THE RIDE IN: HOW I FOUND MY WAY HOME

I was born in Brazil and raised by the Atlantic. Salt air, big skies, the quiet understanding that life could be shaped by rhythm and tide. At twenty, I moved to North America with a suitcase and a stubborn work ethic. I studied design. I learned business by doing it, one project, one mistake, one leap of faith at a time.

For years, my life moved the way most ambitious lives do: forward, fast, and often on the edge of burnout. I co-founded a design studio. I built communities around creativity and water. Then I co-founded Surf the Greats and poured everything into taking Great Lakes surf culture to a national and global stage. We did not just build a business. We reshaped how a community understood itself in relation to the natural world.

From the outside, it looked like momentum. On the inside, it was meaning. Those years taught me how to lead, carry risk, communicate vision, and make decisions when the map offers nothing. They taught me how the right container changes people.

Then everything broke open.

Just before I turned forty, I lost my husband and business partner. Grief does not ask permission. It empties a room and leaves you with the echo. The roles I had built my identity around, founder, strategist, builder, fell away. What remained was raw and human. I could not outwork it or brand my way through it. I had to let it move through me.

That season was the most demanding of my life and the most clarifying. I learned how the body carries stories long after the mind has moved on. I learned that identity built only on achievement buckles under real loss. And I learned that the most honest question a leader can ask is not what should I do, but who am I becoming.

I rebuilt slowly. Therapy, somatic practice, and work with one of the best mindset coaches in North America helped me find the way forward. Training in Internal Family Systems and Neuro-Linguistic Programming gave me language for patterns I had felt for years. I began to see how awareness becomes action when it has a structure to live inside.

Out of that quiet came The Ride In.

This practice is built on a single conviction: transformation does not make you someone new. It returns you to someone you recognise. Someone who was there the whole time, beneath everything life had asked you to carry. The Ride In exists to create the conditions for that return, for leaders who have built something real and are ready to lead from a deeper, more grounded place.

The work is rigorous and human in equal measure. It draws on what I have lived and what I have studied, held together by the hard-won understanding that clarity is not a luxury. It is the foundation everything else is built on.

There was Surf the Greats. Now there is The Ride In. A second act built not on ambition, but on truth.

If something in you is ready for that, this is where it begins.