THE SECOND PAIR OF EYES

There are truths that arrive through study.

Others through experience.

And then there are those most difficult to accept.

Those that others see before we do.

For a long time I believed that I was the observer.

The professional who analyzes.

The man who evaluates.

The person who interprets what happens around him.

I was wrong.

Looking back, I realize that some of the most important things of my life were understood first by the women I met along the way.

Not because they were more educated.

Not because they were more fortunate.

Not because they possessed information that I was unaware of.

Simply because they saw.

In a different way.

More rapidly.

More deeply.

Less distracted.

Men are often fascinated by results.

Women, much more often, observe the signals.

The man looks at the direction.

The woman looks at the movement.

The man listens to the words.

The woman listens to what the words avoid saying.

Naturally it is not always so.

But often enough to deserve attention.

In my professional life I met extraordinary women.

Managers.

Collaborators.

Clients.

Executives.

Mothers.

Daughters.

Friends.

Many came from different countries.

Different languages.

Different cultures.

Yet they possessed a common characteristic.

They understood people before people understood themselves.

At first I considered this ability an intuition.

With time I called it human experience.

Because while many observed the data, they observed the human beings.

And human beings always anticipate the data.

What happens in the numbers almost always begins in the people.

Many changes that would transform my path were identified first by a woman than by me.

Sometimes they were small details.

A sentence.

A silence.

A worry.

An apparently marginal observation.

Nothing spectacular.

Nothing theatrical.

And yet, months or years later, those words returned.

And they were correct.

With time I learned to listen.

Not out of courtesy.

Out of intelligence.

Because the world is too complex to be understood from a single perspective.

Every human being sees a part of the road.

No one sees the whole map.

The women who passed through my life taught me something that no company could have taught me.

That the relationship comes before the transaction.

Always.

A contract can create an agreement.

A relationship can create trust.

And trust survives when the contract is no longer enough.

I have seen very powerful people lose everything for lack of trust.

And apparently fragile people build worlds thanks to it.

When I think back to the women present in my story, I do not think of the roles.

I think of the invisible contributions.

Of what they added without receiving credit.

Of the ability to hold together different parts of reality.

The family.

The work.

The relationships.

The wounds.

The hopes.

Many men face life as a sequence of objectives.

Many women face it as a network of connections.

Perhaps this is why they often reach certain conclusions first.

They see the bonds.

They see the effects.

They see the consequences.

I remember a period of my life in which I was convinced I had to solve everything by myself.

It is a widespread illness among men.

To think that strength coincides with self-sufficiency.

To think that asking for help is a weakness.

To think that vulnerability is a defect.

It was women who demolished that conviction.

Not with grand speeches.

With example.

Showing me that true strength does not consist in bearing everything.

It consists in building bonds strong enough not to have to bear everything alone.

It was a revolutionary discovery.

Because it changed the way I observed the world.

And it changed the way I observed myself.

Every culture possesses its own definitions of success.

Titles.

Positions.

Money.

Prestige.

With time I learned that a different measure exists.

The people who remain.

Those who remain beside you when there is nothing to gain.

Those who continue to believe in you when you yourself struggle to do so.

Those who see your better part even before it emerges.

Many of the people who played this role in my life were women.

And it is impossible to ignore that reality.

Books often celebrate the heroes.

Biographies celebrate the protagonists.

Real life is much more honest.

Behind every path there are people who contributed to building it.

People who do not appear in the titles.

People who do not seek recognition.

People who make possible what others sign.

When I think of the women who passed through my story, I think of precisely this.

Of their ability to see.

To understand.

To support.

To correct.

To anticipate.

And above all to remember a simple truth.

No one really builds anything alone.

We can sign a work.

We can appear in the photograph.

We can tell a story.

But behind every story there is always an invisible community.

In my case, an important part of that community had a feminine face.

This is why saying that women saw it first is not a provocation.

It is an acknowledgment.

Because many times, long before I understood what was happening, they had already understood it.

Women had understood it first.