Inspire your audience.

Let’s unlock the power of knowledge and use it to bring about real change for yourself, your employees, and the people you serve, all through educational leadership. 

Make an impact.

I’m Dr. Najwa Zebian (pronounced nej-wuh zay-bee-in) and I’m a big believer that words have the power to transform the world through inspiring authentic change.

I hold a Doctorate in Educational Leadership and have created a unique model for ensuring organizational authentic inclusion led by tenets of culturally responsive, social justice-focused, and transformative leadership.

I taught in schools for over ten years, where I led initiatives related to mental health, leadership, and equity. The most powerful lesson I took away from that time is that we are all fundamentally seeking one thing: to lead a life where we can be our most authentic selves.

All of this combined with my personal experiences make me a speaker who acts as a catalyst for change. As someone who’s experienced the challenge of being displaced and moving to a new country at 16, I had to learn the hard way that adopting a fixed mindset to life is not the answer. I chose growth over the stagnancy of victimhood. I learned that you have to make things different through intentional action fueled by intrinsic motivation.  

This combination of educational and personal experience makes my work impactful and actionable while providing research-informed and practical strategies for effecting change using a distributed leadership approach, where everyone involved in a team is seen as a leader. 

Change is an inevitable truth in any organization and the key to successfully embracing it lies in knowledge. To make sure change is embraced with intention, it's important to consider where we want to be, how we get there, and what gaps need to be closed between our current and desired reality.

After studying these questions for five years, I’ve devised an organizational improvement plan that tailors to the specific needs of an organization. My research has focused on understanding an organization’s history and context, as well as on developing strategies that work over the long term, creating meaningful, systemic change that allows everyone within and served by the organization to benefit.

Of course, planning and executing change isn't enough - in order for real growth to happen, we must also ensure that change is sustained over time. This requires investing in the growth, development, and mental health of all stakeholders within the organization.

FLAGSHIP KEYNOTE

Build Your Home Within

Unleash Your Inner Leader

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Transformational, Inspiring, and Life-Changing.

This keynote simply empowers participants to stop building their homes (their sense of identity and safety) in other people, places or titles. Najwa will guide them through the process of building a home within so that they feel like they belong wherever they go so that they can be intrinsicly motivated to lead themselves and others.


The powerful metaphor of home provides a structure for personal transformation as participants explore practical tools for self-understanding and self-reflection.

With deeply resonant teachings delivered with her trademark power, candor, and warmth, participants will harvest the power of building that inner space of solace where they can unleash their potential. Organizations will create an environment of self-aware, intrinsically motivated leaders who in turn make the work environment authentically welcoming and reflective of all members of the organization at all levels.

Keynote Presentation Goals:

  • Providing participants with Najwa’s magic formula tools to build a strong foundation of self
  • Exploring the destructive and constructive power of the limiting beliefs we create during our childhood
  • Demonstrating the lifechanging value of changing the question from “why can’t I have that?” to “why don’t I have that?”
  • Walking through the revolutionary process of healthy boundary building in personal and workplace contexts (as opposed to setting)
  • Equipping participants with practical tools to navigate self-love, forgiveness, compassion, clarity and surrendering to the present moment both in their personal and workplace contexts
  • Exploring the benefits of “unblinding” yourself- one of Najwa’s unique tools to achieving internal and external clarity in the workplace

AVAILABLE OPTIONS:
Keynote: 45 min. / 60 min. / 75 min. / 90 min
Keynote + Workshop: ½ Day / Full Day
Custom Training: ½ Day / Full Day
Moderating/Facilitating ½ Day / Full Day
All services are available in English and/or Arabic

MORE…

  • This keynote presentation explores the importance of moving from a top-down approach to leadership to a distributed type of leadership. What does a workplace where every employee is a leader look like? What does it feel like? And how could it transform both the professional and personal lives of every employee to be more productive and fulfilling? Najwa brings her expertise from her graduate studies to this life-changing talk.

    Participants, whether in conventional leadership positions such as management or CEO or not, will reflect on their own understandings of leadership and their application of it in the workplace and in their personal lives. They will also learn practical strategies for going from "I" to "We", ensuring every team member feels valued and valuable.

    Ultimately, educational leadership in the workplace seeks to ensure that employees are meeting their potential, both in terms of their current roles and their overarching careers. Leaders foster a sense of distributed leadership through continuous learning and professional development, recognizing that individuals who are engaged in learning are more productive, creative, and innovative.

    Presentation Goals:

    Creating and sustaining a positive learning environment that encourages employees to develop and use their skills

    Establishing clear expectations, providing guidance and support, and expressing recognition and praise

    Promoting collaboration and recognizing the value of diverse perspectives, experiences, and skills

    Fostering a work environment that is inclusive, respectful and responsive

    Highlighting the connection between organizational culture and overall employee well-being

  • This keynote presentation aims to completely transform both the personal and professional lives of participants at all organizational levels to become the masters of their own path. Through research, stories, and practical strategies, this keynote will guide participants to adopt resilience as a pathway to a healthy workplace mindset and maintaining a work-life balance.

