Available to book
Najwa Zebian
Unlock resilience, belonging, and emotional wellbeing with Najwa Zebian, bestselling author and Doctor of Educational Leadership. Najwa works with organisations to build authentic inclusion and self-worth, inspiring millions globally through her books and speaking.
Najwa Zebian is a bestselling Lebanese-Canadian author, activist, educator, and speaker whose words have inspired millions around the world. Known for her bestselling books, including Mind Platter, and her powerful work on healing, self-worth, resilience, and belonging, she combines lived experience with academic expertise as a Doctor of Educational Leadership.
Having navigated displacement, identity struggles, and personal adversity, Najwa brings a deeply human perspective to some of the most pressing challenges facing today's workplaces. Her work helps individuals and teams build resilience, foster authentic inclusion, strengthen emotional wellbeing, and develop the confidence to lead themselves through change and uncertainty.
Drawing on her experience as an educator, advocate, and globally recognised writer, Najwa shares practical tools for overcoming limiting beliefs, creating a stronger sense of belonging, and developing the self-awareness needed to thrive in both life and work. Her sessions leave audiences feeling confident, connected, and equipped to take meaningful action.
For organisations looking to support wellbeing, strengthen culture, and inspire lasting personal growth, Najwa delivers a message that resonates long after the event ends. Book Najwa Zebian to help your people unlock their potential and lead with greater courage, purpose, and authenticity.
Topics, sessions and talks
Najwa Zebian opens this flagship keynote with a deceptively simple question: where do you build your sense of safety and identity? For most people, the answer is somewhere outside themselves — in relationships, status, or external validation. Zebian uses the metaphor of home as a structure for personal transformation, guiding participants through her practical tools for self-awareness, healthy boundary-building, and intrinsic motivation. Organizations leave with a roadmap for cultivating self-aware, internally driven teams who make workplaces genuinely welcoming at every level.
This keynote challenges the assumption that leadership belongs only to those with titles. Drawing on her graduate research, Najwa Zebian makes the case for distributed leadership — a model where every employee is equipped and expected to lead. Participants examine their own leadership habits and leave with concrete strategies for building a culture of mutual accountability, continuous learning, and psychological inclusion that connects organizational performance to individual fulfilment.
Najwa Zebian reframes resilience not as a personality trait but as a practical skill — one that can be built, measured, and embedded into an organization's culture. This keynote dismantles the false separation between professional performance and emotional wellbeing, showing how emotional intelligence underpins every core leadership competency. Participants leave with self-care tools to recognize burnout, a framework for stress management grounded in real workplace scenarios, and a clearer understanding of how destigmatizing mental health directly affects retention and productivity.
This keynote asks participants to examine the gap between who they are and who they believe they are expected to be at work. Najwa Zebian guides audiences through identifying limiting beliefs formed outside the workplace and understanding how those beliefs suppress performance and creativity inside it. Participants leave with tools for self-awareness around personal triggers, language for expressing boundaries constructively, and mindfulness practices that allow fear to become a source of momentum rather than paralysis.
Change resistance is one of the most consistent drains on organizational energy, and Najwa Zebian argues its root is rarely strategic — it is emotional. This keynote uses a self-compassion framework to shift participant mindset from reluctant adaptation to conscious adoption of change, addressing the fear, need for validation, and uncertainty that typically drive resistance. Organizations working through restructuring, cultural transformation, or strategic pivots will find in this session a toolkit for normalizing risk, decentralizing failure, and creating conditions where every employee feels invited to contribute fully.
Najwa combines bestselling-author storytelling, academic grounding as a Doctor of Educational Leadership, and lived experience of displacement to deliver practical, emotionally resonant tools. Her insights help build resilience, belonging, and wellbeing, equipping individuals and teams to lead with authenticity, confidence, and lasting cultural change.
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frequently asked questions
Something we've not covered here?
Najwa Zebian structures her keynotes around a central metaphor or reframe — such as the concept of “home” as a lens for identity and self-worth — which she uses to organise practical frameworks covering boundary-setting, emotional intelligence, and distributed leadership. These frameworks are grounded in her doctoral research in educational leadership and applied through workplace-relevant scenarios.
Najwa Zebian's sessions address self-identity and psychological safety, distributed leadership and workplace culture, and resilience as a practical skill linked to mental health and organisational performance. She is a bestselling author and Doctor of Educational Leadership, whose book Mind Platter has reached millions of readers worldwide.
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