Becoming a daughter to the world.
A birds-eye view photograph of the Amazon rainforest.
Nathalie Gil is the President of Sea Shepherd Brasil, located in her homeland, and an alumna of the Regenerative Leadership Journey 2022, by Regenerators Academy. This is how regenerative practice has helped Nathalie in her role within the NGO. And, this is her story of finding her place in the world.
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For over 22 years, Nathalie worked at the intersection of culture, behavior, and strategy — a path that began in corporate businesses and now drives my work in environmental impact and animal protection.
Now, she uses everything she has learned to defend what matters most: life in the ocean and on the planet. Strategy, for her, is now about protecting the future with courage, creativity, and impact.
Nathalie used to fear the deep ocean.
She’d inherited the fear from her father. He’d ascended too fast on a past diving trip, partially impairing his hearing.
But the water called to her. She held a fascination with what lay beneath those waves. What was held within that deep dark, experienced by her father but beyond her reach?
What does it mean, to be a woman called to the sea, and yet afraid of the sea?
Perhaps it means the same as being a woman called to do what’s right, and yet who has worked for and with the biggest corporations on our Earth.
And, perhaps, it means the same as being a woman who wishes to make her father proud, and yet whose path calls her away from his dreams for her.
At some point, you need to decide whether or not you’re going to say ‘yes’ to taking the plunge.
It was in 2019 that Nathalie felt that ‘yes’. In Bali while on a break from the private sector, she signed up for a scuba diving course. And found her new home in the very place she’d feared the most. The very place that her father feared for himself, and for her.
“My first dive, I was feeling like I was on an alien planet. Then a turtle was coming my way, loads of cuttle fish, colourful corals. I was like, man, I’m completely vulnerable here. If I take my mask off, I die. I don’t belong here. But at the same time, it felt like a peaceful, balanced, world. There are no big wars or big differences, no big disparities. It’s just very calm and balanced. It’s an amazing meditation to go underwater. All these animals don’t care about you at all. In a forest, the animals are trained to fear humans. Humans have been here a long time. But humans haven’t been under the sea for a long time. These animals couldn’t care less about humans. They don’t just run away. It felt to me like these are unchartered waters. And we’re already damaging them so fast. I saw so much plastic.”
This is Nathalie’s story of finding her calling in and to the sea. A calling that took her away from the private sector, away from her father’s hopes for her. And how, in taking the plunge, she found her way back home.
The body protests what the mind decides
Nathalie had originally wished to be a biologist, or something similar.
But her father, who had grown up poor in Brazil, had worked hard to make a life for himself and to give his children a good life. He wanted them to have the opportunities he’d had to work so hard for. He wished for Nathalie to go to business school.
Their negotiations led to a mutual compromise: Nathalie would forge a career in communications. Here, she would learn about people and psychology while also building a career in Marketing and Advertising.
It was a compromise that Nathalie found she loved. After the decision was made, she spent 19 years working with companies, working to understand the human brain, human behaviour, doing social research, anthropology and ethnography work.
And yet. While Nathalie loved the nature of her work, a deep disquiet bubbled within her, sometimes louder, sometimes quieter.
“I was using that [knowledge] to help companies sell stuff that people don’t need. And making rich people richer.”
Things came to a head when the business consultancy firm she was working for tried to pair her with their biggest client, a global oil and energy company.
It was a client she had managed to avoid, after she refused to work with them after being hired by the firm. But the time had come; she wouldn’t be allowed to avoid them anymore.
The directors convinced her into the work by telling her it was a sustainability project, knowing that this would make it easier for her to say ‘yes’. But there was nothing sustainable about it.
“It was the first time I felt it in my body: a rejection, disgust with myself. I remember crying, and procrastinating. I remember working like hell, but still procrastinating. I was finding other stuff to do; I couldn’t face doing the [work I’d been asked to do]. It was the pivot time in my life. I remember it vividly. ”
Nathalie needed to make a change. Her health and body were being impacted by the work her body knew she didn’t wish to be doing. Late hours, takeaways, work unaligned with her values in an organization that she felt had betrayed her; all were taking their toll.
