Everything I teach, I first had to live.

Hi there, I'm Ana.
 

Throughout my journey, I have come to believe that we are here for two reasons: to learn and to teach. Everything else is simply the context in which those lessons unfold, changing as we move forward and pass through different stages of growth. It may sound like a bold way of looking at life, but it is the one that best explains my journey to this day. I will therefore divide my story into the three learning experiences that have shaped both my personal and professional life the most.

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Chapter 1. Leading a team of 10 people through 5 years of total bootstrapping while building a technology startup. 

 

Between 2019 and 2024, I led a team of ten professionals without salaries, contracts, benefits or any of the traditional incentives that usually keep people committed to a project. We were all fully aware of the risk involved. The team was spread across Portugal, from Faro to Braga. While everyone else had a full-time job from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. with their official employer, I was fully dedicated to the startup as its founder. As a team, most of our working days began after 6 p.m. and extended well into the weekends. My challenge was not only to lead a remote team, but to sustain motivation on the fine line between commitment, fatigue and exhaustion. The obvious question is: why did they stay? It would be easy to say it was because of the vision or the purpose behind the project. Or even because of the relationships we built over time. It is important to mention that I had never met any of those people before inviting them to join the project, and that the team brought together professionals ranging from junior profiles to others who were considerably more senior than me. Yet none of those explanations truly account for what happened. Over those 5 years, we developed 3 versions of our digital platform, built 1 dashboard to support the entire platform, tested it with more than 1,200 users and took part in 4 acceleration programmes. We never secured external investment. Even so, no one left. They remained with the project for 5 years, demonstrating an extraordinary level of both technical excellence and human commitment. At the time, I couldn't understand why. It was only years later that I realised I hadn't simply been leading a team. I had been observing, in real time, the deeper mechanisms of human commitment; something that is rarely learned from books. That experience became the first piece of what would eventually become the Humanum Method.

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Chapter 2. Training 1,500 retail professionals under the brief: "We want a tsunami of empathy."

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As the project I mentioned earlier was struggling to achieve financial sustainability, I had to open myself to new opportunities. Between 2022 and 2024, I had the opportunity to become part of one of the most ambitious human development projects I have ever experienced. What initially began as a commercial opportunity quickly became something much bigger. I ended up being involved from beginning to end: supporting the sale of the project, managing its implementation and facilitating a significant part of the learning journey. For 7 months, I worked with one of Portugal's largest retail organisations, MC Sonae, across 9 stores (Continente, Continente Modelo and Continente Bom Dia) located from north to south of the country. Around 1,500 professionals took part in the programme, from frontline employees to team leaders and senior executives. The learning journey combined in-person sessions, online training, in-store facilitation and individual coaching. I had the privilege of being present throughout almost every stage of the process. The results were remarkable. Customer satisfaction increased by 11 percentage points, rising from 79% to 90%. From the very beginning, the project was designed as a pilot for a potential rollout to approximately 28,000 employees. Looking back, I realise this project gave me far more than professional experience. It allowed me to observe human behaviour across a remarkable diversity of people, roles and workplace contexts, while experiencing first-hand the complexity of leading organisational change. More importantly, it taught me that truly transformative learning is not measured by what people understand during a session, but by what they continue to feel, think and do long after it ends. This experience became the second pillar of the Humanum Method.

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Chapter 3. It took 7 years for my individuation process to unfold. A profound inner metamorphosis.

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The concept of individuation was introduced by Carl Jung to describe the process through which a person gradually becomes who they truly are. What fascinates me most is that I only came across this idea years after I had already begun living it. The name came at the end. The experience had started much earlier. It began in 2019, when I decided to build the startup I mentioned earlier. Not because of the idea itself, but because I had the courage to question many of the truths that society teaches us from the day we are born, and upon which I had built my life. From that moment on, everything began to reorganise itself. The 5 years that followed were anything but linear. They were marked mostly by doubt, loss, frustration and a profound lack of understanding and external validation. In the eyes of many people, I have been failing at life. Throughout that time, I walked with only one compass: my heart. Until, in 2024, it stopped. Figuratively speaking. It felt as though everything that had guided me until then had suddenly disappeared. For the first time in my life, I felt truly lost. And it was precisely in that emptiness that my most serious search began. Between 2024 and 2026, I finally started asking the right questions. The answers came afterwards. I finally began to understand who I truly am, what shaped me, the patterns that had accompanied me for years, and the direction that gradually started to reveal itself. Today, I understand that growing is not about accumulating years of life. It is about gradually becoming the person we were called to be. No profound transformation happens overnight. It is the result of a succession of small events that, for a long time, seem to have no connection with one another. Only later do we realise that they were all leading us to the same place. In my case, it took 7 years; years in which far more happened than I could ever tell here. My individuation process has not ended. Nor do I believe it ever will. But it gave meaning to every experience I had lived before. The deeper I explored myself, the deeper my understanding of others became. It was only then that I realised my ability to lead and develop people would never depend solely on what I knew. Above all, it would depend on the person I needed to become. The Humanum Method was born precisely from that encounter.