daniela | b-side #1

Getting Down to Business

1. What is your job profile?

Administrative Coordinator – basically, I manage the doctors’ agendas, from a health unity, here in Portugal.

2. Name one professional skill that you are currently trying to develop?

I am trying to not allow the peaks of stress to diminish my empathy towards others.

3. What’s your go-to productivity trick?3. What’s your go-to productivity trick?

I listen to music or I go outside to smoke.

4. What characteristic or behavior do you most attribute your success to, and why?

I am intense.  I am always looking for the sensation that I am actively contributing to the company that I am working for.

5. How do you prefer to start your day?

A big nice cup of coffee, in the company of a colleague. I like to start my day interacting with someone, have a quick chat and then I feel ready to start.

6. What have you learned from your worst job experience?

When I was in Porto, whilst working in a shop, I had to learn how to love my differences, which were not well accepted by my colleagues.

7. Do you feel like you have made mistakes in your career? Did you learn a valuable lesson from those mistakes?

Yes, I think so. I think I have had moments, in the past, where I didn’t separate well the personal and the professional "persona". I think nowadays I am smarter in what I allow people to know and see about me.

8. What’s a work-related accomplishment that you’re proud of?

My ability to manage a team, by being the decision maker in unpredictable situations.

9. How do you prefer to end your day?

I need to end my day with some sort of artistic form: dancing tango, going to the theater or reading.

10. What drains you at work?

The importance that is given to mistakes.

11. If you could add one thing to your company office, what would it be?

A space for different activities, to break away from the daily routine.

Let’s get Personal

12. If you could snap your fingers and become an expert in something, what would it be?

A ballerina.

13. What advice would you give to your teenage self?

Look more inside yourself. Don't stay on the surface.

14. What do you do to improve your mood when you are in a bad mood?

This is an interesting question. I think I don’t really do anything to change my bad mood, I just stay with it, until it goes away. Also, I don’t think my bad mood is severe to the point that It would interfere negatively in the relations I have with others.

15. One trip that has changed your life and why?

Marrakesh. I almost gave up going, because I was feeling down at the time. I had to force myself into going there. It was worth the effort, witnessing such a different culture has really helped me.

16. What’s one of your favorite memories from the past year?

My debut in the play that I've done last year. The name of the play was "A Curandeira“, which means the healer.

17. What’s one thing most people don’t know about you?

I think most people don’t know that I have this internal loneliness feeling, inside of me, constantly.

18. What’s the best compliment you’ve ever received?

That I was a very organic actress.

19. What subjects should be taught in school but aren’t? 

How to manage emotions. A less formal approach when it comes to education, by valuing freedom.

20. If you could trade places with anyone for a day, who would you choose?

An inmate. I think due to my background in criminal psychology.

21. What three words would your friends use to describe you?

Dreamer, clumsy, anti-conventional

22. What quote or saying do people spout but is complete BS?

“Daniela you are psychologist!” -  like I have to be Madre Teresa of Calcutta, because I have studied psychology.

Time to have fun

23. If you could choose a superpower, what would it be?

To make the dreams that you have, when you go to bed, come true.

24. What’s one hobby you’d love to get into?

Surf.

25. What’s one totally irrational fear that you have?

I’m afraid of getting lost with no return; of not knowing who I am, where I came from.

26. What’s the first concert you ever went to?

The XX.

27. What book are you reading now?

Identity – Milan Kundera.

28. Would you rather lose all your money and valuables or all the pictures you have ever taken?

Money and valuables.

29. What’s one item you want to own that you don’t?

A pergola.

30. Would you rather be able to see 10 minutes into your own future or 10 minutes into the future of anyone but yourself?

10 minutes into the future of someone else.

31. What’s the top destination on your must-visit list?

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

32. Which season is your favorite?

Summer

32. Which season is your favorite?

Summer

34. Do you think it is important for companies to get to know people beyond their job profile?

Yes.