Editor’s Note: Deborah Goldstein’s Driven 2 Wellness has an amazing workshop series starting on January 29th that will help you reclaim control of your energy and your life!  Go the end of the article for details.

Over the past months, this column has explored how to sustain resilience, how to notice what fills or drains our inner wells, and how even a single scroll or conversation can shift our social energy. Yet resilience, as vital as it is, has begun to feel less like a destination and more like a threshold. What if the question is no longer “How do we keep going?” but “What’s the motivation to grow something new from here?”

In this new series, we’ll step into that “something new”: regenerative leadership, organizations and communities. Rather than asking people to simply endure more, regenerative approaches invite us to work, lead and convene in ways that leave people, places, and systems better than we found them.

What regenerative means

Regeneration goes a step further than sustainability. We are building on how Enrich Sahan described his vision of degenerative and regenerative systems during the Thinkers50 summit in London in November 2025:

• Degenerative systems use people and resources faster than they can recover, extracting value without caring for long-term impact.
• Sustainable systems aim to keep things going without making things worse.
• Regenerative systems actively restore, renew, and enrich the people and environments they touch.

Regenerative leadership is not only about helping teams “cope” with uncertainty. It asks: How can we work in ways that nourish energy, creativity, and connection, so that our organizations become places where both business and people flourish?

Profits still matter, as they are a company’s economic foundation. Results still matter as they also provide people with something to aim for. But these are no longer the only measures of success. The underlying question shifts from “How much value can we extract?” to “How many benefits can we generate, for our people, our partners, and the wider ecosystems we depend on?”

Meet Aurora Collective: a fictional company with real-world challenges

To make these ideas tangible, we introduce you to a hypothetical company– Aurora Collective, a mid-sized business navigating pressures that may feel familiar: ambitious targets, shifting markets, hybrid work, limited time, and humans with full lives outside of work.

Inside Aurora, we’ll follow five people over the course of this mini-series. Each embodies a different relationship to resilience and regeneration. None of them is “the hero”. Instead, their learning journeys will help us explore what regenerative leadership can look like in everyday work.

• Mara – the overextended leader
  A committed regional head who is excellent in a crisis, but tends to respond to new challenges by adding more to her plate.
• Jonas – the quiet systems thinker
  A data analyst who notices patterns others miss, but often hesitates to speak unless asked.
• Priya – the culture pollinator
  A mid-level manager who instinctively connects people, checks in on colleagues, and celebrates small wins that might otherwise be overlooked.
• Leo – the growth-at-all-costs sales star
  A high performer who has been rewarded for maximizing revenue, sometimes without much attention to long-term relationships or team impact.
• Amalia – the boundary-building newcomer
  A recent hire who is ambitious and committed, and also clear about her energy and values, asking questions like, “What would sustainable pacing look like here?”

Over time, we will watch how these characters move from overextension toward wiser pacing, from quiet observation toward timely contribution, from extraction toward contribution, from “just coping” toward quietly regenerating themselves and their environment.

Making the invisible visible

Regeneration can sound abstract, but it becomes real through small, visible practices. When it comes to our own patterns, not only as leaders in organizations but also in our communities, it’s important to make the invisible visible.

In The DRIVEN Community Institute’s own “State of the Community” address, Deborah named her growth edge in real time: the tendency to create unnecessary deadlines and pressure for herself, without adding real value. Instead of waiting for the “perfect” digital system to recognize people’s contributions, she chose to celebrate members’ work immediately. That simple act, naming the pattern and choosing differently, shifted the energy in the room.

At Aurora, Mara has a similar moment. Halfway through yet another late-evening planning call, she notices that the team is exhausted and repeating the same points. She hears herself say, “I realise I keep adding more to our plates when I’m anxious, instead of trusting what we’ve already built. That’s on my growth edge list. Can we pause and decide what really needs to happen this week vs what can wait?”

In that moment, Mara is practicing regenerative leadership. She is:

• Making her inner pattern visible by being authentic by showing her vulnerability
• Reducing unnecessary pressure
• Inviting the team into shared awareness rather than solitary performance

A gentle question for reflection:
When was the last time you named your own growth edge out loud? What shifted when you did?

A brief real-world glimpse

Regeneration is not just for fictional companies. One real example comes from El Puente, a German fair trade organization that partners with local producers worldwide. Instead of focusing only on buying low and selling high, El Puente combines fair payment with environmentally friendly crop cycles and long-term relationships.

The business still needs to be profitable. But questions about ecological and social impact sit alongside financial ones, illustrating that enterprises can be designed to give back to the systems they rely on, not just draw from them.

An invitation for this first step

Every living system moves through cycles: day and night, seeding and harvest, growth and rest. Organizations move through cycles too: start-up and scaling, consolidation and experimentation, adaptation and renewal.

In the next article, we’ll return to Aurora Collective and explore more practices of regenerative leadership: for example, letting go to grow, and celebration as regeneration rather than decoration, with more space for stories from both Aurora and real-world organizations.

For now, an invitation:
Notice just one moment this week when you either drain or regenerate energy, for yourself, for another person, for your organization or the communities you are part of. That simple noticing is where regeneration quietly begins.