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!