Change is never easy. It’s a process that shakes everything that gives us security—routines, certainties, the roles we’ve learned to play.
At the beginning of my journey, I thought change was a matter of rational choice, but over time I realized it’s much more emotional than logical.
Change is saying goodbye to versions of yourself, and that hurts. But I also learned that, behind every difficult change, there is a silent invitation from life: to move forward, even with fear.
When I decided to leave Brazil and start over in Ireland, fear was in every detail. Fear of the language, fear of failure, fear of not fitting in.
It’s curious—the bigger the dream, the greater the fear that accompanies it. And, for a while, I thought courage was the opposite of that fear. Today I know it isn’t.
Courage doesn’t eliminate fear; it only chooses to move forward with it by its side. The difference between those who change and those who stay is simple: one waits for the fear to pass, the other decides to walk even while trembling inside.
Change requires humility. When I arrived in Ireland, I had to abandon titles, comforts, and the recognition I had built in Brazil. I went back to being an apprentice.
I started as a waiter, observing more than speaking, relearning how to communicate and understand what it really meant to start over.
At that moment, I realized that changing is not about losing who we were, it’s about discovering who we can still be.
Every true transformation begins when we accept that we don’t have control over everything.
Over time, I understood that the fear of change is much more linked to the need for approval than to the change itself.
We are afraid of judgment, of making mistakes, of the gaze of others.
But the truth is that the world will always have an opinion, and no one but ourselves knows the price we pay for remaining where we should no longer be.
Fear paralyzes us when we give more weight to external expectations than to our own intuition.
Moving forward, for me, is an exercise of faith — faith in something that doesn’t yet exist, but that begins to take shape with each step.
It was this faith that kept me firm when I decided to start my own business, when I created SEDA, and when I needed to start over countless times.
Fear has always been there, but I’ve learned to use it as a sign that I’m moving in the right direction. Because fear only appears when something important is at stake.
Today, when someone asks me how to deal with the fear of change, I answer: don’t fight it, walk with it.
Fear is not the end of courage; it is proof that it is alive. Life wasn’t made to be predictable, and the security we seek is rarely where we begin.
It’s in the step we haven’t yet taken — and in the courage that arises when we finally decide to move forward.
