Host

Gretchen Steidle is the director of Garrison Institute’s Spirituality and Social Change initiative.

Guest

Radha Ruparell is Chief Learning Officer of Teach For All’s Global Institute for Shaping a Better Future. Teach For All is a global network spanning more than 60 countries and tens of thousands of locally rooted, globally informed leaders committed to ensuring all children can fulfill their potential. Radha’s work explores how education can develop young people who flourish and shape a better future, with a particular focus on inner development, relational intelligence, and collective leadership. She is the author of Brave Now, co-editor of What Leadership Do We Need Now?, and co-author of The Inner Work of System Leadership.

Read and download the full transcript. 

Show Notes

• [02:53] Radha Ruparell reflects on growing up in Calgary, Alberta, with both Western and Eastern influences. Her Indian heritage, extended family, shared meals, and experience bridging cultures shaped her understanding of relationship and community.
• [03:51] Radha traces her inner journey back to childhood, when she began asking deep questions about fairness and belonging. She shares formative memories of noticing who was excluded and questioning why certain people were treated differently.
• [05:11] Radha describes a practice she has rediscovered as an adult: pausing, sitting with her feelings, and being with what is. In a world full of distraction, she makes space between meetings to breathe, pause, and notice what is really there.
• [06:52] Radha introduces Teach For All, a global network spanning more than 60 countries, and its commitment to developing leaders who can help reshape education and create a better future. At the heart of the work is a fundamental question: Why do we educate?
• [08:35] The conversation turns to the role of inner work in education. Radha explains that if we want young people to develop awareness, wellbeing, belonging, interconnectedness, and agency, we also need to cultivate those capacities in the adults around them.
• [10:12] Radha examines the history of the “factory model” of education and how schools were designed for a different era. She argues that transforming education requires not only learning, but unlearning—and creating space to question assumptions we have simply internalized.
• [12:00] Radha describes the capacities Teach For All is working to develop in educators and students. Unlearning can begin by examining our own educational experiences and asking whether we want to reproduce them.
• [13:32] The work also involves recognizing inherited trauma and learning to shift from stressed, disconnected, and reactive states toward more healing-centered states. Radha frames this as learning to make the inner shifts we want to see in the systems around us.
• [15:11] Radha shares how this work began with just six people in a forest and eventually became institutionalized through the Global Institute for Shaping a Better Future. She reflects on how something that once seemed too unconventional for a professional setting can become a core priority.
• [16:18] Radha explains how neuroscience provided an accessible entry point for educators who were hesitant about inner work. Understanding the importance of love and safety in learning helped teachers become more curious about what might be happening beneath a student’s challenging behavior.
• [19:03] Radha introduces the practice of pausing as a foundational capacity for navigating a stressed-out world. She shares “Two Feet One Breath,” a simple 30-second practice designed to help people regulate their nervous systems before entering a new interaction.
• [20:36] From individual regulation, Radha moves to relational intelligence. Because systems change through people and people are in relationships, she argues that the ability to build strong relationships is essential to transformational classrooms and meaningful systems change.
• [21:32] Radha explores how we can learn to be with difference and tension rather than treating either as inherently bad. Naming difference as something valuable can create space for curiosity instead of the impulse to change or fix another person.
• [23:50] Radha describes why inner work needs to happen not only individually but collectively. Teams and groups can create conditions that either constrain or expand people’s ability to live into their full potential.
• [25:15] She shares practices for recognizing and resourcing different nervous-system states, and then describes what happens when teams develop a shared awareness of their collective nervous system.
• [26:20] Simply naming tension or a “stuck state” can sometimes change the energy in a room. Radha describes how her own team has learned to pause, breathe, or step away together rather than pretending that difficult dynamics are not happening.
• [27:19] One team member tells Radha, “I don’t have to pretend anymore.” For Radha, this captures the possibility of creating organizational cultures where people can bring more of themselves to the work—and consequently become more creative.
• [30:26] Radha introduces transformational learning environments that move beyond narrow definitions of academic success and focus instead on developing whole human beings who are aware, connected, and able to exercise agency.
• [31:08] She shares the example of Jhamtse Gatsal, a residential school in the Himalayas of Nepal founded by a former monk. The school centers compassion, intention, reflection, and a sense of “we” rather than focusing only on the individual.
• [32:24] Another school in Mexico demonstrates relational education by building deep relationships with students’ families. Radha emphasizes that children cannot be understood in isolation from their families and the environments around them.
• [33:31] Radha argues that deep interconnectedness should be the foundation of education. Developing capacities such as self-awareness, deep listening, and rupture and repair can help young people and adults become more capable of living in relationship.
• [35:17] Radha reflects on the ripple effects of inner work and the importance of trusting what happens when the right intentions are cultivated. She describes how one leader’s transformation in Nigeria ultimately reached hundreds of teachers and thousands of students.
• [37:14] Radha discusses her growing interest in whole teams, communities, and schools as sites of transformation. She believes that seeing examples of new possibilities can offer people a much-needed “dosage of hope and joy.”
• [38:24] For educators, parents, and school leaders wondering where to begin, Radha recommends starting with wisdom and practices that may already exist in their own communities. She also points toward the Global Institute for Shaping a Better Future as a source of accessible tools and resources.
• [40:05] Radha broadens the conversation beyond education, arguing that whatever kind of change we want to create, we can begin by looking inward. One person who shows up differently, she says, can change the entire energy of a space.
• [41:15] Radha closes with an empowering invitation: rather than becoming stuck in frustration about broken systems, we can recognize our own capacity to shift something within ourselves and influence the spaces around us.
• [42:14] Finally, Radha offers a joyful reminder not to take the work too seriously. Transformation can include laughter, play, and an appreciation for our own humanity—and, she says, the world needs a little more joy.

This summary was created with the input of AI.