that she wanted to publish. That book actually ended up being her second one, as the first was related to stories she wrote on the blog. She always felt an existing generational gap in book dissemination in Portugal, particularly for modern writers. With a book to publicize and disseminate to the public, Helena got the idea of creating a readers community as a way of doing so directly. She called the community: Book Gang.

Things were going really well, though the first time Helena really felt the impact of Book Gang was at the 2019 Lisbon book fair.  There, all the publishers were saying that the books she recommended to the gang were having a huge increase in search and sales. This made her really happy, but at the same time it made her think: Everyone is making money from the Book Gang except for me!! So, she started thinking about how Book Gang could be financially sustainable. After trying an unsuccessful partnership with a major bookseller, Helena decided to distribute the books by herself, always having in mind the value she could give to the experience of buying a book. Book Gang is now a literary curation, a readers community and a way to access modern literature.

This was a journey of perseverance, resilience and belief. Even after several no’s and many doors closed, Helena always believed in this idea of using influence marketing and the power of shortening the distance between the writer to the reader.

“I’m a successful person in my small world”, said Helena. We couldn’t agree more! Thank you so much for your honesty and true sharing, Helena. We feel really inspired and motivated by your persistence and resilience in your beliefs. Thank you for this sincere and kind interview! What a great start of the year!

Text by Ana Sousa

Photos by  Irina Konova and Sónia Ramalho

What Plants Can Teach Us About Living Creatively?

Last Friday we had an amazing and inspiring event with our own team member, delightful Becky Burton. This was the last event of the year and it couldn’t have been better! She shared with us many thoughts and learnings she has gathered from plants and nature and what they can teach about creativity.

For many years, E. O. Wilson, one of the greatest conservationists of our era, has been a source of inspiration on nature and sustainability, in Becky’s world. In his book “Half Earth”, he proposes that if we can protect 50% of our planet’s land and water, most of the species can proceed to exist - including us. Becky works toward this greater aim in her own way, and has focused for over ten years on working to improve practices in the mining industry.

Additionally, it was E. O. Wilson who first named the concept of biophilia, which means that there is something deep in our DNA that connects us with nature. Feeling this deeply inside her, and as a way to unite several projects related to nature and plants, Becky recently launched a project named Green Elbows.The idea is: “Let us be humans… with plants”. Here, she manages all the green parts of her life as a service to us all: she helps turn a space greener, such as a room or a balcony; she is building a community garden called Garden Lab in Ericeira, where different methods will be experienced through a yearlong project; and she shares green inspiration on Instagram, hoping to foster a connection of the community (and the humankind!) to nature.

More importantly,  the higher and deeper insights Becky brought us in this Friday morning were about plants and creativity!

Lesson number one: Plants teach us to find calm! Becky shared the idea of singing plants, in where sensors measure conductivity of the plant, forming a wave. This wave is then put to music, as if the plants could actually sing. One interesting discovery she shared with us was that these researchers found out that the plant’s song would change if it was moved from place to place. Another interesting observation was that when certain people were around the plant, it changed the wave the plant emitted. The researchers discovered these people were Reiki therapists, biologists of florists, all individuals with a huge connection with nature!

Becky then connected this to her personal experience: Born in Utah (USA), Becky lived in New York City for about eight years before coming to Portugal. While she absolutely loved living in the Big Apple for the first several years, it began to drain her over time and she was no longer feeling the joy of living there. So, Becky started to give back to the city by offering gifts all around the city. This giving back project brought her together with NYC once more, with peace and calm. She shared all the experience in a book she wrote some years ago called: The Audacious Magpie. She shared how she never would have written it if she hadn’t first found calm in the chaos and allowed her own voice to shine through.

Lesson number two: Consistency! This insight was based on giant plants, those ones that grow to enormous proportions. There were two lessons here. The first is that if we consistently show up every day to create, we can create something big over time. The second was that we also need to have tender discipline along with consistency. If we are finding it difficult to show up, we need to ask: Is this due to fear and procrastination? Or is this happening because I’ve outgrown the project. While it can be good that plants continue to grow, it can also sometimes be the case that they deplete the soil in doing so. If a project is more depleting than fulfilling, we should be gentle with ourselves and release it.

