Fair Play & Good Game
Nathália is the User Activation Manager at Hotmart, and in her free time, plays volleyball team in a renowned club in Minas Gerais.
In a team, the participation of every player is reflected in the final strategy. The individual moves of each member is part of a role, and everyone is responsible for the harmony of the group. But, in order to keep it harmonious, a lot more than experience is needed. You need commitment and passion.
These are the great challenges faced by Nathália every single day as head of the User Activation team at Hotmart, and a couple of times per week, as a volleyball player with her team at Minas Tênis Clube.
Despite the Syrian and Italian heritage she carries in her name, Nathália Salomão Orsini Cavalieri was born and raised in the city of Belo Horizonte, and attributes her determination to genetics.
She says she belongs to a matriarchal family, having been influenced by strong women in her upbringing. From her mother, grandmother, up to her great-grandmother, for whom she nurtures great admiration because of how she was a woman ahead of her time, and the tattoos that cover her body and tell her story.
“Leadership has always had a constant presence in my life. The challenge I face is to deal with this instinct more wisely.”
From a very young age, Nathália has shown a knack for sports. At school, her first go was at swimming. She achieved such success that, at the age of 12, she had already joined the swimming team at Minas Tênis Clube, a traditional sports club in Belo Horizonte. However, she realized that it wasn’t the sport for her, mainly because it was an individual one, and she enjoyed teamwork.
She took this to her mother, who supported her in the decision to leave the team, but also encouraged her to choose a different sport. And that’s when she discovered volleyball.
Standing at 1m74cm tall, she was confident she would stand out among the players, but she was in for a surprise: the other girls were also really tall. Some were even taller than she was, more experienced, and would give any newcomer a hard time.
From the start, she faced many obstacles in order to establish herself in the sport, from proving she was talented to those who doubted it, and overcoming the initial rejection from the more seasoned girls.
But being a woman with a fire in her belly, she never considered giving up on the game. She recognized she wasn’t the most experienced player, but when she was on the court, she was committed to doing her best.
When the time came to take the university entrance examination, it was hard to juggle studying, working in an insurance company with her father, and playing volleyball. Even though it meant a lot to her, Nathália had to make the difficult decision of keeping the sport as a hobby, going to practice less often on weekdays, up to the point she had to let go of it for a couple of years.
After her graduation in Publicity and Advertising, right from the first professional experiences, she realized she was not a “creator”, but a “doer”. The greatest triumphs in her career were in the collaborative experiences, in which she dealt with groups and managed tasks.
“Learning that comes from exchanging experience, to me, is much more valuable.”
After her time in university, Nathália spent some time abroad. London, San Francisco and Hong Kong were some of the cities in which she had the opportunity to work, and put into practice the fair play she learned on the court, as well as her collaborative instinct.
On one of these occasions, in 2010, she was invited to work in an online gaming and betting company, as a content editor. She aced it, as she was really keen on sports and used to working with media. According to Nathália, this was a turning point in her professional life. The company had over 200 employees from more than 50 different countries, and this led her to make friends from all over the world.
Since then, Nathália has learned how to value the culture of the places she worked in. After some experiences, she decided to bring back to Brazil everything she had learned. And it was at this same period, in the beginning of 2014, that her story with volleyball was resumed.
This reconciliation was not an easy one, though. After such a long time away from the game, Nathália faced the same challenges from before. But she wanted to persevere, and keep practicing the sport that had brought her so much joy, and taught her how to overcome obstacles. So she arrived early to practice, in order to get tips and extra training from her coach. She got her technique back, and, in time, came out on top. Her effort was acknowledged and she finally got the status and respect she worked so hard to achieve.
So, up to this day, twice a week, Nathália gets together with her team, and occasionally, enters competitions against other amateur teams. There are 18 women in her group, in different ages, who share a story with the game just like hers. This is yet another opportunity for Nathália to have access to different cultures.
In 2016, Hotmart found Nathália and offered her a job in the Marketing department. Once again, she was drawn to the opportunity of working in a culturally diverse group, and she accepted the challenge. Today, she is the manager of the User Activation department, a team that is focused on the activation and growth of the user base on the platform through our tools and services.
A united team is what motivates Nathália to keep performing to the max. One of the main project in her team, Hotmart Academy, has now more than 80 lessons offered to users for free, with more than 170 thousand students, 47 thousand of them already certified.
