Bernie Borges [00:00:00]:
Most leadership stories start with a promotion or a business launch. Diana Panetta’s story starts with a murder, a respiratory arrest, and a decision that nearly killed her. She went from total collapse to building education systems for children that the world overlooks. This isn’t just a story about bouncing back. No, it’s much more than that. It’s a masterclass on what happens when responsibility becomes your strategy for survival. In this conversation, you will learn how pain can become the birthplace of purpose, why self-leadership must precede leading others, what reinvention actually looks like across decades, and how a survival story is now reshaping global education. Diana Panatta, welcome to the Life Fulfilled Podcast.
Bernie Borges [00:01:03]:
I wanna start our conversation at the beginning because I know that as we record this, you are sitting in London where you and your husband Diego reside currently.
Diana Pineda [00:01:12]:
Mm-hmm.
Bernie Borges [00:01:12]:
But you are, you’re originally from Colombia and that’s where your story begins. So let’s begin there. Start where you wanna start.
Diana Pineda [00:01:21]:
Thank you, Bernie. I’m super excited to be here. It’s a pleasure just to spend this time with you. And yeah, like you said, I was born in Colombia in a small city called Bucaramanga. We dance a lot. We spend a lot of time playing outside. It was, it was so much fun. And I grew up as an oldest daughter and my daddy was my best friend.
Diana Pineda [00:01:48]:
He wasn’t very strict with me. He was strict with my siblings, but with me, I was like, I don’t know, he was my first love. He was the man that taught me how to dance, the man who took me to the restaurant for the first time, the man who gave me flowers for the first time. So I grew up very close to him, more than closer to my mom. But unfortunately, he was murdered. When I was 18, and my life just came tumbling down into a path of destruction. And unfortunately, I went to drugs, first to marijuana to ease the pain, then to cocaine to be able to function. And it was really a path of destruction.
Diana Pineda [00:02:42]:
I was not going anywhere, and I felt alone. I felt lonely. Even though he was murdered, I felt that he failed me. And I tried several times to get out of that life, but I couldn’t. And one day, I mixed everything with alcohol, and I got respiratory arrest, and that led me to the emergency room. And I thought, okay, I’m destroying my life. I need to get out of this. I need to wake up, but—
Bernie Borges [00:03:20]:
So you’re a young adult here, right? You’re 18, 19 years old.
Diana Pineda [00:03:23]:
Yes, I was actually in my early 20s by that time. Okay. Yeah. And, but I couldn’t stop Bernie. It was so hard just to leave drugs. I tried several times. I went to several meetings. I tried everything, but I couldn’t stop it until one night.
Diana Pineda [00:03:45]:
It was a Saturday night, it was a party, and I was there, but I wasn’t there. You know, my mind was everywhere and nowhere. And I was passed out and somebody abused me. And that was horrible, Bernie. You know, when you wake up in a different place and you’re half naked and you feel, oh my God, What happened here? And then you try to, you know, get, you know, hold of yourself. And the worst thing wasn’t that actually. The worst thing was 2 months after I figured I was pregnant. You know, I wasn’t self-aware that I was destroying my life.
Bernie Borges [00:04:35]:
Okay. So, I mean, I’m kind of at a loss for words here, but at that moment when you discovered that you were pregnant, that was a turning point for you, right? Why don’t you speak to that?
Diana Pineda [00:04:51]:
Yeah, actually, I knew that I was destroying my life, but when I realized I was pregnant, I had to save myself. I have to save myself for that baby that was growing inside of me. So even though I I was not going into a good path, I realized a truth. The baby needed me to live. So I snapped out of that, whatever I was, and I was completely clean after that. When I realized, oh my God, I’m pregnant, I left everything, Bernie, everything. I left and they left me. I didn’t do drugs anymore or alcohol, marijuana, or anything.
