Vienda Maria

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Tag: travel

  • what it really takes

    wrapping up the wild donkey ride that was 2025 🫏

    DEC 24, 2025

    My final vlog of 2025: the last month in Paris, in all its unglamorous glory. Slow brunches and busy workdays, ethical fashion chats, pre-Christmas errands, a cold that took me out, and the quiet work of not turning difficulty into a victim story. I talk therapy (again), breakups, why we date our unresolved parental wounds, and what it actually takes to take responsibility for your life as a new year approaches. Also: three big losses, one major perspective shift, and the decision to leave Paris in search of sunlight.

    My apartment is set to a tropical 24°C, a decision I stand by morally. My weather app is teasing me with numbers between -1°C and 6°C, as if any of those are meaningfully different. The solstice slipped by quietly a few days ago, and with it, winter has officially arrived. I am hibernating through the final week of 2025, emerging only for strategic walks in glimpses of sunlight and friendship gatherings.

    It’s Christmas Eve. I’m in bed with my laptop balanced on my thighs. A fragile truce between closing the final loops and rest, peppermint tea stationed to my right as both beverage and emotional support. Outside, the last remaining leaves clinging to the final undecided tree outside my window have turned a dark, rain-soaked brown and are rustling in the wind.

    The past two months have been a slightly feral mix of redesigning, rebuilding and upgrading The Mentor Training. The kind of work that makes you forget what day it is, question your life choices, and then suddenly remember exactly why you started.

    This training was born in 2022, not from a slick business plan, but from something I couldn’t ignore. Client after client arrived in my world carrying quiet damage from experiences with people who called themselves coaches or mentors and had deep emotional influence without the responsibility or rigour to match it.

    Now entering our fourth year, the training has matured. The curriculum is stronger, the standards clearer, and the focus remains on ethical, relational, embodied mentoring — not performance, not charisma, not “personal brand,” but trust.

    On January 9th, 10th and 11th, we’re offering a free 3-day introduction, with enrolments opening for two weeks immediately after. If this speaks to you — or if someone immediately comes to mind — please register and share it.

    Thank you for being here with me and reading, watching, commenting and sharing your journey as we bumped along side each other through this year. This was my last note to you from me in 2025.

    I am taking January off from outward-facing work and this newsletter to replenish and rebuild after a year that took everything. If you’re a private client, you’ll see me in our video calls as usual.

    If you’re a free subscriber, starting next week you’ll meet one of my inspirations every Wednesday: on the list. In November, I started this gentle, playful interview series about what women I admire are tending to, dreaming of, and prioritising, one list at a time. It’s been such a joy introducing you to women who show that anything really is possible when you choose to trust yourself.

    If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll continue to receive my most vulnerable writing: unfiltered, raw, honest stories and updates, as always. Essays I’m working on in my drafts include Bad Sex with Nice People, Inside My Notes App, and My Year of Magical Thinking.

    If you’ve been thinking about becoming a paying subscriber, I’d be so grateful for your support. And there’s a little extra nudge: through the end of the year, I’m offering 25% off an annual subscription:

    get 25% off her way club

    See you next year!

    Vienda

  • what I really think of nyc

    & why I’ve stayed…

    find my list of fav cute places in nyc here on Instagram

    I heard a loud crunch, followed by the softest gasp, and turned my head. A bicycle lay on its side, a man tangled with it on the ground, and a large SUV hovered just above them, still and silent.

    In an instant, people moved. Without hesitation, strangers rushed forward, bending down, reaching out, offering presence and help. A small collision. A moment of disruption. And then, care. Simple, instinctive, human.

    That’s what New York is like. Sudden, raw, and full of heart.

    My friend Petra and I were sitting on the terrace of my favourite natural wine bar in LES when it happened, the fragility of human life, the compassionate human response brought tears to my eyes. In many ways, this encapsulates what I think of this city.

    People keep asking me “what were your first impressions?” and “did you actually even want to go?” and “what do you really think?” and “do you want to stay?” 

