About Bridget Doogan
Leadership Coach | Professional Learning Consultant | Founder, Self-Leadership for Educators
Bridget Doogan is a leadership coach, professional learning facilitator, and the creator of Self-Leadership for Educators—a research-informed curriculum designed to help school leaders navigate complexity with clarity, coherence, and compassion.
In her career in international education, Bridget held senior leadership roles spanning curriculum development, coaching, and professional learning. As a consultant, she partnered with organizations including Thinking Collaborative, Near East Council of Overseas Schools, International Schools Services, and the Danielson Group to develop systemic and cultural change.
In the course of her work, a recurring and under-acknowledged need emerged: to address the human dimension of performance, the inner capacity-building essential to long-term sustainability, collaboration, and wellbeing.
This insight led to a decade of in-depth inquiry at the intersection of leadership theory, emotional intelligence, positive psychology, adult development, and systems thinking. Drawing on her expertise in professional and adult learning, Bridget has distilled this complex body of knowledge into a coherent pedagogy that makes advanced leadership literacies accessible, applicable, and impactful in real-world educational settings. The result is Self-Leadership for Educators: a structured framework designed to support individuals and leadership teams in building the personal and relational capacities essential for thriving in high-stakes, high-demand environments. It is a curriculum that combines inner development with leadership practice in a format that is accessible, impactful, and profoundly empowering.
Bridget is an International Coach Federation Professional Certified Coach and holds certifications in Cognitive Coaching, Wayfinder Life Coaching, and Positive Psychology. Her approach is grounded, compassionate, and evidence-based. At the heart of her work is the belief that sustainable leadership begins within. Participants report greater clarity, improved collaboration, stronger boundaries, and a renewed sense of purpose in their leadership practice.
Bridget is an advocate and guide for a kind of leadership that is both powerful and humane, rooted in self-awareness, emotional regulation, and authentic purpose. Her work does not bypass complexity, but meets it with the inner literacies required to lead from presence, not pressure.
Bridget works globally with school leaders, leadership teams, and professional learning networks seeking to integrate self-leadership into their cultures of practice.
Empowering leaders from the inside out.
Learn More
Explore Self-Leadership for Educators
Explore Leading Self and System
Schedule a Consultation
My Self-Leadership Journey
This course arose from a career as a professional learning leader in international schools experiencing and observing the very high demands on the personal resources and wellbeing of leaders.
Like so many of my colleagues, I was a competent, capable leader. I led and lived with purpose, perseverance and impact. I leveraged my strengths and personal mission to do the work I set out to do - of building professional communities to provide the best possible education to the children we served.
Having a powerful sense of mission and shared purpose is highly energizing. Positive experiences, milestones, achievements offset the challenges that are inevitably encountered. But education makes infinite demands and it can be hard to retain sufficient levels of resourcefulness and resilience and positive energy.
Seeing these patterns and recurring cycles in myself and others, I recognized a knowledge gap. It led me on an exploration of the literature around well being, professional culture, positive psychology, neuroscience, social emotional learning, recovery and resilience, emotional agility and more.
In the leadership preparation literature scant attention is paid to these aspects of leadership, which are often dismissed as soft skills. But there is nothing soft about the principles, mindsets and practices I acquired in this pursuit. This course represents the curriculum I wish I had learned and that I believe will support others.