Diana Pineda [00:05:42]:
I started eating properly. I surrounded myself with other people. I actually moved from one city to another just to receive the proper environment, the proper love, care. Because when you are in an environment that is not helping you, to grow, you need to remove yourself from that environment and get into one that will help you develop how you want and what you want. And that—
Bernie Borges [00:06:14]:
So Diana, as your story is unfolding here in our conversation, I wanna make an observation here, and I especially wanna call this out for the listener because I wanna connect the dots between your story and the theme of fulfilled leadership, which is what I’m all about. At this moment in your life, what I’m hearing you say, Diana, is that you found purpose.
Diana Pineda [00:06:38]:
Yes.
Bernie Borges [00:06:39]:
You aligned your values. I talk about this all the time. I actually teach this in my workshops. You aligned your values with your purpose and you became self-aware, which again is a big focus of fulfilled leadership. You became self-aware of that purpose and what you needed to do. And this was an act of self-leadership on your, your part to take the actions that you just explained that you take moving to different cities, becoming living clean, surrounding yourself with people that would be positive. That’s all self-leadership. And I wanna commend you for that.
Bernie Borges [00:07:17]:
I know that was a long time ago, and I’m sorry to that you’re reliving it in this conversation. And thank you for being willing and being vulnerable to relive it in this conversation. I’m sure it’s not easy. But I, I just wanted to give you that recognition and also point it out for the listener that that was an act of self-leadership on your part.
Diana Pineda [00:07:36]:
Yes. Thank you, Bernie. Actually, today is, uh, my puppy, uh, would be, well, not would be, but it was 32 years ago when that happened today. So it’s like, wow, it was, it was meant to be, you know, to realize all these decades have helped me to become the leader that I wanted to be. And what you say, Bernie, is so true because I wasn’t a leader of myself. I wasn’t taking care of my fitness or my health or my relationships. But then when I got pregnant, I became the leader that I needed to be for that baby. And I decided to receive the support that I needed as well to become healthier and to establish better relationships with others and with myself and with my body.
Diana Pineda [00:08:35]:
So in that moment, I realized that the systems that were surrounding me were helping me with my brokenness, and they were actually saving my life. So yes, I needed to become the leader for the baby in that moment.
Bernie Borges [00:08:55]:
Now, in your next chapter, if I understand correctly from what I know of your story, Diana, you met Diego and that became a new chapter for you. So tell us about that and the meaning behind that new chapter.
Diana Pineda [00:09:10]:
Yes, that’s the most beautiful part of my story, I think, because he became my life. When I lost my daddy in And he was my life, right? And I met other guys, but I didn’t connect with them, maybe because it was not the time, maybe because my heart wasn’t right at the moment, maybe because it was not Diego, of course. And I met him 3 years after that happened. And the most beautiful thing is that he saw me without shame about my past. So he gave me a different meaning about what happened to me and my son. So that was beautiful. So we got married, and we were living in Colombia, and we moved to the States. And there he studied and he worked.
Diana Pineda [00:10:05]:
And then I got pregnant again. I had another child, my second one, Daniel. And, uh, we were living in Texas and we had two major hurricanes and we lost our home in the 2008 crisis. Our world was collapsing and, um, we had to make the decision to, to move to another country. So we moved to Canada and, uh, Canada was amazing because it was our time to to establish ourselves and to really find out what were we made of in terms of our relationship as a husband and wife, with my children. We started paying attention to our health and our fitness. And I, with my two kids, I started thinking as well about my legacy. So, In that period of time, my oldest son, um, got himself kicked out of school.
Diana Pineda [00:11:11]:
Yay. Okay.
Bernie Borges [00:11:15]:
Yeah.
Diana Pineda [00:11:15]:
Because he was, he was amazing in mathematics, but he wanted all the things that school was not, uh, giving him. And, um, yeah, so I started homeschooling and that’s, you know, like another chapter.
Bernie Borges [00:11:28]:
Um, now when you started homeschooling, was homeschooling as advanced? I’m going to use the word advanced as, because it’s progressed and advanced quite a bit in recent years. So, you know, was it as much of a thing as it is today or was it more new at the time?
Diana Pineda [00:11:46]:
Yeah, it was, it was newer, especially in, in Canada. In the States, I think the homeschooling, it’s, it’s stronger. Um, and they have lots of books. I actually, I bought so many books from the States, from Martell Library. I love it, bookshop. And, but in Canada, it was not as traditional or as common as in the States. And I started homeschooling him because of well-being, because he wasn’t, the school was not tailoring the knowledge as he wanted to receive it. Like my oldest son is very creative.
