12 Leadership Lessons from 2025

Tala recently posted a recap of her 2025 leadership lessons and inspired me to reflect on my own. 

The lessons below are internal. They’re the shifts, realizations, and practices that shaped how I lead myself this year and informed how I help other leaders and CEOs show up. 

January - Reconnecting with Curiosity and Voicing Intent

January was spent exploring what my 2025 word of the year, laughter and longing, truly meant. It showed up as an invitation to vitality and learning, and set the tone for the year. Sitting with that theme created space to diverge, relearn, and shed what no longer served me. Naming intent early shaped the experience of everything that followed.

February - Nurturing paradox instead of resolving it

My search for learning and new teachers led to an unexpected encounter. It surfaced the polarity of the masculine and feminine as a living theme in my life. One I later shared with countless men and women, finding a wound at nearly every encounter. Strength and softness, movement and stillness, ambition and love coexist, and learning to hold them is the work of a lifetime. 

Leadership deepens when we hold polarities rather than attempting to collapse them.

March - Boundaries as a Form of Generosity

I watched pillars in my life crash into burnout, having lowered their boundaries in service of others. It reasserted that boundaries and vigor are core to buildinging something sustainable and being a leader others aspire to become. 

Boundaries protect people, attention, and quality. When surfaced, they become collective discipline rather than private struggle.

April - Rituals Create Meaning

Surrounded by our community, we celebrated our 5-year anniversary and published our 5-year impact report. What had been built quietly over time became visible. This yearly tradition took on a life of its own. 

Rituals mark the passage of time and give us space to create meaning. 

May - The Body Keeps the Score

May blurred into a stream of masterclasses, leadership circles, and facilitation work, with barely a seam between one and the next. My body eventually drew a line I hadn’t. The pause that followed, spent in slowness and companionship, brought the reminder back into focus: 

Energy and health are leadership traits, not personal inconveniences.

June - Teams are Living Systems

Our first leadership team offsite brought hard conversations and bold dreams into the same room. It was a moment of collective definition: clarifying what we share, what we hold separately, what we stand for, and the kind of leadership we want to model. A turning point in Cosmic Centaurs’ story. 

Leadership teams are the most powerful leverage point in an organization. They are where systems change first.

July - Shared Ground

July was anchored in Beirut. We spent time together as a team, not just in meetings, but alongside our extended families, across shared meals, conversations, and unplanned moments. We used that closeness intentionally: to strengthen relationships, surface what mattered, and bring strategic clarity into the open. 

Alignment deepens when head and heart are both engaged. 

August - Strategic Stillness

August was a deliberate pause. I slowed down, came home, and resisted the urge to fill the time with activity. Instead, I used the slowdown to observe, think, and prepare. The quiet became a place to gather perspective and design before the demands of Q4. 

Preparation doesn’t always look like motion. 

September - Scale without Strain

September was devoted to preparing for the Cosmic Conference. The work stretched all twelve of us, intellectually and creatively, while also taking our co-creation with external partners to a new level. Together, we designed the most ambitious conference we’ve held in six years, with a fraction of the individual effort it once required. 

Mature systems make complexity easier to carry.

October - An Ancient Mirror

At the closing of the conference, I shared a personal story about how the synchronicities in my life led me to the story of the Simurgh. In Attar’s Conference of the Birds, seekers cross seven valleys of transformation in search of a king, only to discover at the end that the Simurgh they were seeking was never separate from them. They themselves are what they’ve been looking for. Something ancient and alive landed with the audience, and the wisdom of the Simurgh rippled: whatever we seek to change in the world begins with ourselves.

November - Vigor is Currency

The Monday after the conference, following seven intense weeks, 18 webinars, five in-person events, three countries, I hit the ground running. Something was fundamentally different. I wasn’t carrying the weight alone, and for the first time, I didn’t walk out broken. I was ready to go again. 

Vigor is the outcome of systems that don’t rely on collapse to function.

December- Holding the Ending and the Edge

December unfolded as a careful balance. While teaching 17-year-olds public speaking, I found myself repeating a simple truth: every good story needs an ending. We lived that lesson through Rays of Appreciation, a strong retrospective, moments of connection, and deliberate rest. At the same time, the year was still in motion. Proposals going out, conversations continuing, decisions pending. Progress required momentum, patience, and restraint in equal measure.

Leadership, I was reminded, is knowing how to close with care while staying open to what’s still unfolding.

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Across the year, my own leadership grew quieter, stronger, and more humane, shaped by intention, vigor, and the conditions we create for others to thrive.

Those lessons informed how I, and the team at Cosmic centaurs, show up in our work alongside other leaders.

I worked closely with several CEOs across the region, supporting shifts that were both personal and systemic. The work wasn’t about adding tools or pressure. Transformation didn’t start with scale, speed, or certainty. It started with leaders relating to themselves in new ways, and then rippled outward into teams, systems, and impact.

The year returned me to a simple realization: the work we do in the world is shaped by the work we’re willing to do within ourselves.