In Becky’s experience, she shared that during some years of travelling all over the world she started a project named 1 to 100. She asked the same question to 100 people of all ages, one at each year of age: “What do you love about being alive?” She talked to people all around the world and met amazing individuals. Consistency was the key for this project to persevere. However, there was also tender discipline. She decided to end the project early – with the last spotlight being on a 63-year-old – when she needed to return from her travels to be at home. She understands it was simply the time to stop, rather than to force it. . “When something is not serving you anymore, it’s ok to let it go”, she said.

Lesson number three: Consumption! This insight came from the mining plants, which are a certain species of  trees which draw minerals up from the ground through their sap. Part of the tree can then be processed into usable metals, such as nickel. . In other words, the trees consume what is around them and this leads to how consumption is important for creativity! It’s important to ask: What voices do you have coming into your mind? What are you surrounding yourself with? Becky sees how this is important to stimulate her creativity by listening to podcasts, surround herself with a creative community, read certain books and so on. Our consumption has a direct connection to our creativity and creative process.

Becky took us on a creative journey through her personal and creative experiences inspired by plants and how we can learn so much from nature. Becky believes that we need to allow some of the love we have to give to fall on nature. To her, plants are a source of joy and their pace helps us to not get so frenetic about life. We definitely have so much to learn from them and from Becky. We are so grateful for her, too. Her calm, her energy, her insights and her creative mind makes us fortunate to participate in this event, to listen to her voice and, most of all, to have the opportunity to share our lives with her! Thank you Becky for your beautiful (and green) heart! CreativeMornings Lisbon is really lucky to have you! What a way to end this year!

Text by Ana Sousa

Photos by  Irina Konova and Sónia Ramalho

Is multipotentiality the key for happiness?

Last Friday we had an amazing and enthusiastic virtual event with the incredible Ana Luísa. Her presentation centered on the question: “Is multipotentiality the key for happiness?”.

Born in Lisbon and currently living in London, Luísa is a true multipotentialite with several passions, jobs and creative thoughts. So, how did her journey start? How did she discover this about herself? Luísa has always been changing jobs. Just when she was really into a certain job, she would wake up the next day and suddenly feel like there was nothing there to make her happy and that everything she wanted from the job was already achieved. So, she changed to the next one…and the next one…and another one.

While on this road of constantly changing jobs,  she crossed paths with Emilie Wapnick, who was a true inspiration in multipotentiality. (You can check out her TED talk or her book “How to be everything.”) The concept of being a multipotentialite resonated perfectly with Luisa’s life: someone with many interests and creative pursuits.

As a dreamer and a multipod, Luísa realizes now she was not wasting time in any of her previous jobs. The skills she learned at one job are transferable to her new jobs, so she feels she’s not starting from scratch, but adding information and skills to each new experience.

Now Luísa sees that  multipotentiality gives her many super powers: rapid learning, idea synthesis, adaptability, big-picture thinking and the capability to relate to different people and environments. Still, it also has its challenges, such as finding something that gives financial stability, needing to build confidence in each endeavor, fighting off imposter syndrome, and dealing with family and friends who don’t understand her seemingly patchwork approach to work. She has been many things — tour guide, photographer, journalist, English teacher, restaurant manager and so on. The connecting thread between all of these jobs? They fulfill her two true loves: travelling and creativity. Luísa’s lesson for others? It is really important for a multi-hyphenate to remain connected to their true loves in order to feel alive and to keep running.

Additionally, to help her stay afloat Luísa has three life pillars:

1 - Surround yourself with other multipods

2 - Say yes to new adventures

3 - Search for inspiration

In this journey, it’s also important to create boundaries, build a safe environment, remain true to your values, and above all,to trust your gut feelings to help you keep your mental sanity.  For Ana Luísa her values  are integrity, honesty and kindness. Each time she has a decision to make, she always checks to be sure she’s honoring those values. Finally, she shares the importance of not letting your talents stagnate. Instead, take the opportunity to improve, learn and invest by either getting trained or surrounding yourself with the best in that area.