Diana Pineda [00:12:32]:
He’s a musician, but he wanted to make money and he loved sports. And so through observation, I realized that he didn’t have the stillness to be in a traditional setting. You know, he didn’t want fixed schedules or assessments, you know, paper assessments or He didn’t want to be assessed as everyone, everybody else, because he, he used to say, mom, what if I am an eagle and I’m being assessed like if I was a monkey, you know, if I were a monkey. So what if I was a fish, I were a fish or, you know, things like that.
Bernie Borges [00:13:15]:
So, and Diana, did you at the time when you were experiencing this with your, your oldest, did you feel like this was unique to him or did you feel this to be more of a a bigger problem within the school system itself?
Diana Pineda [00:13:31]:
Yeah, I thought he was unique because as parents we think our children are unique. Uh, but then when I asked for help, I, I saw that so many parents, uh, wanted the same thing. So what I did was like, okay, there’s an opportunity to, for them to help me and for me to help them. And because I, what I did with Nick, uh, was through observation, create a curriculum for him according to his talents. So I started doing curriculum design for other parents that wanted the same thing, but their children were different. Maybe they were neurodivergent, maybe they were athletes. Um, there were some musicians as well, like my son. So I decided to create, um, resources for them and help parents to accommodate education towards their children.
Diana Pineda [00:14:27]:
So instead of taking the child into the system, um, I decided to take the child and build education around the student.
Bernie Borges [00:14:39]:
And you, so you built an online curriculum. Was this a school essentially?
Diana Pineda [00:14:44]:
It, I did it for 10 years. I designed curriculum for other parents, uh, for a decade. Um, because it was fun because I liked it because parents needed it. Sometimes because teachers needed it. Uh, but then, uh, we went back to Colombia, uh, because we wanted our children to live the experience in Colombia. And I wanted to make peace with the country as well, because when I left, I said, I will never go back. So I wanted them to experience the, the country where we grew up. So Um, we created a physical school with all the curriculum design that I was creating for the parents.
Diana Pineda [00:15:30]:
We had like 40 different subjects and kids could pick any of the subjects that they wanted. So it was kind of like a uni-iversity. It was kind of like a university, but it, but it was a school. And, um, I took that school to the Department for Education in, in Colombia and they didn’t accept it, Bernie, because they said, yeah, because they said you cannot teach kids to think, you know, and you’re teaching them how to think. I was like, what do you mean? And they said, you need to teach them math. You need to teach them English and you need to teach, I know, but it’s important that they have agency as well. Anyway. I, they rejected me 3 times and I was like, forget it.
Diana Pineda [00:16:17]:
I’m going to do it without your permission. And that’s what I did, but then COVID hit.
Bernie Borges [00:16:23]:
Okay. So what happened during COVID then?
Diana Pineda [00:16:26]:
COVID hit and Diego, my husband, he was working, uh, online since 2009. So for us, remote, remote working. And remote studying, it was natural. And when we started doing, uh, the school, I taught kids the tools, you know, we introduced Zoom, we taught, uh, our parents how to set up a place for the kids so they could study. And when COVID hit, my parents and my kids, they were, my kids, I mean the school, they were all prepared for COVID. You know, we were all, prepare for online learning. So our school in Latin America was the, one of the very few, or maybe the only one that didn’t stop teaching because we, we were prepared and it was amazing.
Bernie Borges [00:17:24]:
And did the school grow?
Diana Pineda [00:17:26]:
Oh my God, Bernie, it grew exponentially. It, it grew super fast and You know, looking back, I didn’t like how it grew, but it grew amazingly. We touched 15 countries and we had students from all sorts of paths of life. It was great, but in terms of leadership, I didn’t have the systems in place. We grew so fast that it was reacting instead of planned action.
Bernie Borges [00:18:01]:
And so did you hold on to the school or what did you, what did you do with it?
