The right story changes things - starting with mine
Hi, I’m Joana — a German-Portuguese mom of two, solopreneur, storytelling obsessive, and someone who took the scenic route to building the career she actually wanted.
I grew up between two cultures — German precision and Portuguese warmth — which basically means I show up exactly on time AND greet you with kisses when I do. I’ve ALWAYS been drawn to people, places, and the kind of conversations where someone says something that makes you go: WAIT, TELL ME MORE!
The second I graduated high school, I left my hometown — and never went back.
I studied at an American college with campuses in Madrid and Boston, landed my first job in New York City at a global communications agency, and spent four years soaking it aaaaalll in before the pull of Europe called me home. Not to the town I grew up in, but to BERLIN — creative, bursting-at-the-seams-with-startups Berlin.
How storytelling found me (or: how I realized it had been there all along)
For years, I didn’t think of myself as a “storyteller.”
In New York, working in healthcare communications, I was just doing my job — reading dense clinical trial data and regulatory documents, then finding a way to make them digestible and human. I learned to ask: What’s the ONE THING that actually matters here? What’s the story buried in all this complexity?
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was learning to distill.
To simplify without dumbing down. To find the emotional core in even the most technical content.
Then I moved to Berlin and joined a small agency curating innovation conferences — including TEDx Berlin. We coached speakers, corporate leaders, C-suite executives who needed help shaping their message in a way that captivates an auditorium.
And that’s when it clicked. I’d been doing this ALL ALONG.
Finding the story. Stripping away the excess. Helping someone say the thing that makes a room lean in and pay attention. I saw it in real time on those stages: what makes people put down their phones, what makes an idea stick, what makes a message move from “interesting” to “I need to tell someone about this.”
And I was hooked. 🔥
After that, I moved into brand strategy consulting — six years working with Porsche, Audi, Nestlé, Deutsche Telekom. I learned how to build brand narratives at scale, facilitate strategic workshops with up to 50 participants, and bring clarity to the messiest of briefs.
It was incredible training.
And then: it was slowly draining the life out of me. 🫠
The part where everything changed
The thing about becoming a mom: it rearranges your priorities in the most beautiful, inconvenient way possible.
My husband and I used my maternity leaves to travel. But like: months-long, pack-up-the-babies, live-somewhere-new travel.
For three consecutive years, we spent winters in far away, surfy places — Byron once, Santa Teresa twice — and in those places I kept meeting people living creative, self-determined lives on their own terms. People who lit up when they talked about their work. People who didn’t dread the question “So, what do you do?”
Meanwhile, when someone asked me, my answer sounded exactly how I was feeling: LAME.
“I work part-time at a strategy consulting agency.”
And every time I said it, I felt a little piece of my spark dim.
The math wasn’t working either. My part-time salary wasn’t worth the hours I was pouring into someone else’s projects. I was financially unfulfilled, creatively starving, and deeply aware that something had to change — radically.
So during a months-long family trip to Costa Rica, somewhere between the jungle and the ocean and a couple of new moon manifestation sessions (yes, really), I made a decision:
I’m just going to close this door. And see what opens.
The universe responded
I resigned without a new job offer or a lineup of freelance clients.
And literally the MINUTE I sent that resignation email, the universe shifted its energy.
My first project landed pretty much as soon as I touched down back in Berlin. Opportunities seemed to find me organically and I felt like I was surfing through my first six months on a wave of pure alignment and momentum. (Why did I wait THIS LONG to quit?)
Developing concepts for individual clients who chose ME — not my agency, not my title, but my ideas, my perspective, my way of seeing things — was the most incredible feeling.
I knew quickly I didn’t just want to be a freelancer-for-hire. I wanted to build my OWN THING.
And here’s the part I didn’t expect: building my own business finally fed the creative gene I’d always thought I’d neglected.
Turns out, creating something from nothing — my own methodology, my own brand, my own path — is the most creative thing I’ve ever done.
What I do now
Today, I work with individuals and founder-led brands on the story that could change things:
>I help people craft presentations that need to win over a room.
>I find the narrative buried in a scattered bio and set someone up for success in their next professional chapter.
>I work with small brands to discover the narrative layer that makes an audience fall in love with them.
My approach is built on a decade of experience at the intersection of brand strategy and live storytelling, distilled into my proprietary EDGE Method — a framework that uncovers your Essence, Difference, Gold, and Expression to build a story that’s unmistakably, magnetically YOU.
Because I believe that the stories we tell about ourselves are truly the most powerful tools we have.
If you’re sitting on a story that could change things —
for your career, your brand, your next big moment — I’d love to help you find it.
The right story changes the room.
The right story changes the brand.
The right story changes the career.
Let’s find yours.