about taking a BREAK... and living my calling

What a year! At the end of 2019, without having a clue of what the following year would bring us, I decided to take a BREAK in 2020. I felt I’ve been running in the treadmill for several years, dedicating time and energy to fulfill all kinds expectations. I had completed two graduation courses, had a remarkably successful career at a global company, had become manager and associate director at a young age, had travelled the World working at different places, had led international teams… just to name a few “checked boxes”. However, I knew the meaning in my life has never came from checking those boxes, my meaning has always been anchored in Love and true human connections built and strengthen along the way.

With the encouragement and support of my lovely husband, I slowed down, to a completely different rhythm that I was used to. Not having meetings scheduled back-to-back with a crazy busy calendar was a relief. I felt a tremendous power (and responsibility) to own my time. Mindfulness was the first topic I decided to go deeper, because even before knowing this name existed, I used to practice it in my awkward way. So, I enrolled in a #mindfulness course. Luckily, it was planned to be online, and by the time the pandemic started to impact our lives around here, we started our wonderful Mindfulness group, some of whom became good friends, Karen Fabiane Hercules. B-Breath was the first step of my BREAK.

I continued my BREAK journey so grateful for this amazing synchronicity of being able to dedicate time to be with my dear sons while school was online. I am happy to say that I was with my little one when he learned to read, trying to understand the World through products’ packs or anything in front of him at home. I know that for working parents this year has been totally crazy and more than challenging… I was truly privileged to dedicate time to be with my children; family together at home with good health, while the World was going through such hardship. My profound admiration for all mons and dads who performed miracles during 2020.

Consciously breathing and spending mindful time with my kids were great accomplishments for me. And then I realized I needed to push my own “Reset” bottom. I learned with Mo Gawdat, on his wonderful book #soveforhappy (which my dear brother gave me some years ago, thanks Gui!) that the “happy me” was below several stones of illusions and social expectations. Another pleasant synchronicity for me was that Mo started a podcast called #slomo early this year, while he was in London lockdown. – Mo, I cannot thank you enough for your generosity of sharing so many nuggets of wisdom. Listening to so many stories of amazing people around the World who went through their paths of awakening, helped me a lot with my own R-Reset.

{If you are still reading this text until this point, after you finish reading it, I strongly recommend you hear a SLO MO episode of your choice, there are more than 70, I’ve heard them all. Some episodes are conversations with major heroes that I admire a lot, other episodes are with people that I feel could be a close friend. As Mo likes to say, “I know you have a million things going on, but there is always time to slow down”.}

After pushing my own R-Reset bottom, it was time to E-Energize. Energy was getting low after some months inside an apartment with kids running around playing soccer at the living room and my husband working long hours on endless conference calls. Of course, we were grateful for him continuing his job from home and for our loved ones being healthy. However, being in contact with Nature has always been important to me. It is crucial to know what helps us reenergize, in my case, walking bare foot on the grass or on the sand are simple pleasures that make a huge difference to my energy. In July we rented an airbnb house with a garden, I could gladly walk barefooted, and the boys could play soccer on the grass. Simple things, that I was so happy that we could do together. During the second semester, fortunately we managed to include short nature breaks with our family.

As you may have noticed, I am a big fan of positivity. I have a strong curiosity about Positive Psychology, since I had the opportunity to participate at an experimental group lead by Pablo Platero about 5 years ago. I strongly recommend his book Working on Happiness: Reflections for Personal Development, available on amazon. Positive Psychology is not only a fun topic, but also very useful to apply in our lives. So took advantage of this year to study a bit more about this subject. Among many things, I strongly believe that we all should take advantage of our own natural talents, focus to develop abilities that become our personal strengths. That was the next step of my BREAK, A-Acknowledge my own personal top virtues: Integrity, Love, Kindness, Gratitude, Criteria. How could I put my virtues in service to others?

That was when I decided to review my purpose statement that I had written some years ago, and this completed my BREAK journey with: K-Key Contribution, knowing that I am in this World to make a meaningful contribution in other people’s lives. My purpose is to encourage talents to grow our best abilities to serve collective evolution. I am thankful to #simonsinek online classes, with Stephen Shedletzky and Lee Prosenjak, who helped me refine my why statement, during very useful sessions, with people all over the World, some of whom are now part of my network. More important than the exact words of our statement is that we actually live our WHY. And I am proud to say this is a “checked box” for me during 2020.