Diana Pineda [00:18:06]:
Well, I loved my school. I love my kids, but like you said, I moved to England because we wanted another adventure with my husband. So my kids grew up and they, they left us because children leave. Their nests.
Bernie Borges [00:18:25]:
Well, they moved out on their own. They didn’t leave you, Diana. They moved out on their own. I have two of my own. They didn’t leave us. They moved out on their own. They’re living a productive adult life.
Diana Pineda [00:18:38]:
Well, yes, but I’m a mama who likes my chickens under my wings. Yeah, they move on with their lives. You are correct. My oldest son stayed in Colombia. He loved it and he developed a business there and his music there. So he was great. And my oldest son came back to Canada with us because we moved back to Canada during COVID but then he decided he wanted to be a dancer. So he moved to Ontario in Toronto, and my husband and I, went like berserk.
Diana Pineda [00:19:19]:
Now what are we going to do? We don’t have our kids. We’re still young. Let’s have an adventure. So I love studying, Bernie. I am a firm believer of lifelong learning, and I always wanted to do a master’s degree, but I couldn’t because life, right? So 30 years later, I decided to do my MBA in London and I moved here and I finished my MBA in marketing, graduated with honors. And, uh, it was amazing. And now I, I see that I have my legacy now, I think is, is forming. Okay.
Bernie Borges [00:20:13]:
Well, I don’t want to gloss over your MBA because you said that in less than 30 seconds, and I’m sure that it took some time and a lot of effort. And if you don’t mind my asking, what is your age, Diana?
Diana Pineda [00:20:29]:
I am 52 in a month.
Bernie Borges [00:20:33]:
In a month. Okay. So you, You did your MBA essentially around age 50.
Diana Pineda [00:20:41]:
Correct.
Bernie Borges [00:20:42]:
Okay.
Diana Pineda [00:20:43]:
51.
Bernie Borges [00:20:44]:
51, okay. And the people around you, the students that you interacted with, what age range were they in?
Diana Pineda [00:20:52]:
23.
Bernie Borges [00:20:54]:
Okay. So relationally, that must have been very dynamic for you.
Diana Pineda [00:21:00]:
It was very interesting because they, they would call me mama. And, um, but I became, without wanting it, I became their leader and their role model. So it was like, okay, what do we need to do? Let’s ask Diana. You know, everything was like, they looked at me like, okay, what do we do? Or if the teacher wanted to know something, they looked at me like waiting for the answer. So, It was interesting to say the least, but I learned a lot. I learned a lot because they are the future, right? We are the present. They are the future. And, um, I think that as a leader, oh, because I didn’t tell you, I sold my school, the Latin American one.
Diana Pineda [00:21:53]:
I sold it to my directors, actually. They are in their 20s and that’s That’s something that I understood when I was doing the MBA, that I needed to handle the reins to the new generation so they could take the school to a place that I couldn’t take, not because of my age, but because maybe I didn’t have the stamina or the desire to do it because I was starting a new chapter here in England.
Bernie Borges [00:22:26]:
Right, right. You exactly. You were already into a, into a new chapter, but during your MBA journey, didn’t you tell me that you entered some pitch competitions?
Diana Pineda [00:22:37]:
Oh yes. Yes. I’ve, I’ve always been fascinated about competitions. I’m, I’m very competitive. My husband can tell you that. And there is a, a part of the university called the Generator, and they prepare students to be entrepreneurs, to be, you know, more than theory, to be practical and build stuff, et cetera. So I joined them with all the 20-somethings to the competitions. So there were a round of pitches that you need to do, uh, 3-minute, 5-minute, and 7-minute.
Diana Pineda [00:23:15]:
And if you pass all them, then you can get to the grand final and you will earn money. And lo and behold, yours truly win them all. I won the commercial category with the new school that I’m creating now in London.
Bernie Borges [00:23:34]:
Wow. That is amazing. That is no small feat. And I just wanna congratulate you for that. I remember that when you first told me that, it gave me goosebumps. And even now as we’re recording this, I, I have that same emotion. I can only imagine the sense of accomplishment that, that you experienced. So let’s fast forward a little bit to where you are today.