So, is multipotentiality the key for happiness and success? Well, we can see that it definitely gives you a whole package: it makes your options wide, you get so many perspectives, your universe is broadened and your passions are fulfilled. Luísa is a dreamer. We thank her for sharing her lessons with us, as she is very relatable, very enthusiastic, and definitely a girl full of talents and creativity! It was so inspiring to learn from her! Thank you Ana Luísa for sharing with us your multipotentiality and giving us a window into your wide life!

Text by Ana Sousa

Photos by  Irina Konova and Sónia Ramalho

Life on Wheels

October came with the theme Transit. CreativeMornings Lisbon virtually got together with CreativeMornings Porto and the first national event happened! What a ride it was!

It started with a virtual dance party with the incredible DJ Teté Funky Leaf.It was such an energizing way to start the event! We then focused with some meditation exercises powered by Marta Afonso to slow down and center ourselves. In other words, there were different rhythms but we were always moving, from dance moves to a zen state of mind. 

Then our amazing speaker, Inês Ponte Grancha shared her perspectives on the theme. As a mother, a physical therapist and a rally co-pilot, she shared with us how she manages all these pillars of her life, always in motion.
Her passion about racing started with the influence of her father, who bought her a crosskart when she was still a kid, even though all she wanted was to do ballet. However, with her father’s lead, her passion for this racing world started to grow. Inês started racing at 9 years old and at the age of 13 she drove her first stick shift. As she got older, she got her first job as co-pilot and fell in love with this work. The co-pilot’s role is really complex, but important. They’re the ones who give instructions to the pilot and a minor error can put both of their lives in danger.

In between, Inês graduated as a physical therapist, a job that also involves constant movement! She appreciated that it was a job where she could deal with people of all ages. So, the second pillar of her life was growing. 

Finally, she wanted to be a mother.  It was a long-time dream. However, she was told she couldn’t have children and this discovery really weighed her down. At the same time, she got an invitation to be part of a great racing team, one of those irresistible invitations she couldn’t say no to. It was then when it happened! Without expecting and thinking it was impossible, she got pregnant! Family is really important for Inês and motherhood really filled up her life.

So, how does the amazing Inês manage all of these roles?! With a lot of creativity, focus, passion and a bit of stubbornness, she has proven she can do it. Especially as a woman in a men’s racing world, where she fights to be part of it as an equal, even though there is still a gap in the way she is treated. 

“Success only happens when we don’t try to be too ambitious,” she says. One should have goals of course, but without putting relationships at stake along the way. She has also learned to stay positive, even when adversities come. Inês shared with us–with vulnerability and honesty–a big accident she had three years ago. It was a time when everything could have fallen apart. She was in a wheelchair that could have been with her for the rest of her life and the doctors said that she would not be able to race anymore. However, Inês had a huge and unexpected recovery that not even the physicians can explain! Now, she walks, she carries her children, she races and she is always moving! 

Inês is movement embodied, the way she communicates is all about movement, transit and a great energy. Movement is part of her life. Thank you, Inês, for sharing your life with such passion, vulnerability and a positive vibe!

Text by Ana Sousa

Photos by Sónia Ramalho

Can new parents still have creative dreams?

We are back! After summer break, with some beach time, sunsets, sunrises, walks through nature and some chill and breathing time, Creative Mornings Lisbon came back last Friday, September 25th . With our batteries refilled and with much energy and enthusiasm, we had a virtual event on the theme of Spectrum with the amazing and creative Petra Vaz.

With a passion for words, Petra started by taking us through the dictionary definitions of spectrum and creativity, to help set the stage for the creative tale she was going to share.

• Spectrum - a wide range of objects, things, ideas or opinions.
• Creativity - the ability to produce original and unusual ideas or to make something new or imaginative.

Feeling a lot of pressure from these definitions and believing that what we are has a huge role in what we do creatively, Petra started by presenting herself: a woman, a mother, a professional.  These three roles make her unique and give her the stability and purpose in life.

How does creativity fit into the various roles we have in life?? Trying to answer this, Petra presented four types of creative people: 24/7 creatives, active creatives, part-time creatives and hobby creatives. Where do you fit?

“The beauty of spectrum is that there are a lot of gray zones between these types. You can definitely be in the middle”, says Petra, “And that is ok.”

