If you haven’t read the companion essay: What If Regeneration Isn’t About Getting Back to Normal? I invite you to!
Regenerative systems inquiry:
What changes when we stop measuring recovery by our ability to return to what was?
For years, I thought recovery had a destination: get my strength back, trust my body again, run again—get back to normal.
After multiple injuries, five surgeries, and years of rehabilitation, I’m beginning to question the premise underneath that goal.
What exactly am I trying to get back to?
In this companion audio reflection to my essay, What If Regeneration Isn’t About Getting Back to Normal?, I explore what my physical recovery is teaching me about regenerative leadership and living systems.
What if recovery isn’t simply the restoration of a previous state? What if it’s also a developmental process—one that asks us to build new capacities to sense, respond, choose, and flourish within the conditions that exist now?
I explore what changed when I stopped treating my knee as an isolated problem to fix and began asking what my whole system needed. I reflect on pain and compensation as feedback, the difference between adaptation and regeneration, and why a system’s ability to keep functioning doesn’t necessarily mean it’s healthy.
And I explore a question that has become increasingly important in both my recovery and my work with leaders:
How do we bring different forms of knowing into relationship without surrendering our own agency?
My surgeon has knowledge I don’t have. My physical therapist has knowledge I don’t have. My body is providing information they don’t have. And I hold knowledge of my history, goals, fears, values, and lived experience.
No one holds the whole picture.
Perhaps that’s true of the systems we lead, too.
I’m not sharing this because I’ve figured out regenerative recovery. I’m sharing it because I’m practicing it—and because regenerative leadership is giving me new language and new questions for understanding an experience I’ve been living for decades.
I leave you with the question I’m asking myself:
Given what is true now, what does this system need in order to flourish from here?