    New York holds you in ways you cannot hold yourself. It cradles you and asks you to let yourself be swept away by its momentum. If you cling to what you think you know and resist the current, it will spit you out. It is deeply imperfect. It is alive in a way that catches you off guard. There are layers to it, and not all of them are beautiful. You cannot escape yourself here. You meet yourself again and again. In the streets, in the faces, in the silence that exists between the sirens. 

    I think the New York that people fell in love with, the one that raised artists and misfits, the one pulsing with radical self-expression, is gone. Or at least fading. What remains is a softened echo. A diluted version wrapped in branding. You can still hear the heartbeat, but it’s muffled by rent prices and influencer cafés.

    I’ve seen this happen before. The cities stretch, and the soul thins. Creatives, thinkers, those who live at the edge of culture leave. No longer willing to mortgage their joy for the performance of a lifestyle. The New York I had hoped to meet doesn’t live here anymore. Or maybe she’s hiding. I don’t know.

    And still, the city pulls you in. There is something magnetic about the way life moves here. The pace makes you sharper. The people make you braver. Everyone is building something. Everyone is searching. 

    It has given me clarity. About what I want. About what matters.

    New York City retains a feverish optimism that anything is possible here. The American dream that you can create a new life on these shores remains intact and alive. The people cling to it, and this perspective offers opportunities to build on possibility and belief, if little substance. And that is enough. It is enough to start with. Substance comes with time.

    New York City hold the power of proximity. Most cities are built wide, so it takes an hour, if not more, to go anywhere. It is built sky-high, so everything is within half an hour’s reach, either walking or by Subway. It means you can meet people and go places without overly taxing both your energy and your time. The currency of this city is the value of your relationships. 

    That accessibility makes a huge difference.

    I came to New York for love. For adventure. For the desire to experience a different perspective and to reclaim my sense of inspiration and hope. I believed, deep in my bones, that the relationships I build shape everything that comes next. And for that, I couldn’t imagine a better place. 

    I also came to New York because I wasn’t sure where else to go.

    On Tuesday evening, I was supposed to board a flight to London, but I didn’t.

    Life cracked open in a way I didn’t see coming. Plans changed. The shape of my future shifted overnight. And so I stayed. Not because I wanted to, exactly, but because something asked me to meet it here, in the unknown, in the aftermath, in New York.

    hi friends!

    I felt like nodding my head at the fact that this newsletter is never just one thing. It’s part personal memoir, part story, part soul of my business. It contains multitudes, like I do, including updates and offerings, woven between reflections and real-life turning points. It arrives when it’s ready, not when a schedule demands it.

    Some weeks it’s a window into what I’m creating or learning. Other times it’s just a trace of where I’ve been or what’s breaking open in me. But always, it’s a long thread of my desire to be of service. To contribute something meaningful through words, through beauty, through whatever insights life offers me to pass on.

    I’m so grateful you’re here. That you let me do things this way. That you’ve never asked me to make my creative work more conventional, more predictable, more polished. Instead, you let me do it her way. And for that, I’m deeply glad. I’m working on an essay that reveals this business approach in depth because this is what I have discovered:

    Even though it’s really scary at first, it always pays off to do things your way. Even you think it’s wrong. Even when you think it’ll never work. Which is the underlying premise of her way club. To always trust yourself despite any doubt. 

    For the past months, I’ve been quietly working on something behind the scenes. A little companion guide I’ve been using in my own life for more than a decade. A way to ground, to find rhythm again, to work with the natural currents of time instead of pushing against them.

    It’s called Planet Powered…:for the curious

    Over the last few days, everything finally came together. The words, the flow, the feeling of it. It’s part written word, part gentle practice. A simple guide to living in rhythm with the energy of each day of the week. A way to tune back in, realign, and soften into how life wants to move through you.

    I’ll share more soon, but for now, I just wanted to let you know it’s here.

    And I hope it meets you exactly where you are.