I did not come to performance coaching from a wellness bubble.
I came to it through corporate pressure, reinvention, ambition, long hours, self-doubt, business building, burnout, and learning the hard way that your body eventually joins every meeting.
You can separate health and performance on paper. In real life, they are completely connected.
Your sleep affects your decisions. Your blood sugar affects your patience. Your digestion affects your focus. Your stress affects your cravings. Your energy affects your leadership. Your health affects how you show up everywhere.
I know this because I have lived it from more than one angle.
From Brazil to Atlanta
When I left Brazil, I did not sit down with a map and choose Atlanta as my grand destination.
I wanted to improve my English, so the opportunity could have taken me to many places where English was the main language. I could have landed in a different city, a different state, or even a different country.
But a tiny company in Atlanta offered me a job.
“You can separate health and performance on paper. In real life, they are completely connected.”
So, in many ways, I like to say Atlanta chose me.
July 2, 2026 marks 30 years since I arrived in this country. Thirty years of building, learning, falling, growing, and becoming.
And Atlanta is still home.
That move changed my life in ways I could not have understood at the time. Like many immigrants, I learned quickly that starting over requires discipline, resilience, discomfort, and the willingness to keep going when everything feels unfamiliar.
That mindset followed me into corporate finance, business school, entrepreneurship, coaching, and health.
For many years, I thought performance meant pushing harder, doing more, staying disciplined, and finding a way through.
Those qualities helped me.
But over time, they also taught me something important: you can be driven, capable, and hardworking, and still reach a point where your body starts asking for a different kind of strategy.
The layoff that forced a decision
In 2002, I was let go of my position. That moment forced a hard decision. I did not want to stay in the United States illegally. So I had to decide: go back to Brazil, or find a legal, responsible way to rebuild my future here.
A friend told me, “You need to finish your degree.”
So I did.
I became a full-time student at Georgia State University and finished my undergraduate degree in Finance. English was not my first language. The reading, writing, papers, and workload were intense. I had never read that much in my life. I remember crying from the pressure, the hours, the writing, the comprehension, and the fear that I was not good enough.
But I kept going.
I graduated with a 3.98 GPA and built a career in corporate finance. Later, while working full-time as a finance manager, I completed my Executive MBA at Emory University.
That chapter was not easy. I often felt behind, judged, and out of place.
But I kept doing the work.
And in the end, I became the only female student in my class to graduate with honors.
That did not erase the hard parts, but it did teach me something important: I can do hard things, even when I feel intimidated, even when I feel like I do not fully belong yet, and even when the path asks more from me than I expected.
Why that matters to how I coach
That experience changed the way I understand high achievers.
I do not look at driven people and assume they need more discipline. Many of them already have plenty of discipline. They know how to push. They know how to perform. They know how to keep going when something is hard.
But sometimes the problem is not a lack of effort.
Sometimes the problem is that the strategy no longer matches the season of life, the stress load, or the body they are living in now.
That is why I do not coach by simply telling people to try harder.
I help them understand what their body is asking for, where the current approach may be working against them, and how to build a plan that supports performance without requiring them to burn themselves down.
Because I know what it is like to be capable and still feel stretched.
I know what it is like to do hard things and still need a better strategy.
And that is often where real change begins.
Leaving corporate did not magically make life easier
At the end of 2014, I resigned from my last finance role and moved fully into building Be Fab Be You. I had started developing the business and working with early clients in 2014, and in 2015 I was all in.
And then I did what many driven people do.
I overworked.
I worked long hours, tried to build everything, said yes to too much, and believed that if I just worked harder, I could make it all happen.
That season eventually showed up in my body and in my testing, which I shared in the previous story. But here is the performance lesson I took from it:
The body does not care how inspiring your mission is if you are destroying yourself to build it.
A business coach told me something that hit hard: “Maria, you cannot build a $10 million company on your own.” She told me I had to stop, rest, say no, pick priorities, and stop trying to do everything.
That advice was business coaching and wellness coaching in the same conversation.
Because sometimes the business strategy is not another funnel, offer, or marketing plan. Sometimes the strategy is sleep, recovery, boundaries, priorities, and making sure the person behind the business does not collapse.
“The body does not care how inspiring your mission is if you are destroying yourself to build it.”
Business and wellness are not separate
In my business and leadership coaching work, I often see professionals come into a conversation thinking they have a career decision, leadership challenge, or productivity issue. Sometimes they do. But often, underneath the surface, the deeper issue is energy, stress, identity, values, boundaries, sleep, guilt, fear, or the habit of overfilling one bucket while the rest of life gets neglected.
High performers are praised for pushing through until pushing through becomes the problem.
That is why I love coaching conversations that integrate business, leadership, wellness, and real life. A person is not a job title. A leader is not just a calendar. A business owner is not just a strategy machine. The person behind the performance matters.
Health affects leadership, communication, emotional regulation, decision-making, confidence, resilience, and follow-through. If your body is running on poor sleep, unstable energy, digestive stress, blood sugar swings, and constant pressure, you may still function, but you are not operating with the capacity you could have.
What sustainable performance actually requires
Sustainable performance is not about doing more forever. It is about having the health, clarity, systems, recovery, and self-awareness to keep doing what matters without burning yourself down.
“High performers are praised for pushing through until pushing through becomes the problem.”
Sometimes what blocks progress is not a lack of information. It is overcommitment, fear, stress, self-sabotage, poor boundaries, or emotional weight that needs to be acknowledged before the plan can work.
This is where high-touch coaching matters.
Information gives options, but support helps people follow through.
Health creates the freedom to perform and live
This is the belief that ties my story together. Health creates the freedom to perform at work, lead with clarity, travel, train, have energy at home, and age with strength.
- Freedom to think clearly.
- Freedom to make better decisions.
- Freedom to walk into a room with energy.
- Freedom to enjoy the life you worked so hard to build instead of dragging yourself through it.
That is what I mean when I say health creates freedom. It is not just about avoiding disease or fitting into smaller jeans. It is about capacity: the capacity to live, lead, work, love, move, recover, and keep becoming the person you want to be.
My path from Brazil to Atlanta, corporate finance, business coaching, entrepreneurship, functional health, and personal rebuilding taught me this: you cannot separate health from performance. The body is always in the room.
The question is whether you are listening to it or forcing it to scream.
If you are ready to stop guessing and start understanding what your body may be trying to tell you, a Clarity Session is a simple place to begin.