When the theme is creativity, sometimes the problem lies in the inner and outer expectations about what someone will create. The truth is, there is no one 0% creative nor 100% creative. The challenge is to find room for creativity in our daily lives, wherever it fits. This is one of Petra’s biggest challenges, to find room to be creative on a daily basis, with motherhood often influencing her schedule and emotional state. Petra shared how she is creative in the ways she educates her child, such as  inventing new songs to teach her the animal sounds for example. She tries to maximize her life to have creativity always present in her day. Listening to a podcast during supermarket time was one of her examples. It’s a time to listen to other ideas, interviews, and opinions as a way to stimulate her creativity. This habit led to her tips to unleash your creativity:

1. Stop. Disconnect.
2. Read, do, watch, listen to anything that gets your creative juices flowing.
3. Put those ideas to work.

Yes, put those ideas down on paper. Even if the first idea doesn’t work, it can lead you to a winning idea. Don’t wait until you have the skills, until it is perfect. Just get it started. Don’t expect too much. Accept things. Talk positively. Be kind to yourself. Let your creativity fly!

As a mother and a creative woman, Petra’s spectrum is wide and filled with interests, opportunities, joy, love and creativity. She is charismatic, enthusiastic and we couldn’t be happier to return to our events with such a lovely and amazing speaker! Thank you Petra! Keep on going!!

Opening the doors of insecurity

Last Friday we gathered together once more for our CreativeMornings June virtual event with the theme Insecure. To talk about insecurities and how to overcome them, we had Juliana Torres, a creative producer full of energy and amazing stories. This was also a special event as it was held in Portuguese, a proper way to celebrate the month of Portugal.

Juliana, also known as Ju, was born in Recife, Brazil, and came to Portugal 20 years ago wanting to know and explore the world. She had the opportunity to work in Angola, Mozambique and South Africa, where she had different challenges, such as limited resources, where her creativity was absolutely needed to recreate and transform the way she worked. The major learning she got with these experiences was the importance of doing, even without being perfect. Everything takes shapes, as long as you do it.

Some years ago, Ju decided to be an entrepreneur by starting a public cloakroom. However, she had some hard times as accounting is not her strongest skill. She learned along the way, creatively reinventing her business and ultimately transforming it into a traveling cloakroom for events, festivals and concerts. She found her market niche and it is going really well! With this experience (and life in general), Ju gave us some tips important for those who want to start a business:

• Study the market
• Ask opinions of people who are close to you
• Know your competition
• Take care of accounting
• Have a real plan and a dream plan
• Look for partnerships and collaborations

These are Ju’s recipe for creating a transformative and successful business.

Recently, Juliana started a podcast called Absurdo Podcast, where guests share their experiences and projects in an inspiring way, with the knowledge of someone in their 40’s.

At our last event, we’re glad Juliana shared with us her way of life and how being humble, vulnerable and allowing herself to ask for help has been important throughout her journey. Ju says that “flexibility is the youth elixir” and that is what drives creativity. Every time something bad or wrong happens, Ju thinks about the future, how to transform things and how to get better. It was a truly inspiring and absolutely sincere sharing of Juliana’s experiences and learnings. We have a lot to learn from each other and Ju is a master of life lessons that we all can connect to in some way. It was especially delightful to have her energy to start the day in Portuguese, our mother tongue. Thanks Ju, you rock!

Connecting with Nature is our Nature

May’s theme was Nature and we couldn’t have had a better speaker about plants, flowers and all things green. Tomás Tojo was the most recent speaker for CreativeMornings Lisbon and showed up on screen surrounded by green leafy plants– very on theme. We are still doing virtual events, but our community energy was fulfilled with our virtual hugs and smiles!

Tomás Tojo was born in Lisbon but grew up in the south of Portugal where he started gardening while young as a way to occupy his free time. He found a way to entertain himself through gardening and this phase started to determine his relation with nature. He studied arts in Chapitô, did an acting degree in Porto and went to London to study art direction. 

Life then found him in Brazil where he discovered a newfound love of tropical plants. 

His first project, Green São Paulo, was to build a public garden. With no plants to start it, Tomás and his team went to a graveyard and gathered old plants that were nearly dead and rescued them for their project. The team has a lot of committed people, so the project was a success and the community was involved with it.

