Fernanda Vezina: Dreams, ambitions, & friendships spanning the globe

It’s quite astounding to stop and really think about your friends. Where did you meet? When? Through whom? Do you get to see each other often or just every couple of years at best?

When I think of my dear friend Fernanda Vezina, I’m literally amazed we met. Fernanda is from Brazil, and we became friends during my post-college stint in Austin. At the time, she was a newlywed, having married an American (hi, John!), and only recently moved her entire life to the states. She left behind a career in finance, her family, and the familiarity of home to navigate the newness of pretty much every aspect of her life in Texas.

Over the next few years, Fer used her international style and business sense to start a fashion line, became a mother of two boys, and established roots in the capital city. She dabbled in real estate and other ventures and eventually found her way back to her professional training as a financial planner.

As modern women, we’re programmed to dream big and work to achieve goals, but to do this in another country presents so many added challenges (just picture yourself doing what you do now but in a foreign country). Fernanda is a few years older than me, and I always looked up to her for her poise, grace, beauty, and confidence, but not until I became a mother and navigated (and continue to navigate) the questions of Who do I want to be now? What kind of a career path should I follow? How can I achieve this while still prioritizing my family? etc., etc., etc., did I truly understand just how much grit and determination it took for her to press onward and upward in her personal journey.

I am grateful for meeting Fernanda (and the outstanding women in her family!) and for her showing me that in this ride of life, risks of all sizes reap incredible rewards . . . and many are completely unplanned or serendipitous.

Q & A with Fernanda Vezina

[Note: This Q & A is a transcription of a phone interview.]

Where do you get your energy/what motivates you?

“On the personal level: The kids, family, travel, music . . . I love to plan traveling with the family, not only because we get to spend time together but a lot of quality time, but I see the kids learning about other cultures, other people, and valuing what we have here, the life we have. Because my mom is Italian, married to a Brazilian, and I’m married to an American, traveling and indulging in other cultures is very important to me and is becoming very important to our kids and our family. We’ve learned together, we spend time together, and we get to appreciate what we have.

“On the professional level: I really get energy by serving people. I take care of something that is so deeply important to people, which is their money, their legacy--they’re worried about outliving their money, are they going to be able to retire, are they going to leave a good legacy for their kids, grandkids--so serving those families and helping them so intimately gives me so much energy and motivates me so much. I love to serve. I love what I do, and I think being able to accomplish that with the families I work with is such a huge motivation. I’m a planner by nature, so being able to plan with and for those families is so important to me--that definitely gives me energy and motivation, too.”

What other women inspire you?

“Number one, my friends. All of my successful friends--my best friends from college, my childhood friends from San Juan, I have friends all over the world, one in Singapore, one in London, one in San Francisco, you in Oregon, one in Tuscany, several in Sao Paulo. So all of those successful women are major inspirations to me, in their different ways, doing their different things, in their different places. If we’re talking about a person that is famous, I have to say Cleopatra. I’ve read that book several times--she was such a warrior, defending Egypt, and such a beautiful, strong lady back so many years before Christ, and how was she able to pull that off? Respect and power and accomplishing so many things. I love Cleopatra and her story.”

How do you break up your days/what’s a day-in-the-life look like?

“I’m a planner. I’m organized. I organize my days, [my husband] John’s, the kids’ . . . if you let me, I’ll organize the neighbors’ too! So, our days start early. I drop off the kids at school or they ride their bikes, but normally out the door by 7:30. I like to be in the office before the market opens at 8:30 Central Time, so I’m normally there before 8 so I can plan for the day, and then I normally stay in the office until about 3:30, which, the market’s closed by then.

“I have all my meetings organized, calls, leadership roles. Once I get out of the office, the kids are coming home from school. I think it’s very important to be there for them, so we help with homework and all of that, and then after that, the kids go do their sports, and we come home, we eat dinner. I cook every single night, and they play in the front yard with our neighbors, their friends, and we eat dinner as a family, we take showers, we go to bed.

