Here’s a question worth sitting with.
If you could design an organisation that achieved 95% behaviour change in under 10 minutes, across communities shaped by war, displacement, and intergenerational trauma, what would that actually take?
Most systems focus on gathering and delivering information. They add more content, clearer language, and better design. They publish handbooks, run campaigns, and aim for compliance.
What they rarely create is real change.
Dr Naba Alfayadh found something different. And in my conversation with her on The Wisdom Of … Show , she revealed the insight that underpins everything she’s built. That people don’t change because they received information, they change because they feel safe enough to receive it.
That is the operating principle behind Rahma Health, the award-winning global charity Naba founded in 2021, which today serves over 3 million families across 50 international partnerships, from Melbourne to Baghdad to Gaza. It’s the insight I want to sit with you here, because the implications for anyone leading people, in any context, are significant.
The Woman Behind the Work
Naba Alfayadh arrived in Australia at age 10 as a refugee, her school in Iraq bombed behind her, and the experience of arriving in a country that didn’t speak her language, couldn’t understand her culture, and couldn’t make her feel safe in its systems became the blueprint for everything she would later build.
She went on to graduate from Monash University with an MBBS and BMedSci, supported by a Merit and Equity Scholarship. She studied Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Stanford. At 22, while still studying, she co-founded Happy Brain Education, a charity supporting disadvantaged students from refugee backgrounds. She grew it to 50 employees across two states and served more than 2,000 students before handing it over and moving on to her next vision.
In 2021, right through COVID, she founded Rahma Health. She works part-time on it, alongside emergency medicine at The Royal Children’s Hospital and general practice training. Rahma Health has tripled its reach, partnered with 50 global organisations, and in 2025, Dr Naba won three national Telstra awards simultaneously: Business of the Year, Championing Health, and Accelerating Women.
The Insight That Changes Everything
In our conversation, I asked Naba to explain the science behind Rahma Health’s outcomes. How does health literacy more than double in 5 to 10 minutes? What’s actually happening?
She went straight to the thing most systems ignore. Cultural safety, understood not as an add-on or a translation service, but as the foundation that determines whether a person can hear information at all.
When a parent from an Arabic-speaking community, who has experienced displacement, trauma, and a healthcare system that didn’t see them, encounters a resource that speaks their language not just linguistically but culturally and psychologically, something shifts. The walls come down. The survival mode softens. And in that window, information doesn’t just land, but it moves.
“As long as you ask with authenticity and humility and kindness, it’ll be received with authenticity and humility and kindness.”
Consider what that means for your business, your team, and the people you’re trying to move.
The problem is rarely the message. More often, it’s the safety of the container that the message arrives in.
The Mechanism of Intergenerational Trauma
One of the most precise and confronting things Naba shared in our conversation was her explanation of how trauma passes between generations. Not through cruelty, but through love, or rather, through a broken understanding of it.
Here’s how she described it. A child wants unconditional love, to be loved just for existing, not for performing. But the parent received a different programme. They were taught through their own childhood, through survival in conflict, through the experience of loss, that conditional love is what keeps children safe and striving. If you love a child unconditionally, they’ll grow complacent. They won’t strive, they won’t survive.
“Parents feel it is their duty to conditionally love their children. They feel like they’re doing something good by withdrawing love and making love feel limited.”
So they withhold. Not from malice, but from a survival programme that made sense once, in another world, under different conditions, and that is now being passed forward, quietly, into the next generation.
That’s the cycle. And it runs deep, across cultures, across communities, across all kinds of families.
The intervention point? Making parents aware that what felt like protection was actually a pattern. That there’s another way. The research on unconditional love is unambiguous. It’s the foundation of mental health, resilience, and long-term human flourishing, and it takes considerably more courage and discipline than the conditional version most people were taught to perform.
That insight of turning awareness into changed behaviour. is the engine of Rahma Health’s impact.
See how I build a visual model around this framework in the full episode
What Founders Can Take From This
On the surface, this is a story about a health organisation, but the deeper you go into how Naba built it and why it works, the more it reads as a masterclass in something every founder and executive is grappling with.
Naba built Rahma Health with no institutional funding at the start. Part-time and also during a pandemic. Across cultures, she was simultaneously serving and building for. And she achieved measurable, research-validated behaviour change at scale.
She named them explicitly in our conversation. Listening, respect, and love, understood not as values on a wall but as operating practices, as the daily methodology for leading people who’ve been let down by systems that thought information was enough.
Every leader I respect has a version of this understanding. When you build real safety in your culture, psychological, intellectual, and interpersonal safety, people think better, engage more fully, and change more readily. When people feel genuinely heard beneath the surface layer of what they’re saying, they bring you the real problem, not the presenting one.
That’s where leadership lives.
“Listening, slowing down, creating the pause … truly listening to what they’re saying, as well as what’s beneath the three layers of what they’re saying.”
The Scale Insight
Rahma Health has reached 3 million people since 2021.
Naba built 50 international partnerships. She embedded Rahma Health’s approach into government health policy through her work with Safer Care Victoria. She co-created a children’s book, Kookaburra Kindness, with her daughter in response to the Bondi tragedy, extending the mission into homes and classrooms. She uses AI and data analytics to personalise health information at a population scale.
All of this, while working clinically.
The lesson for founders and executives isn’t about volume. It’s about what happens when you’re absolutely clear on the problem you’re solving, and you build everything, your partnerships, your technology, your content, and your systems, around that one thing.
Clarity compounds. And Naba has it in abundance.
Why This Conversation Matters for Business Leaders
The best leaders I know have stopped asking, “How do I get people to do things?” and started asking, “How do I create conditions where people can change?”
Those are profoundly different questions. One is about force, and the other is about architecture.
Naba has built that architecture for communities facing some of the greatest barriers to change imaginable, and achieved outcomes most would call impossible – 95% behaviour change, doubled health literacy and sustained transformation.
“When we change how we love our children, we can change the future.”
I’d extend that. When we change how we lead our people, when we build the kind of safety, clarity, and genuine connection that allows real change to happen, we change the trajectory of our organisations too.
That’s the wisdom in this episode. I hope you’ll hear it in full.
Watch the full conversation with Dr Naba Alfayadh on The Wisdom Of… Show now