The year was 2019. The sea called. She embarked on her break from the sector that was making her ill, leaving the consultancy firm and the large brands behind, and set sail on her travels.
The body knows and the mind follows
That first scuba dive in Bali awakened something within Nathalie.
As she continued her travels, everywhere she went she would hear of Sea Shepherd. She had been looking for volunteer work, but nothing had been right so far. Sea Shepherd felt different.
And so, Nathalie took another plunge: signing up to volunteer with them.
She didn’t think she’d be chosen; she had neither activist nor naval skills.
But two months later, she received a call: be in Mexico in five days.
Nathalie went.
And her body was her compass again. As Nathalie arrived in the shipyard, her body knew that this was going to be a dividing point in her life. She didn’t know what to expect. But her body knew it would be big.
She was tasked with helping to maintain one of Sea Shepherd’s ships, an old World War II ship.
With paint in her hair, doing the physical labour of removing rust, Nathalie found she had never been happier. From the people on the ship, she began to learn more about veganism, about predatory fishing, a biocentric vision of the world, about so many of the ethics that underpinned the organization’s work.
And then, the stars aligned. Nathalie heard that the founder of Sea Shepherd wanted to run a campaign protecting the river dolphins, a species threatened with extinction.
Two of the five species lived in Brazil.
Nathalie learned that there was no one on the ground in Brazil to do the research needed. And her body glimmered.
“I said this is what I’ve been doing my whole life, but I was researching [things like] toothpaste. Let me do it. I looked into it, and it was like doing research for a new sector: who are the players, the threats to the animals, what do we already know, who are the experts?”
Nathalie carried out the research, presenting her findings to the President of Sea Shepherd Brasil at the time. There were fears that Brazil was too dangerous for activists, but Nathalie’s findings helped them realize that defending and conserving the rivers and waters of the land weren’t as high a risk for activism work.
Her course was set. Nathalie went back to working in the private sector, this time for a sustainability company, to fund her volunteering with Sea Shepherd Brasil and their river dolphin work.
By the end of 2021, her work had helped build the NGO enough that she was able to quit her sustainability job altogether, and start earning a salary full-time with Sea Shepherd Brasil.
It was then that she heeded another call: the Regenerative Leadership Journey cohort of 2022, by Regenerators Academy.
Learning from regenerative practices
“When I migrated to the NGO world, I was still bringing a lot of the concepts and theories and expertise from the private sector with me. I had this impression that I could use my expertise from the private sector to save the world and in the third sector. But that was so limiting. Some of the mistakes of the private sector are that they’re using very mechanistic ways of working. [The Regenerative Leadership Journey] really transformed me. I immediately applied everything to how I was working in the NGO; how we think about feedback, reframing my mission, [removing] KPIs.”
Nathalie first learned of regenerative practices while working for the sustainability company that was helping her continue her volunteering work. The co-founder was learning from books like Daniel Christian Wahl’s Designing Regenerative Cultures, and the organization was taking on clients looking to integrate regenerative processes into their value chains. As part of her work, Nathalie began reading more and more about regeneration. It was in her learning that she came across Laura Storm’s and Giles Hutchins’ Regenerative Leadership book. And then the Regenerative Leadership Journey.
Given her work with Sea Shepherd Brasil, Nathalie was able to apply for and was given a scholarship place to be part of the Journey’s first cohort, in 2022.
Like Marion Brastel, Nathalie devoured the book, reading it alongside beginning the Journey, and finishing it within the first few months.
Like Marion, Nathalie didn’t wait for the course to finish before applying what she was learning.
Feedback appraisals were transformed, removing KPIs and becoming more rooted in people’s humanity. The ‘Regenerative Business DNA’ spiral was used in an annual planning session, helping the team work through each of its three elements and what it meant for them. The tools were helping Nathalie shape Sea Shepherd Brasil, define its mission, and create a culture of care in a sector rife with burnout and exhaustion.