“It’s pretty simple, and the boys are at that age where they know what to do, so it’s become fun because we don’t have to be asking them a million times, ‘Go take a shower, go do this, go do that,’ so they know their role and they help out, too. So that’s kind of how my day is. Nothing exciting, but really organized. I feel like when it’s organized, it’s easier to make it through, at least for me, since John and I are both working parents full-time, and then we also want to be there for the kids. So, it works.”

How do you stay organized or what strategies do you have for accomplishing goals?

“It’s natural for me to stay organized. I think that’s why I love so much what I do. I’m a financial planner. I like to plan. I like to organize. And the strategies I use are so many, but if I could give you just like a good idea . . . I use my strategies by actions and not by only, ‘What do I want to accomplish?’

So, for example, I like to say to a person that says, ‘Well, this year, I’m going to lose 20 pounds.’ Most likely, she wont get that desired accomplished because she’s not saying what actions she is taking to accomplish what she desires. . . . Let’s say I want to buy a house in Colorado, like we just did. So what do I need to do to buy a house in Colorado? So, I organize my strategies by which actions I am going to take. How much money am I going to put aside every day, every week, every month? And what is my deadline?

So putting my actions, writing my actions down, rather than my final goals, helped me tremendously accomplish all of my dreams. Because if you just think about, for example, a person who says, ‘I want to lose 20 pounds’ may not be able to do it because they got lost on what actions they need to do rather than a person who says, ‘In 2021, I want to wear red lipstick every day,’ because they’re going to wake up, they’re going to get the red lipstick, put it on. So I think it has been very important to me, in several years, to just organize my strategies by which actions I am going to do.”

Name three positives that came out of 2020 for you personally.

“To name three positives 2020 brought me . . . I wouldn’t be able to. I think 2020 was one of the best years for us as a family. We were in such a hustle, on the go all the time, John and I, we barely saw each other. The kids were on the go and we had a schedule and we were on autopilot. Twenty-twenty came and all of us just slowed down, we were able to be home, watch movies, do nothing, eat popcorn, do charcuterie boards, play card games, and that’s when we realized how important it is to be together as a family doing nothing.

“We were outside the other day and Antonio asks me, ‘Mom what was the best year of your life?’ And I said, ‘Probably the year you were born and the year Vincent was born,’ and then I asked him, ‘What was the best year of your life?’ And he said, ‘2020 because we spent so much time together, and that’s so important to me.’ So that, right there, it was so valuable, I can’t even describe how important 2020 was for us.

“We did so much together. The kids learned so much more than they would have learned than if they were in school. I had more time to be at home with them. John had more time to be with me. We evolved as a couple. We evolved as parents. And then on the financial side, too, we were able to dedicate ourselves to our personal finances, our budgets. We were able to accomplish financial goals because we were finally looking within, and so 2020 was an amazing year, and I am very thankful for the opportunity for us being together so much.”

What’s your go-to recipe?

Stay tuned!

Do you have any good life hacks?

“I can’t think of any good life hacks. I’m sure I have a couple. The things I can think of off the top of my head are some Brazilian old wives tales. For example, one is when you’re driving in a parking lot and there’s no space available, you scratch your butt, and they say you’re going to find a spot. And I have to tell you, every time I can’t find a spot, and I scratch my butt, next thing you see, there’s a car backing up, and there goes my beautiful spot right there. Another Brazilian old wive’s tale is that the color of the underwear you spend your New Year’s Eve wearing--so if you want peace, and relaxation, and tranquility for the following year, you wear white, and don’t ask me why it’s the underwear--it could be the socks or the T-shirt, but no, it’s the underwear--if you want love, of course, is red, if you want health, it’s yellow, so you can Google--there’s several different colors of underwear you can choose and all the women in Brazil respect this rule. You don’t want to mess with that.”