Learning #1: Presence is the starting point
Over the past few years, we’ve explored what makes school-based coaching truly transformative. Not just effective. Transformative.
Our conversations with emotional intelligence practitioners, coaching elders, and regenerative educators – including Kenny Peavy, whose work draws from ecological literacy and outdoor education, and Noan Fesnoux, who reminded us in a recent podcast that the most powerful learning doesn’t come from instruction.
It comes from connection. From relational safety. From emotional attunement. From creating spaces where people can actually show up. So we began with a question: what kind of leadership grows people?
The answer wasn’t in a toolkit or a fixed framework. It lives in a philosophy – one that could stretch the mind, stir the heart, ground the body, and shape our identity, as offered to us by our work in dialogue with the founder of Raising Racial Consciousness, coach, and EQ practitioner: Bernice Hewson,
Not a script. A way of being.
Learning #2: Do what regenerates you
If there’s one pattern we’ve seen in school leadership again and again, it’s this:
the leaders who stay well are the ones who know how to resource themselves.
That doesn’t necessarily mean spa days or massages (although those help too). It means mapping your sources of strength — in body, mind, spirit, relationships, and environment — and making them non-negotiable. This is what Kenny Peavy might call “ecological self-awareness” — the ability to know where your energy comes from, and what takes it away.
As one international school principal recently told us:
“It’s not just about the coaching tools. It’s about who I am when I’m in the room. That’s what people feel. That’s what changes things.”
Leading regeneratively means making room for your full humanity. Not just your expertise. Not just your job description. It also means letting go of seductive but ultimately depleting patterns, like needing to be in control, having the answers, or always being available. These patterns might get things done. But they also create exhaustion. And when your team mirrors that pace, you start to lose the relational magic that makes schools truly work.