A man in a suit at the café, with nowhere to go
After retiring, he kept going every day to the Starbucks across from his old office. Wearing a suit. He would sit, open his laptop and work in front of the building he no longer entered. When asked why, he said he had nowhere to go: he never developed hobbies, lost his family along the way, and his whole life fit inside a job.
This case, told by Andrea Eboli in an interview on the Manhã Z show, is not about one man. It is about what happens when someone hands their identity over to a functional role and that role, one day, disappears. Because it will disappear. It is part of life.
The world taught us to HAVE, not to BE
After more than 25 years in the executive world, living in different countries and among very different people, Andrea began to notice a pattern. People became conditioned to a power given to them, tied to roles they had to perform. The good professional. The good mother. The good wife. And little by little, they handed that power over to institutions, relationships, work. Until, when they lost the role, they lost themselves.
From this the investigation was born. And the numbers are disconcerting. In Andrea's research, 80% of people believe power lies outside them. Only 8% recognize it lives within. Even stranger: 60% of those who place power on the outside want to keep chasing exactly that, betting that happiness arrives with the next title, the next recognition, the next validation. That day, often, never comes.
This is the difference between HAVING power and BEING power. To have power is strength conditioned on something we must keep or receive. To be power is not depending on what we have to recognize who we are. Success, prestige and recognition do not prevent emptiness, because someone living a model handed to them from outside can have everything that defines external power and still feel unfulfilled.
The pendulum between stress and cure
Andrea describes the movement we live in as a pendulum. On one side, the stress of proving worth, of being recognized, of measuring up. When that tires us, we swing to the other side: the search for cure, therapy, meditation, rest, travel. And then we return to the chaos. We oscillate between healing and handing our power over again.
Conscious power is in neither extreme. It is at the center of the pendulum: the place from which you can still have your moments of stress and your moments of leisure, but without being dragged by either. Balance is coexisting with both, not choosing one.
Identity, context and action
The Estrutura Consciente de Poder articulates a triad. The first dimension is identity: who you are within your story, with gratitude for what you built, beyond generic self-knowledge. The second is context: knowing who you are in the abstract is not enough, you must know who you are inside the meetings, the relationships, the real places. As Andrea says, you may think you are all of that and, at the first encounter with reality, feel your world collapse. You remain who you are. It is the world that cannot be controlled. The third dimension is coherent action: acting from who you are, not being automatically led by what the context expects.
What artificial intelligence does not replace
In the age of artificial intelligence, control no longer exists, and much of the work will be done by machines. The question that remains is: what is left for us? Consciousness. Human leadership. The capacity to deal with people who also have stories, to lead from who one is, not from the position one holds. The ones who will stand out are those with more consciousness about how to move through this scenario.
The question that remains
Near the end of the interview came the question that organizes the whole research: if tomorrow your title, your credentials and all your recognition disappeared, what would remain in you? Andrea's answer was about the relationship with her own life, gratitude for what she achieved, her values, what she believes, what overflows from her into the world.
It is not a formula to control life. It is a structure for not disappearing inside it. And the question is not meant to be answered once. It is to be asked always.