In Portugal, Tomás has worked as a teacher focused on gardening, teaching children about nature and its importance for human beings. He also started a garden festival in Lisbon called Jardins Abertos. At the Open Gardens Festival, you can discover Lisbon’s largest gardens, such as Monteiro Mor Park or the Belém Palace gardens, or small private gardens and courtyards, such as the Botanical Garden and Library, João and Teresa’s private Courtyard, among many others. For Tomás, creative gardening is a faster way to build a community and this has been his motto. We are all invited to participate in Jardins Abertos this year on the 18/19th and 25/26th of July, all around Lisbon.

Tomás wants to promote environmental awareness and to show how collective gardening is important. He says that “we have this perception that somehow nature will always be there for us” but it is important to know nature, to care for it and to take responsibility for the environment that belongs to all of us. 

He also feels that during this pandemia and world crisis people are reconnecting with nature and this is really good. It must definitely continue. 

This event was all green, smooth and inspiring, really influenced by the peace and calm that Tomás Tojo shared with us. We must connect with more green, become more aware of nature and focus on being more connected with it. Thanks Tomás for sharing all your creativity, knowledge and passion about nature!

If you’d like to be a volunteer at Jardins Abertos 2020, sign up here.

[Photo credits: the first photo belongs to CreativeMornings Lisbon, the second and third one to Jardins Abertos]

Leading a Brand with Purpose

Finding our purpose is something we all aspire to do. We want to understand what drives us, what makes us feel connected, what we can do to leave a mark in someone’s life or on the planet. Somehow, we all want and need the same thing - to find our purpose.

Last Friday, we had our second virtual event precisely about purpose and finding meaning in all we do, particularly in our work. Lara Seixo Rodrigues, our speaker, shared how finding her purpose has helped define her job and her projects. She’s the founder of Mistaker Maker, a platform for artistic intervention with a meaningful purpose that she shared with us throughout the talk.

Before Mistaker Maker, Lara worked as an architect for more than 10 years, but she felt held back by the bureaucracy. At the core, what she really loved is the social environment of a building, how it connects people and can have an impact on the community and the neighborhood. While she was still working in architecture, she started to have  parallel artistic and creative projects allied with her field.It all started in Covilhã, Lara’s hometown, where, together with her brother and sister-in-law, they gathered their community in the first street art festival in Portugal. All around the city, street artists displayed their work on old buildings or empty facades. In Covilhã, they also did an inside-out project with the oldest workers of a factory, portraying these valued employees through large portraits on the exterior of the building. In 2017, they paid a tribute to the firemen after the massive fires that summer, all with street art. The connection between all of these projects was the impact of street art and the involvement of the community. These were, and still are, important values for Lara, as they give purpose to these projects.

Mistaker Maker also undertook a project around S. Bento station, in Porto, where illustrators were invited to share stories of some well-known people of the neighborhood through street art. The results were incredible, and the involvement of the whole neighborhood and the illustrators was so meaningful in bringing connection to everyone there, both old residents and new.

Another project full with purpose, which embraced the power of community,was for Federação Portuguesa de Futebol, a festival that occured all across the country and ended in Bairro da Jamaica, a social neighborhood in Setúbal. It was a tough community to work with, as Lara and the Mistaker Maker team had to work with the leaders first in order to finally reach the kids. To the organizers’  surprise, they found these children couldn’t easily articulate dreams and visions for their lives.t Instead, they were focused on surviving, rather than envisioning a purpose for the future. So, the main work there was to help the youth understand they could dream big. The result was a huge flag hanging in the center of the neighborhood saying “Conquista o Sonho” built with the help of all of the community.

In all of the projects Lara developed, she was expecting more young people to be around when the artists were working on the streets. However, it was interesting to find out that seniors were their most interested audience. They were always around and asking questions. So, Lara thought, why shouldn’t seniors connect, learn and be part of street art? This led to a new project called Lata 65, which started as a workshop about street art for seniors. They learned the history and theories behind street art, they picked out their own graffiti names and finished the experience by painting a wall with their own masterpieces! The receptivity of this initiative was huge, and this project is now in several countries, such as Spain, USA, and Brasil. This project definitely shows how art is for everyone and that age is just a number!