Education and #lifelonglearning have always been subjects close to my heart. What a great privilege to have access to great contents of the best Universities of the World, many of which offering courses for free. One course that I enjoyed a lot was HarvardX Leaders of Learning. It helped me find my own way into creating safe and collaborative learning spaces, inspired by Distributed Collective Learning method.

On September, I launched 2 collaborative learning groups online, one of which is called B.R.E.A.K, based on my own BREAK experience. After going through this process myself, I wanted to structure a way to share with others what I learned, but not in the “instructor mode”. My mission was to do it in a way that values each participant experience and challenges, collaborating so that the group learns together. The first group was a mixture of old friends with people I didn’t know yet and the registration fee was directly to an NGO that needed resources to continue their amazing work with vulnerable children.

B.R.E.A.K group provides a conscious pause to reflect on what really matters in your life and on your choices to live with more harmony and meaning. It is made for those who are living a busy life and want to find ways of creating small breaks during the day or the week. I am happy to say that feedbacks were very positive from those who participated of the B.R.E.A.K groups during this year!

One other collaborative learning group was born inspired in Marianne Williamson statement: “As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.” Together with dear friends and inspiring professionals, Barbara Barbieri, Flavia Possas, Cássio Azevedo and Patricia Zuccolotto, we collaborated to create and facilitate a group called “Conex?o 5 Pontas”, focused on young talents, between 18 and 25 years old, who want to surpass internal barriers and develop critical abilities to make the World a better place, starting from themselves. It is an invitation to openly discuss topics that are useful for life and career but are usually not taught at schools or universities, such as consciousness, empathy, vulnerabilities, growth mindset, collaboration. When we thought we were going to teach something, we ended up learning a lot with very enlightened young leaders. 

We need to count on people to inspire us during our journey, those groups are a one way of finding this connection and collaboration. I am so grateful for friends who encouraged me during this year of true transformation in my life, and I also grateful for those who I met during 2020 and believed in my potential, just to name 3 wonderful ladies, Sonia Custodio, Sumaia Thomas and Rhonda Delaney. Rhonda’s message that “leadership is a verb” resonates a lot with me, and I am very glad that she reinforced something that Sonia was also telling me, that I didn’t need anything else to create my own methodology, I could do it based on my experience as a leader, and I could support other leaders to thrive. It was an honor to participate at Rhonda’s podcast, talking about #remoteleadership. [it is still available; in case you want to listen!]

Encouraged to proceed with my own methodology, I continued mentoring close people who were feeling hopeless during this pandemic. I am so glad to share that my dear mentees gained clarity of their own talents, worked to consciously develop their abilities, and now they are all applying their strengths in service of collective evolution, making sense of their lives and their roles in it. Other type of mentoring that I had also the opportunity to practice was to support those who needed a new job. Advices to improve CV, guidance to practice for interviews, everything to gain confidence on their value and the real contribution they could add to their future employers. What an awesome feeling when each of them called me to tell me the great news that they were starting at their dream job!

Well, my new career as a mentor and a learning facilitator was shaping into more than a career… it was shaping into my calling. Combining my passion, my purpose, with my experience, collaborating with other’s experiences… I started to live my best version, so it was time to officialize the way forward: Ancoragem, collaborate to evolve. As an umbrella to the different partnerships, groups and mentoring, Ancoragem was founded, to those who seek conscious personal and professional evolution, with more harmony and meaning.

My sincere thank you to old and new friends, who had a tremendous contribution to make this such a meaningful year, finishing with the creation of this new collaborative network called Ancoragem. We are all interconnected, we do not accomplish anything alone, so let’s start 2021 with a positive mindset, encouraging one another to let our own light shine. Whishing Love, Health, Peace, Joy, Harmony to the World. Hoping that next year children can go to school and we can hug our dear elderly relatives.

Hope we can continue collaborating to evolve, to be better humans strongly connected to build a better World.

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If you want to stay connected to our Ancoragem collaborative network, please visit us at https://ancoragem.net , follow us here on LinkedIn company/Ancoragem, on Instagram @ancor.agem , and on Facebook Juliana Ancoragem