I'm Scared of Transforming

Bernardo Torres - 2026-03-29

I'm in one of those moments where life is holding a mirror up to me. Lázaro turns 2 and Uncommon turns 12. I'm standing in the middle of many changes, asking myself whether time is carrying me toward something or away from something. I still don't know. The uncertainty, which would have paralyzed me before, today seems like the most honest answer I have.

For 12 years I learned to push, to build from willpower. To be the gravitational center of everything that moved around Uncommon. I learned that if I didn't push, nothing moved forward. At the time, it was a real virtue. Today that same muscle is my main obstacle.

Over the years I've been telling myself a story about who I need to be to deserve a place. Alfred Adler had a name for this: the guiding fiction. Mine said that my value depended on Uncommon working perfectly. That being founder, provider, leader and father were synonyms for never wavering. That doubt was a luxury others could afford, not me. That fiction served me for years and then charged me interest.

The map that got you out of the forest isn't necessarily the map that takes you to the mountain.

What nobody told me about founding a company is that the biggest risk isn't the market or the competition or capital. The biggest risk is that you become the single point of failure in the system you built. That you build an organization in your image and likeness, and that image starts to cost you more than it gives. Today I burden my team, or so I feel. The brutal honesty I owe myself is this: part of that burden I built myself. With well-intentioned decisions that created dependency. With generous leadership that was sometimes control disguised as care. I don't blame them, I understand them, and understanding them without solving everything for them is the hardest work I have today.

A team that doesn't carry its own responsibility isn't an HR problem. It's the mirror of how you lead them.

There's something else I find hard to admit out loud. I'm afraid, real fear, concrete, with a full name: fear of not being able to provide for my family. That the life I built and genuinely love will start to crumble because I didn't know how to make the transition in time. Fear that Lázaro will grow up seeing a father who didn't know how to let go of what no longer worked. For a long time I treated that fear as an enemy. As something to overcome, silence, convert into fuel to work harder. Today I treat it as information.

Buddhism has a teaching that took me too long to truly understand: suffering doesn't come from pain, it comes from resistance to pain. From clinging to what was, to what should be, to the image of what one believed one was. Letting go isn't giving up. Letting go is the necessary condition for something new to enter.

The fear you look at straight on is always smaller than the fear you avoid.

In the middle of all this, something strange is happening. I'm in the most creative period of my professional life. I read, write, produce, think. Every morning I have new ideas. I don't know exactly where all this is going, but I know it comes from a real place. From a place that wasn't available when I was in total control mode. Csikszentmihalyi called this flow, the state where challenge and capacity align and the ego steps aside. Zen calls it mushin: mind without mind: action without the interference of the actor. For a long time I interpreted that state as a distraction from what "really mattered." As if writing and thinking were a luxury while the company needed me to sell, close, execute. Today I understand I had the causality reversed.

Your creative state isn't a luxury, it's the scarcest and most valuable resource you have. Sacrificing it to attend to urgency is the worst deal you can make.

I've been thinking a lot about the message I tell my own clients about the difference between the strategy we plan and the strategy that emerges. Uncommon's best moments weren't the most planned ones, they were the ones attended to with presence. Conversations that arrived without an agenda. Projects that appeared when I was being, not when I was executing a plan. I've been an expert in Uncommon for twelve years. The universe is inviting me, with all the discomfort that implies, to become a beginner of myself again. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few." I don't know exactly what Uncommon is in its next chapter. I know it has to be something I can build without destroying myself in the process. Something where the team carries its part with genuine pride. Something I can look Lázaro in the eyes ten years from now and tell him: this is how you make a transition. Not perfectly. Honestly.

You can't build the next chapter from the fear of the previous one. You need to let go of the pen before you can write with it again.

When you're a father you think frequently about legacy, that word so big it sometimes scares more than it inspires. I used to think legacy was what one built. The company, the size, the clients, the name. What remains when you're no longer here. Today I think the most important legacy I can leave Lázaro isn't a successful company, it's an honest relationship with fear. A living demonstration that men also doubt, also transform, also ask for help and also survive their own transitions. Children don't inherit their parents' assets. They inherit their relationship with difficulty. I want Lázaro to learn, by watching me, that trusting isn't the opposite of working hard. That flowing isn't the opposite of having direction. That transforming isn't failing at what one was. It's having the courage to become what one is being called to be.

The best legacy isn't what you leave built. It's the way your children learned to stand before the unknown.

I don't have the complete answers today and I'm no longer ashamed. I have twelve years of accumulated learning, a two-year-old son watching me, a team that deserves a better contract with me, and a company that still has something important to say to the world, even though I still don't know exactly how. I have fear and confidence at the same time. I've stopped treating that contradiction as a problem to solve. It's simply what it feels like to be alive in a moment that matters.

The river doesn't push the water. The river is the water moving.

I'm learning to be the river.