Sofía Silva Berenguer
Decision Facilitator - Gold Coast, Australia
Choose, then flow.
What I know about the women I work with
You're carrying a lot. There's a long to-do list, and you've rewritten it more than once. You're exhausted, and at the end of the week you're not sure the business has actually moved.
You suspect some of the time, energy and attention you're investing isn't worth it, but you can't tell which parts. You've tried productivity tips and tools. Maybe you've worked with a coach and ended up with a longer list.
You've noticed you're working more hours than you did as an employee, or more than you planned. When you started, you had a picture of the life you wanted. You're not living it yet, and part of you keeps asking when you will.
Nothing is wrong with your capacity. What's usually missing is a way of deciding what deserves your focus, using your own criteria. For most of your working life, a structure did that for you: a job, a family business, someone else's expectations. Now it's yours to do, and nobody taught you how.
What I used to believe, and what I believe now
I used to believe that starting a business meant being willing to sacrifice my personal life, and that for a while I'd be working 24/7, obsessed with it. I no longer believe that. I think it would end in burnout, and in hating myself and hating the business. That isn't what I want.
I believe you can build a business on purpose, from the earliest stage, so that it allows the life you want to live. I'm willing to make sacrifices. I'm not willing to sacrifice everything. I won't give up my personal life, or the rhythms I've learned are good for me: the relationships, habits and routines that keep me healthy, physically and mentally.
I also believe the biggest source of waste in organisations isn't inefficiency. It's the failure to decide. The same is true of a business of one.
Why decision architecture, and not more tips
Productivity advice assumes you already know what deserves your effort and only need to do it faster. Coaching often adds to the list. Consulting hands you someone else's answer.
I do something different. I facilitate the thinking: a space and a process where you develop your own criteria, give yourself permission to use them, and make decisions from them. Then we build the ways of working that make the next decision easier, so you're not starting from scratch every week.
The aim is a business designed from the start to support the life you want, not one you'll fit your life around later.
How I came to this work
For a big part of my life, every decision I made was based on what I thought others would do in my place, or what I thought others expected of me. Not on what I wanted, or on what I felt would make me happy.
I was expected to continue with a PhD. A friend told me: "You don't need an excuse. If you don't want to do it, say you don't want to do it". That was the first time I understood the decision was mine to make. It had always been mine. I chose not to continue, and it was the first decision I made on my own criteria, not the criteria of the structures around me. Believe it or not, I was already 29 before I realised I was a grown-up who needed to make my own decisions.
Since then I've been working, on purpose, on connecting with how I feel about things. I ask myself which of my narratives are inherited, which of those I want to keep, and which I need to let go of. That practice is where this work comes from. I want to make a space and a process for other women to do the same: develop their own criteria, give themselves permission to use it, and build a business that makes the life they want real.
Why this combination of disciplines
My background sits across fields that rarely meet. Each one shapes how I work with you.
| Discipline | What it brings to the work |
|---|---|
| Telematics Engineering | A problem-solving approach: breaking a tangled situation into parts you can actually see and decide on. |
| Product Management | Working backwards from the outcome you want, and prioritising when the path isn't clear yet. I spent years facilitating a product team's alignment, planning and agreement on its goals. |
| Program Management | Coordinating across complex, multi-stakeholder environments. I facilitated agreement on a shared purpose and annual plan among five independent international organisations, aligning their priorities and their capacity to deliver. |
| Productivity Coaching | Ways of working that let you achieve what you want while keeping you sane, physically and mentally. |
| Ontological Coaching | The deeper layer of the move into your own business: the identity shift, the narratives that limit your results, and the moods and emotional states that shape how you work. These live in the body and nervous system, so they shape how work feels, not just what you decide. |
Together they let me work out what is making your decisions hard, design the way of working that fits, and pay attention to the person doing the work, not just the work.
What this makes possible
You decide what deserves your focus, using criteria you've defined yourself. You let go of what doesn't, on purpose. You end the week knowing whether the business moved, and you keep the rhythms that keep you well.
I'm based on the Gold Coast, Australia, and my sessions are online. I work with women across Australia, New Zealand and compatible time zones.
If you'd like to talk it through, let's chat.