    There is a myth that there is no room for emotion in the big leagues. Whether we want them to or not, emotions guide how we do almost everything, not just how we handle failure. Our feelings dictate how we manage our time and energy. They help us navigate conflicts, take responsibility for our actions, communicate with others and adapt to changes under stress. All these skills are required to be a good leader, teammate, or employee. Instead of focusing on one skill at a time, we can strengthen our emotional intelligence and build resilience that enables us to handle anything that comes our way.

    We can create a welcoming and healthy work environment where employees can thrive by bridging the gap between personal and professional perseverance skills and destigmatizing mental health in the workplace. With the incorporation of mental health exercises, organizations can reconcile employee attitude, mental health, and retention leading to increased productivity and performance for the whole organization.

    Presentation Goals:

    Equipping participants with self-care tools to recognize and combat burnout and overwhelm

    Bridging the gap between work and life through authentic, tangible mental health practices

    Providing a framework to help participants develop strategies for stress management and reduction

    Changing mindsets and removing resistance to organizational change through intentional adaptation

    Guiding participants to devise personalized plans for resilience in the workplace based on their lived reality

  • This keynote empowers participants to dismantle and remove limiting beliefs they have about themselves in order to stop being led by them. Instead, participants are encouraged to lead through authentic action that spans their personal and work lives. This talk emphasizes the connection between making changes in your personal life to bring your best self to the workplace.

    Authenticity plays an important role in originality and credibibility both in and outside the workplace. But how do we balance being our most authentic selves with the role we're expected to fill at work?

    By bridging the gap between personal and professional perseverance skills, participants will walk away with tools for developing self-awareness of their triggers and barriers plus how to manage them while prioritizing their emotional wellbeing. This understanding and balance will lead to higher performance and passion for their work.

    Presentation Goals:

    Empowering participants to own and tell their story

    Highlighting the connection between limiting beliefs outside of the workplace to performance/productivity in the workplace

    Guiding participants through effective strategies to gain clarity on who they really are

    Providing examples of language to express healthy work boundaries with themselves and others

    Instilling mindfulness skills that allow for constructively using fear

  • This keynote guides participants to harvest the power of self-compassion and lead themselves and others through courageous action. It offers a guide to navigate through changes we don’t choose, changes we choose, and changes we must make. Through tackling the roots of fearing change (fear, uncertainty, need for validation, etc.), this keynote positions change as a positive and necessary part of a company’s evolution.

    Most people want something in their life to change, but sometimes unwanted change comes all too swiftly. When the changes in a workplace are unwelcome, employee wellbeing and productivity can suffer.

    By navigating the changes we must make (or those we need to endure) with acceptance, we can embrace change for the possibilities it presents. Using a self-compassion approach to alter participant outlook from merely adapting to change to consciously adopting and embracing it, will not only shift perspectives but also foster a vibrant work environment conducive to creative productivity.

    Presentation Goals:

    Decentering failure language in the workplace, normalizing risk taking innovation and curiosity

    Setting participants up for excellence through an empowering, full-potential approach

    Fostering an inclusive environment where participants feel invited to assume a seat at the table

    Providing participants with tools to identify and dismantle guilt or hesitance because of failure (or the possibility of it)

ALL AVAILABLE AS:
Keynote: 45 min. / 60 min. / 75 min. / 90 min
Keynote + Workshop: ½ Day / Full Day
Custom Training: ½ Day / Full Day
Moderating/Facilitating ½ Day / Full Day


All services are available in English and/or Arabic

CUSTOM KEYNOTES

BASED ON CLIENT REQUESTS

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This will be more of an individualized presentation, done by collaboratively working one-on-one with the organizer. The organizer will have the option to choose multiple topics including diversity, inclusion, social media growth, leadership, emotional intelligence, and other discussion points upon request. Any required resource creation that serves the organizer’s goals will also be provided.

Keynote Presentation Goals:

  1. Tackling specific organizational goals
  2. Implementing organization-driven change
  3. Solving specific problems hindering a positive work culture
  4. Creating a more dynamic workplace where all employees feel valued
  5. Embracing diversity in the workplace
  6. Creating a culture shift through the practice of distributed leadership
  7. Increasing knowledge related to fair and equitable opportunities in the workplace

Added Benefits:

  1. Embracing originality over numbers
  2. Relieving the pressure of competition
  3. Fostering a sense of community
  4. Removing the fear of risk taking
  5. Increasing engagement and reach

AVAILABLE OPTIONS:
Keynote: 45 min. / 60 min. / 75 min. / 90 min
Keynote + Workshop: ½ Day / Full Day
Custom Training: ½ Day / Full Day
Moderating/Facilitating ½ Day / Full Day
All services are available in English and/or Arabic

 

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