Inês Jesus

Inês was one of Google's top facilitators standing on the company's largest stages, fought crimes against children online, and built equity programs for the company's Latin community... only to get laid off, as an immigrant on a working visa and in the middle of a medical leave. While her humor kept her spirits up, it was her resourcefulness and resilience that turned yet another obstacle into a story to joke about later - a year later to be precise, because first she needed to figure out her burnout and her immigration status, and figure out how to defeat her grandpa at dominoes (the latter is still a failure). She teaches resilience, change management and life design with both the pragmatism and the optimism of a neurodivergent person. She also teaches digital safety and resilience to school aged youth.

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Inês is a global speaker, coach and consultant. She has worked for a decade in startups and tech, in roles ranging from business and operations, sales and product development, to policy enforcement and incident management.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, she was an innovation manager for child safety, where her mission was to protect children from online harm. In this role she built a strong skill set of resilient wellness practices that helped her be a thought leader in such a crucial yet hard space. She built most of her career at Google where aside from her full time jobs, she continuously took on leadership and founding roles in diversity, equity and inclusion and education, training, mentorship & coaching.

She was awarded top 2% of facilitators at Google worldwide, has delivered talks across most continents, including in countries such as the US, the UK, South Africa, Mexico, Cambodia, France and Ireland, and has stepped on 100+ stages, delivered 500+ hours of training, and trained more than 10,000 adults and children.

Inês is no stranger to change. She has lived in 7 countries, worked professionally in 4, and collaborated with more than 70 nationalities and nations. True to the tech industry, she has taken on more than 10 roles and adapted and survived to more than 20 different managers and organizational restructures, until the fateful day of the Google layoffs of more than 12,000 people when her team was affected. At that time she not only was an immigrant holding an employment visa, she was on medical leave (thankfully a friend told her to check her email to confirm her employment status). With what her therapist describes as her great capacity for resourcefulness, Inês navigated this time with grace, conscious action, and a whole lot of humor. But wait, there’s more…

Inês was battling severe burnout (the one where your body is shutting down), an ADHD diagnosis that explained a lot, and her lifelong friend of generalized anxiety disorder (that she has warmly named Olive). How had she survived this long in the workplace? The doctor said it may have been her smarts - and that was not a compliment. How had she built such resilient practices that helped her be a top contributor in Google’s largest stages or an expert on child safety, yet still failed to build sustainable wellness for herself?

With her purpose set on protecting children and being a voice of connection, she was doing what she had to in order to get the job done, but not to have a life well lived. She built her practices with a perfectionist mind, but in an imperfect world that soon showed her she couldn’t be in full control. If those around her were like a fern that needed more humidity to survive, she thought she could go search for water, when instead she was a cacti that needed to search for sun. She was an expert at masking until the masks started cracking, and she never took the time to fully understand the unique ways in which her brain worked or what her soul needed, and never invested in the right support systems for herself. And she soon discovered she couldn’t successfully be an agent of change, if she did not take care of herself first, in ways that were true to her.

Inês now focuses on resilience and change management, helping individuals and companies become changemakers and go through change by building sustainable practices that cultivate resilience and wellbeing. She is a deep believer that toxic positivity is one of the largest predictors to failures in leadership, change management and organizational growth, and eagerly invites vulnerable hope as a detoxification method. Passionate about life in and beyond a career, her coaching program is focused on life design with the ultimate belief that a life designed to our aspirations is a life well lived, and a life that helps us be better in our careers too. True to her mission of child safety, she still works directly with schools on digital safety and resilience for youth.

You can hire Inês for:

• Speaking engagements (inc. on Resilience, Change Management, Vulnerability, ADHD, Wellness & Wellbeing, Burnout, Finding joy and laughter in the hard things, Digital Resilience & Safety, and more)
• 1:1 Life Design Coaching (for a sustainably blossoming life, focused on sustainable wellness, burnout, ADHD, and more, with a foundation on strengths, values and mindset)
• Workshops (on Resilience, Life design, Vulnerability, Burnout & wellness, Public speaking)
• Workshops for youth (on Digital resilience & safety)
• Corporate consulting (to develop programs or training on Resilience, Change Management, Vulnerability, Life Design, Wellness & Wellbeing, Burnout, Public Speaking, Digital Resilience & Safety, Thoughtful leadership, and more)