More recently, for these strange times in which we’re living, Mistaker Maker created something really cool called Sebenta da Quarentena.  This colouring book was designed for elderly people in isolation during this pandemic, but it has grown and spread to everyone of all ages. Sebenta da Quarentena, made with the participation of 40 artists, has gone from just being a colouring book to inspiring much more creativity. People using the book are being so creative,using different materials and even embroidering  the illustrations. It’s incredible how the purpose we give to something we build and develop can grow, change and adapt to people’s needs.

Lara is purpose-driven. She wants to make a point. She wants to give power to communities and has learned street art is a fast way to do it, faster than architecture. “I believe the arts have the power to transform society”, she said, and I must add, she proved it true with all of these amazing projects. Keep on going, Lara!

This event was full of art, energy and social impact and it was absolutely amazing and inspiring, particularly in times like these where many of us find it difficult to find a purpose. So don’t give up on finding your path or your purpose! We all have it, so pay attention to the signs along the way and everything will drive you there!

Text by Ana Sousa

Photos by  Irina Konova and Sónia Ramalho

Losing it (and being okay)

This month’s event was particularly special, given these strange and challenging times. This pandemic has changed our daily routines and is making us stay home and learn to live inside 24/7. Even though some routines have changed, CreativeMornings Lisbon wanted to keep our tradition alive and reunite our community, even if everyone could only join from the comfort of their own home. So, we went virtual!

Last Friday morning, we joined our first ever remote event to talk about Identity. What is your identity? What defines it? Could your job be defining your identity? To share thoughts about these and other questions, we invited Ana Luísa Silva, a scientific researcher turned IT Service Desk Agent. She had so much to share!

Ana has studied Biological Engineering, obtained a Master of Science degree in Biotechnology and pursued for a PhD in the Netherlands, which she finished in 2015. Her academic career was growing, which led her to a granted position as Postdoctoral Researcher in Lisbon in 2017. She was pursuing the standard life of an academic, reliant on grants for survival in this scientific world. That system is exactly what changed everything! In 2018, Ana wasn’t awarded another postdoctoral grant and her career was entirely diverted. With no funding, she could no longer pursue research.

As her hoped-for future was vanishing through her hands and the feeling of emptiness was surrounding her, she decided to find a psychologist. On the way to her first appointment, her heart rate started to escalate and she started to lose control of her movement. Before she knew it,  she was being taken to the hospital while living out her first panic attack. This was definitely her lowest point. She was then diagnosed with anxiety and depression disorder, which she still manages to this day. Thankfully, she adopted one strategy early on to help, the strategy of adopting cats. Ana is a proud cat lady, with four little ones living with her!

In terms of her work, Ana was first invited to be a part-time teacher in an institute far away from her home, where the salary wouldn’t even cover gas money. When she opted not to accept, it was a turning point. Instead, Ana sent her CV to Fujitsu and started working as an IT Service Desk agent in their contact center. She decided to be the best agent possible, taking advantage of all the skills and knowledge she gained in her biotechnology and academic life! Now, she’s nailing it!

Ana provides clients exceptional support on the regular and is now being trained as a Problem Manager, the next step in this new career. She is a master at repairing Outlook or recovering passwords, and we all know how challenging those can be sometimes!

These last years were not easy, as Ana undertook this major life change. The depression was especially difficult and friends were lost. “Identity changes with experiences and losses…,” she remarked. However, it was also through this process that she learned to say no, to set boundaries, to remain true to her inner self and to pursue stuff she likes and she is good at: learning more, solving problems, pushing herself!

“A job is what we do. It could not define us. What we are inside is what defines us”, she said. It is the most absolute truth! Our identity is not defined by what we do to get a salary, it is much more than that! It’s what is inside of us, in our inner self, in our hearts, I must add.

Ana Silva shared with our community her vulnerabilities, her ghosts, her life-changing experiences and her successes, always truly connected to her identity. It was an honest and truly heart-connected talk, where most of us identified with some point of her story. Particularly in these challenging times that we are all living, the world might not ever be the same, many things will probably change, but our inner self, our most intrinsic identity will survive. Don’t ever forget, “What we are inside is what defines us”. Don’t ever let go of that certainty!

Text by Ana Sousa

Photos by  Irina Konova and Sónia Ramalho