By Naomi Ward & Kyra Kellawan
Leading a school right now is no small thing. You’re not just steering policies or measuring performance. You’re tending a living ecosystem -people, emotions, culture, and pace – all while the world keeps tilting.
We’ve spent years coaching and teaching inside those pressures, and one truth keeps resurfacing: the most transformative shift a leader can make isn’t a new strategy.
It’s presence.
Grounded. Relational. Reflective.
That kind of presence is where regenerative leadership begins.
Why regeneration, and why now?
Many schools still orbit around performance: outputs, outcomes, evidence. But the global conversation is evolving. Thought-leaders such as Laura Storm and Giles Hutchins remind us that leadership must now mirror living systems: “Regenerative leadership is leading in a way that is life-affirming -for ourselves, our teams, our organisations, and the wider systems we’re part of.”
If your leadership is draining you, it’s likely draining others too.
Regeneration offers another way -one that begins not with doing more, but with reconnecting to who you are when you’re resourced and alive.
It isn’t soft; it’s strategic.
It isn’t new-age; it’s deeply human.
We call this work resourcing; mapping the inner and outer wells that sustain you: body, mind, spirit, emotion, and environment. Here’s what we’ve learned.
1. Presence Is the Starting Point
When does school-based coaching become transformative, not just effective?
Our dialogues with emotional-intelligence elders and regenerative educators -people like Kenny Peavy and Noan Fesnoux -keep landing in the same place: transformation begins in connection.
Relational safety. Emotional attunement. Spaces where people can show up as they are.
So we started asking, What kind of leadership grows people?
The answer isn’t a toolkit. It’s a way of being – one that stretches the mind, stirs the heart, and grounds the body. As Bernice Hewson of Raising Racial Consciousness reminds us: leadership that grows people begins with who you’re being, not what you’re doing.
2. Do What Regenerates You
The leaders who last aren’t those with endless stamina. They’re the ones who know how to replenish.
Resourcing isn’t about spa days (though yes, take them). It’s about knowing what feeds your energy: movement, silence, friendship, wild air – and treating those sources as non-negotiable.
Kenny Peavy calls this ecological self-awareness: knowing where your energy comes from and where it leaks away.As one international-school principal told us,
It’s not about the coaching tools. It’s about who I am when I walk into the room. That’s what people feel. That’s what changes things.
To lead regeneratively is to lead as a whole human. That means letting go of control, constant availability, and the fantasy of having all the answers. Those habits may deliver short-term results – but they burn through the relational soil schools depend on.
3. Know What You Won’t Do
Clarity also means refusal.
Our own acts of refusal look like this:
– No to surface-level CPD.
– No to leadership programmes that prize optics over depth.
– No to cultures that reward over-functioning while eroding well-being.
Laura Storm invites leaders to “create the conditions for life to thrive.” Sometimes that begins with the hard questions:
Whose voices are centred?
What stories are we reinforcing?
Are we building cultures of control, or cultures of trust?
These aren’t puzzles to solve but places to begin again.
4. Keep Your Principles in Sight
Over time, our learning distilled into simple regenerative reminders—anchors when things get messy:
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Be like water.
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What you pay attention to grows.
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Small is good; small is all.
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Hold the boundary; trust the process.
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Never a failure; always a lesson.
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Less prep; more presence.
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See the people; trust the people.
Pick one. Write it on a sticky note. Test it in your next staff meeting. Notice what shifts.
These aren’t slogans; they come from lived conversations. They offer an alternative to the rigid, depletion-driven models many of us inherited.
5. Remembering This Work Is Ongoing
Regenerative leadership isn’t a destination. It’s a practice:
How you show up when you’re tired.
How you listen when you don’t know what to say.
How you make just enough space for others to breathe, feel seen, and belong.
Above all, it’s the reminder that you are not a machine.
You are a living being in a deeply human profession. The way you lead matters—and you’re allowed to lead in ways that give you life.
Because when leadership regenerates the leader, it regenerates the whole ecosystem around them.
A reminder that we will host our first in-person regenerative gathering, a cultural reset called Interbeing, this coming January 2026 at the incredible Al-Fanar School in Dubai. More information and last tickets still available at 
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*Article adapted from a longer piece originally published in October 2025’s edition of International Teacher Magazine.