Diagram of The Regenerative Business DNA spiral framework, by Gile Hutchins and Laura Storm
Now, over two years after the closing ceremony of that first cohort, Nathalie and her team at Sea Shepherd Brasil are still feeling the ripples of what she learned.
“I’ve created mantras with the team, like: we’re going to be as big as the world wants us to be; we won’t go crazy accepting every single new job; the right time will be the right time. We’re very small, a team that is exhausted and work with so much passion. Environmental donations for NGOs in Brazil are challenging; the ocean is at the very end of the spectrum [of what people are interested in supporting]. Our team doesn’t earn much, we rely a lot on volunteers, their talents and their rare availability. What I say is ‘let’s do enough, and enough is okay’. The majority of the time we go with the flow; if it’s too stressful then we can postpone; if a new opportunity appears, we quickly adapt to embrace it! We live as a super-organism, reacting to the world outside. A lot of this is what I’ve brought from the vision of the [Regenerators] Academy.”
And what of the impact on Nathalie herself?
"While my memory of the classes isn’t clear, I remember the energy. I remember feeling a strong energy with the people around there, and so many people who were genuine in why they were there. I remember crying a lot just hearing people’s stories. And the smaller groups always felt very safe. My Home Circle was very welcoming, and I really liked that. We created a bond… and it was like having witnesses to your journey; people who understood you through it, and could help create the narrative of how you were going through it.
Now, I feel much more confident listening to my gut, to my instinct, to not think I’m not ready to do something just because I feel I don’t know enough. It feels to me I respect this life force within me that means you will find places to learn and evolve. This feeling of letting it be is much more integrated in me. Sometimes, I used to feel I wasn’t using the right frameworks, I didn’t have enough expertise in NGOs. But it’s like a life force, you’re evolving, you never stop, life and nature. I process everything and evolve through everything."
Reflecting back on her 19 years in the private sector, Nathalie has strong words about her experiences:
"Even though you can cover it with beautiful words and inspirational messages, everywhere in the private sector, every brand I worked with, none was born in a genuine background. All of them were born with ‘let’s make money’ as a mission. Purely that.
We were convincing clients that we were this amazing, passionate team, and that we wanted what’s best for society. But it wasn’t true. I had this naive belief that I could do an internal job of changing the private sector, moving money in the right way.
And this is something I never thought of in the years I worked before I learned about regenerative leadership [in 2022]: nature is doing a huge job here. If you are a company that is using materials from mining, what about the price of making those stones and rocks and metals actually exist? How many millions of years of energy was put into that? How is nature receiving something back from it? She’s receiving nothing."
Becoming a daughter to the world
Nathalie has recently been able to have an honest conversation with her father about the course she chose to follow and navigate all those years after they negotiated about her career.
Looking at her, he shared words that Nathalie hadn’t expected to hear from the man whom she had worked so hard to make proud before turning her back on his vision for her:
“Nathalie, you’re not my daughter. You’re a daughter to the world. You were born to serve the world. And I’m pretty sure of that.”
Tears flow at the retelling. And Nathalie reflects, “You’re a drop, and you’re the ocean.”
"It feels like a responsibility to share my story. It feels like so many people are stuck in the same place where I was. But I look back, and I don’t feel sad. I understand that little girl wanting to make her dad proud. And I feel a responsibility for that woman who accepted the oil consultancy project. More people may be in that same box, not even knowing that there is another way, that it is possible.
Once I changed my career path, everything else came so naturally to me: I became vegan, became more conscious of what I eat and purchase, I avoid plastics, harmful chemicals, and processed food. I donate more, help people on their journeys. It seemed like once I was not happy with where I put my energy in life, I was comforting my body with instant gratifications as a way to compensate. Once that was gone, my body felt nurtured by what I decided to spend my living on. And everything else follows. Once you love yourself from within, you have an abundance of love to change the world outside.
Sometimes, you’re afraid of dropping the things in your life that want to pass through the journey, things that don’t matter anymore.
You just need to take the plunge. The sea has wonderful plans for you."
Storyowner is Nathalie Gil
Words by Shimrit Janes.
