Just Me
Why I'm stepping out from behind my business name to work as myself
In the past two weeks, I stepped away from screens, visited Hamburg with my parents and partner, and celebrated my birthday.
I also made a decision that's been brewing for some time: to stop operating under Connection Camino and embrace what's truly behind all this work: just me.
I've been running Connection Camino since 2021, something that emerged after two years of freelancing.
As a one-person project, it felt good to have a container for experimenting with my ideas about developing a new world of work.
But I always knew it wouldn't become a "real" company in the traditional sense. The intention was never to hire people or scale, and every time I explored the path of joining incubators or preparing pitch decks, I would dissociate and feel like I was putting on a mask. This wasn't impostor syndrome; it was the deeper recognition that I wasn't being myself.
Why now?
Before this two-week pause, I spent time in Andalucía, the south of Spain, where my family is from. Reconnecting to my roots was a long-overdue process of realigning with my intuition, my sense of home, and honoring the energy of this land. This trip gave me something unexpected:
A deep inhale of authenticity and beauty.
A deep exhale of expectations and complications.
I'm 39 now.
A middle-class millennial who grew up with promises of success, thriving, and stability, only to see them crumble when I graduated from university in 2008. We're a generation that learned to navigate uncertainty and work hard for peanuts we couldn't even plant to watch them grow.
My safety net is my parents.
My investments are in psychotherapy, coaching, and well-being.
My long-term thinking spans six months.
I could identify as the victim of an unfair system, get panicked and frustrated, and try to achieve through hustling and grinding everything I was promised as a child. I already tried that path, and it felt like selling my soul. Whether I consciously chose this situation or not, today I accept it.
The frustration remains, but it has shifted.
I'm no longer frustrated by trying to achieve the middle-class life my parents envisioned for me.
Today's frustration comes from trying to build an authentic, aligned life without a blueprint, within a system that keeps pushing everyone toward pursuing illusions and obsolete dreams of success.
Operating as the founder of Connection Camino felt like navigating this new frustration with old-system thinking.
It became another box I created for myself after burning down so many others.
I was trying to contain and make digestible something that is constantly evolving, fluid, complex. What one business mentor literally called "fluffy" when reviewing my pitch deck.
My entire thinking and inner world became defined by a static label that needed constant revision to fit the category of "business," because I, the founder, was never fully aligned with it.
Connection Camino, as the container for everything I do and am, lacked my humanness, which is precisely what makes everything I do meaningful.
To me, the work I do is art.
When I hold and create transformational spaces, I'm tending to beauty.
When I ask deep questions, I'm sculpting clarity.
When I guide others to cultivate self-awareness, I'm weaving meaning.
This is an expression of my essence, something I can only channel through my whole human identity.
Reflecting on what Granada and Almería gifted me—this connection to authenticity, beauty, and the practice of letting go of expectations and complications—has brought me to this moment.
You can commission my doing and being, but you cannot contain it.
I can't even do that myself. It seems that I forgot for a second that my main value is freedom.
Some artists work under pseudonyms. Others use their own names.
From now on, I'm choosing the second option.
My website already reflects that: www.juditsaez.com.
And I’m not killing Connection Camino, but gently giving it a more suitable role: it will be the name for my calendar where I post the events, sessions, workshops that I curate, run, or co-host. You can subscribe here: lu.ma/connectioncamino.
What containers have you outgrown?
What would it feel like to let your work be an expression of your whole human self, rather than something that needs to fit into a box?
Love this! Feeling like inspired. It's so important to create space to listen to what feels right. And hard to truly listen to the answers that come up and align to them.