Bernie Borges [00:23:57]:
You and Diego are in London. You’ve relaunched the school or a school. Tell us about that.
Diana Pineda [00:24:04]:
I’m doing it like the, like you said, the, the two, the version two. So I’m taking everything that I learned from the previous one called REMA eSchool, and I am improving it in NovaQuest Academy. So what we’re doing here in England is to take the national curriculum and have entrepreneurial concepts and entrepreneurial projects into each of the different subjects. We want kids to build agency. We want them to have critical thinking, problem solving, all the skills that adults need when they are going out to work. So that’s what we’re doing here. I’m waiting for the accreditation from the Department for Education, and we are going to start in September this year.
Bernie Borges [00:24:57]:
Fantastic. Well, congratulations on that. Uh, your journey has been amazing. It has been impressive. It has been filled with everything from heartbreak to reinvention, to success, and then more reinvention. And really, I just want to comment on, again, your contribution to leadership and how there’s a lens of fulfillment in there because you were leading students in Columbia. And then even though that chapter closed, like you said, you sold it, you went through this chapter where you earned an MBA, I’m sure the education value alone was tremendous, not to mention just the experience. And now you’re back to leading students again in sort of version 2 of that school.
Bernie Borges [00:25:50]:
And I know that you’re also, we haven’t talked a lot about it, but I know you’re also very dedicated to your physical life through fitness. We haven’t talked about that, but I know that about you. I remember you told me that you went to work out at 10 o’clock at night because you had planned to work out that day and you hadn’t. You went and did it just because you had committed to doing it. So all of the pillars, my 5 life pillars, health, fitness, career, relationships, and legacy, you are a living, breathing example of how to experience fulfillment in spite of whatever life throws at us and experiencing that fulfillment in a way that is very relational. And you even said, that you’re thinking about your legacy. And I want to remind you, Diana, that legacy is not limited to how you’re remembered after you’re gone. Legacy is today.
Bernie Borges [00:26:43]:
The impact you’re having on the students that you teach today, as well as other people in your life, that’s part of your legacy. So I’ll leave it there and ask you for a closing thought, as well as how can people connect with you?
Diana Pineda [00:27:00]:
Thanks, Bernie. Well, I think that my closing thought is about how that I, now that I recounted my life, how that leadership became to be into being. First was my self-awareness, where I was wrong. All the things that happened, that awful path that I took, led me to realize, okay, I’m doing these the wrong side. I think that I need some action, some steps that I need to take that at the beginning were reactions and then they were steps that I could follow, you know, 1, 2, 3. And it was an authentic action to have that baby and make the best out of that situation. And then it was, the impact. How can I create those systems around me that will help me grow and develop and be successful and thrive? And to me, the most important thing, like you said, in leadership is to be, to be the example, to keep the promises that you, that you make to yourself, those are the most important things to me.
Diana Pineda [00:28:20]:
Like you said, I am an avid gym goer and I try to go at least 4 times a week. And that day, my husband says that is not Tuesday, but leg day, uh, according to me. And, um, I needed to go to the gym because I promised myself that I was going to go and I went. And because my fitness and my health are the most important things if I want to be the best leader.
Bernie Borges [00:28:49]:
So, so, so how can people connect with you, Diana?
Diana Pineda [00:28:52]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so people can connect with me on Instagram, uh, Diana Pinera K, and that’s my handle for all the socials, YouTube, et cetera.
Bernie Borges [00:29:07]:
Fantastic. Well, my listener knows, Diana, that that will be linked up in the show notes for this episode, and I just want to thank you for not just your time, but your willingness to share your story with us here on the Life Fulfilled Podcast. It’s very inspiring. You really touch all the pillars and you’re really just a wonderful and inspiring example of fulfilled leadership in every dimension of life. And that’s what I love about your story is that it’s not limited to career, even though what you’re doing in your career is terrific and inspiring, but it’s really multifaceted. It’s very holistic and very inspiring. So thank you so much, Diana.
Diana Pineda [00:29:45]:
No, thank you, Bernie. I love talking to you. Thank you so much for having me in your podcast.
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