Expedition Leader Reflections from the Refugee Expedition, Session Two: Elements
Reem is the Expedition Leader of the Refugees’ Expedition and Co-Founder of Makani Cambridge CIC, where she co-leads programmes centred on collective care, justice and joy. A British-Syrian, born in London and raised in Damascus, Reem is a leadership development facilitator and certified transformational coach who has delivered more than 4,000 hours of facilitation globally. She is fluent in English, Arabic and French. She has lectured in immunology, served as Chief Biomedical Technician at the University of Cambridge, and co-founded the Free Syrian Translators. She co-authored The Arab Spring, Five Years On and is a single mother, social activist and lifelong learner.
As the Expedition Leader guiding the Refugee Expedition, I offer this reflection on our second session. Again I write as “we”, because the deepest work of the day belonged to everyone in the room, myself included.
We came back to the second session still holding the maps we had started the week before. This time we were not asked who we are, but what has come out of who we are. If Essence is the ground we stand on, Elements are what grows from it: the patterns, instincts, strengths, fears and habits that show up in how we actually live and lead.
We began in pairs, reconnecting with our maps out loud. It was a reminder that we do not have to make sense of ourselves alone. We can think through witnessing, questioning and reflecting alongside each other.
From who I am to how I lead
The question that opened the session was deceptively simple: what has come out of my Essence? One aspect can travel in very different directions. Family can become a deep sense of responsibility. Trauma can become self-protection or hypervigilance. Learning can harden into perfectionism. Faith can become a hunger for meaning. Elements are not goals we are reaching for. They are the ways our histories become visible in our everyday leading.
And the map stayed fluid. We moved back and forth between Essence and Elements, noticing that something we first called a behaviour sometimes felt closer to the core of who we are.
Honouring what once protected us
The idea that stayed with many of us was that an Element does not have to be labelled simply good or bad. A pattern that feels restrictive now may once have been necessary, adaptive, even protective.
So instead of shame, we practised curiosity. Why did this develop? What did it make possible for me? Does it still serve me now? Perfectionism was the clearest example. Rather than condemn it, we were invited to see what it had given us, release the part that had become harmful, and keep the care underneath it in a gentler form. That opened three possible movements: to jettison an Element, to reframe it, or to combine it with another.
Learning to say goodbye
Jettisoning gave us permission to notice that growth sometimes means consciously letting go of ways of being that have kept us company for years. This was not about rejecting an earlier version of ourselves. It was about acknowledging why an Element grew, appreciating how it helped us survive or belong, and then deciding, with some agency, that it no longer has to lead.
For many of us this touched familiar places: the difficulty of saying no, the habit of over-giving, distrust, making ourselves small, avoiding conflict, the pressure to keep proving ourselves.
Kindness, service and the right to boundaries
One thread ran strong through the room: our relationship with care. We spoke about how much we want to help, and how tiring it is to keep saying yes. One Explorer’s reflection on service surfaced a fear of saying no, and a wish for boundaries that would let her keep giving without emptying herself. Another spoke of love as central to who she is, while asking what happens when that love keeps costing her.
The answer, we realised, is not to care less. It is to discover how care for others and care for ourselves can live side by side.
Not either/or, but both
From there the conversation moved to combining opposites, and this became one of the richest shifts of the day. We are often told leading means choosing: humility or visibility, empathy or distance, vulnerability or strength. What if both can be true?
Combining is not the same as balancing. Balance adjusts the proportions, a little more of this, a little less of that. Combining asks something harder: how do I stay fully connected to both? Having boundaries does not make us less generous. Being visible does not cost us our humility. Stepping back from someone does not mean abandoning empathy.
This matters especially in community and justice work, where contradictory truths sit together all the time. Learning to hold that tension within ourselves is part of learning to hold complexity with others.
What we are carrying forward
By the end, we had moved from telling our stories to interpreting them, and from awareness towards agency. We were no longer only saying “this shaped me.” We were beginning to say “and this is what it taught me to do, and I can choose whether it keeps leading.”
We left with our maps a little fuller, and with one question to sit with before the next session: why do I choose to lead? Not the answer for a lifetime, but what it feels like now.
