Two pivotal moments led to the creation of Alua Com Paixão. Both were essential.
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The first moment I experienced firsthand as a leader. For years, I was the kind of leader the business world recognized and rewarded: results-driven, direct, and efficient.

What took me a long time to realize was the cost of that. The toll it took on me, with constant tension and the persistent feeling that there was always a gap between what I demanded of others and the burden it placed on them. It was a leadership style that achieved results at the expense of the people who produced them thriving.
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In a "command and control" model, the leader is always right because they hold the power, and the people around them become increasingly diminished.

It took me a while to see this clearly. But once I did, I couldn't unsee it.

The second moment was personal. Deeply personal. I lost my mother.

‍During that process, which was painful in a way only those who have truly loved and lost someone understand, I felt a need I can only describe as an urgency:

I needed to understand what Compassion and Self-Compassion were, how they worked, and what purpose they served.
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Not as a philosophical concept, but as a lived reality, as science, and as practice.

I began to study, and continue to do so, to delve deeper and realize that Compassion is not a weakness, but rather the most demanding and essential competence a human being can develop. Compassion is universally applicable: it is present in our personal relationships, in our organizational relationships, and in how we lead and serve.

In my mother's final days with us, she said something to two hospital nursing assistants who were talking about the heartbreaks that life brings—something that resonated deeply within me:

"Always live with Com_Paixão, my dear..." It wasn't a management tip. It was a life's legacy.

And it was also, though I didn't know it at the time, the name of what I was about to build as a personal and professional way of life.

Alua Com Paixão was born from the intersection of these two moments.
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From the awareness that the leadership model we inherited from the industrial era – commanding, controlling, measuring, and extracting – is no longer sufficient for the world we live in today, and from the conviction, built with scientific rigor and first-hand experience, that there is another way. A leadership that inspires, instead of merely instructing.

One that genuinely trusts people, instead of just managing them as resources. One that is, itself, the change it wants to see in others. One that embraces its vulnerability and shares it with its team, instead of hiding it as a weakness. Not because it's nicer to do so, but because when people feel seen, they give their best to produce better results, and not just enough to avoid being dismissed.

I don't create Alua Com Paixão despite these two moments. I create it because of them.
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Every diagnosis we make, every intervention or training we provide, every conversation with a leader who wants to transform their relationship with their team, has an invisible thread that connects me back to these two moments.
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To the pain of having been a leader who caused suffering without much concern, and to the last words I heard from my mother:

"Always live with Com_Paixão"
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Vítor Alua, founder.