Liz Pasillas walked off a Miami stage in 2017 certain she had failed, and spent the next eight years turning that into a method. She gave it to TEDx Ciudad Juárez in about eight minutes.
TEDx Talks published the talk, in Spanish, on May 27, 2026, under the title Lo que sucede cuando empezamos a liderar desde lo que ya somos. Pasillas introduces herself as an entrepreneur, producer and leader of technology and cultural projects from Mexico's northern border, and the question she puts to the room is small enough to answer and hard enough to avoid: what changes when you stop leading from who you think you should be?
Eight minutes on leadership, told from the border.
It starts with a pitch that did not go as planned, at an event that did not end there.
In 2017 Pasillas and her husband went through a professional crisis. A business accelerator helped them rethink the whole thing and build a new prototype, and she was selected for the Startup Nation Conference in Miami to pitch in front of more than 30 investors.
On stage, at the projections slide, her mind went blank. Her accent got stronger and, without noticing, she switched to Spanish. She left believing she had failed and cried in an empty room. But the event ran three days.
That is where the talk turns: what if a fall is a mirror rather than a verdict — and what if leadership starts from what is already there instead of from the version of yourself you were performing?
Impostor syndrome is common. Her answer is to go and collect evidence.
Pasillas talks about impostor syndrome and self-sabotage, and about why they land harder on women, who carry more social pressure, more stereotypes and less representation. She cites studies putting impostor syndrome at 70% of people, with higher rates among women in leadership.
Her turning point was the Reflected Best Self exercise, from the Center for Positive Organizations at the University of Michigan. You ask the people who matter in your life — colleagues, friends, family, bosses — for concrete stories of you at your best, up to 30 of them. Then you read the verbs, adjectives and behaviours that repeat, and patterns of strength start to show. She notes that the brain holds on to negative memories more easily, three for every positive one by her account, which is the reason to go and gather the positive ones deliberately rather than wait to remember them.
One example she gives: a friend who became a mother found her skills had not disappeared, only changed direction. Pasillas points at the other moments the exercise is for — a career change, starting over after burnout, designing a career with a purpose, moving from contributor to leader, or finding yourself again after a loss.
Five steps to start leading from your strengths.
- Reconnect with the moments when you felt alive, useful and strong.
- Ask five people you trust for specific stories about you, not adjectives.
- Look for the patterns that repeat across those stories.
- Redefine your leadership from what you find.
- Make it a yearly habit.
She closes by telling the room that their best version is not a perfect one but a powerful one, and that they are already enough.
A founder talking openly about the inner work behind building from the border.
Most of what gets written about a company is the work it delivered. Pasillas put the other half on a stage: how a founder recovers from failing in public and turns it into a way of leading. Her profile in MexicoIndustry covers the founder behind the talk, and Jonalex Herrera's TEDx talk is the other founder on the same stage, arguing something adjacent about identity and belonging. About carries the current company context.