A Question

For most of my life, I believed growth came from becoming MORE.

More capable.
More accomplished.
More knowledgeable.
More resilient.

There was always something else for me to learn, achieve, improve or understand.

Today I ask a different question:

What if more of what we need is already here? How can we access it when we need it most?

The evolution of that question has taken me into very different landscapes.

Each season has changed what I could see in the next.

Three Seasons That Shaped the Work

The work I do today wasn't created in a single moment. It grew out of the seemingly unrelated seasons of my life.

No one path led me here and yet, here I am.

There was a long season inside global organisations — more than two decades immersed in leadership, ambition, relationships, growth, responsibility and pressure.

There was a season of turning towards the human experience itself — more than a decade spent working closely with people and exploring what shapes how we experience ourselves, one another and our lives.

Then came a season I never anticipated.

This season has been shaped by an increasingly deep relationship with a community of ancient oaks. It is changing how I understand many of the things I have spent years exploring — presence, strength, relationship, belonging, participation and what it means to be fully alive.

Each season has taught me something the others could not.

Each has changed the way I understand what it means to live, lead, relate and contribute.

Today, they are no longer separate strands of my life.

They meet in the work I call Open Leadership.

A Season of Ambition

I was ambitious. I wanted a big life.

I wanted to travel. To do meaningful work. To meet interesting people. To create, contribute and succeed.

For a long time, that ambition carried me around the world.

I built a career in international business, eventually working at Director level in global organisations, specialising in alliances and business development. I worked across countries and cultures, built partnerships, led people and businesses, and carried increasing levels of responsibility.

I loved much of it.

I loved the people. The possibility. Creating something where nothing had existed before. Bringing different worlds together and discovering what we could make happen.

Yet somewhere along the way, my ambition became entangled with self-doubt.

I felt I had to continually prove that I deserved to be there.

Always underneath, there was a voice whispering: you're not good enough.

When my doctor put me on three weeks of bed rest, I felt sidelined.

So I did all the things to look after my health and I worked harder.

I achieved more. I stayed available. I kept doing.

Doing had become a kind of self-worth Band-Aid.

Every achievement temporarily covered the doubt underneath. But the reassurance never lasted.

So there was always more to do.

Even when I was exhausted, I kept going.

From the outside, my life looked successful.

From the inside, I was increasingly disconnected from myself.

A Season of Inquiry

Leaving corporate life didn't immediately give me the way of life I wanted — or lead me directly to the work I do today.

I had more freedom. More autonomy. More ability to choose how I spent my time.

Yet changing my circumstances didn't automatically change my experience of my life.

I brought myself with me.

The patterns that drove me to push, prove, control and keep going hadn't disappeared simply because my job title had.

So began a long season of exploration.

I became a portrait photographer.

Then a yoga teacher. I immersed myself in more than 2,000 hours of training and exploration — studying the body, movement, anatomy, breath, embodiment and different approaches to human wellbeing.

I became a somatic movement therapist and, over time, a coach.

I learned through studying. Through being coached. Through working with people. And, perhaps most importantly, through living the questions myself.

My life gave me plenty to explore.

I was a single mother, raising a daughter with complex medical needs.

I was her mother, her advocate and the person carrying the responsibility for decisions I desperately wanted to get right.

There were things I couldn't solve by working harder.

Things I couldn't make certain.

Experiences I couldn't protect my daughter from.

The strategies that had helped me succeed were no longer enough to help me meet my life.

Her health journey took me into worlds I might never otherwise have explored — different approaches to healing, energy, the body, the nervous system and the relationship between our internal experience and the way we meet life.

Some became part of my work. Others didn't.

All of them changed what I was able to see.

Over time, this personal inquiry became more than a decade spent working closely with other people.

Through yoga, somatic work, coaching and thousands of hours of conversation and practice, I began to notice recurring patterns.

How much of what we do happens outside our conscious awareness.

How the body carries what the mind cannot simply think its way out of.

How protection can shape what we perceive and how we respond.

How knowing what to do and being able to access it in the moment are very different things.

And how changing our external circumstances doesn't necessarily change the place within us from which we meet them.

I was trying to understand what it means to be human from the inside out.

And the more I learned about being human, the more curious I became.

Not about what was wrong with us.

But about what else might be available to us.

What becomes possible when we have greater access to ourselves?

A Season of Remembering

Then something happened that I didn't see coming.

I had been walking among the ancient oaks of Windsor Great Park for years.

I loved them. I photographed them. I knew that being among trees changed how I felt.

This is only a fraction of what I am discovering is possible.

Through a series of unexpected encounters, I began exploring what it might mean to relate to the living world differently — not simply to spend time in nature, observe it or benefit from it, but to enter into relationship with another living being.

I began to experience the living world not simply as something around me, but as something I could be in relationship with — with its own presence, intelligence and aliveness.

So I wondered, “Could I meet the oaks this way?”

I began. I listened. I sensed. I wrote. I paid attention to what arose through the encounter without needing to explain it.

And something began to unfold.

I returned to that oak. Then others.

Over time, I formed relationships with individual oaks. Each encounter offered something different — about presence, relationship, belonging, strength, freedom, possibility and what it means to be fully alive.

They didn't give me another body of knowledge to master.

They invited me into a different way of knowing and experiencing — myself, my life, others and the world.

The questions I had spent years exploring from inside the human experience opened and widened.

What if presence isn't something we need to create, but something we can return to — more deeply than we thought possible?

What if strength doesn't require us to harden? What if we can be both deeply rooted and open?

What if relationship isn't simply something that happens between two people, but is part of the very nature of being alive?

What if belonging isn't something we have to earn?

What if we already belong — and the choice is whether we participate in that belonging?

Through this oak work, I found myself remembering and reconnecting.

Not to something new.

To something that had always been there.

As my relationship with the oaks deepened, the things I had learned through all those years of leadership, human inquiry and lived experience began to look different too.

What had once seemed like separate strands began to reveal themselves as parts of the same living system.

I began to see that perhaps we cannot fully understand what it is to be human in isolation.

Self. Other. Relationship. The living world.

Not separate parts to understand or manage, but alive through their relationship with one another.

One living system.

Where These Seasons Meet

These three seasons have changed how I understand what it means to be human.

Through ambition, I learned how much we can accomplish — and what can happen when achievement comes at the cost of our connection with ourselves.

Through inquiry I learned how profoundly our internal patterns, state and ways of relating shape what we can perceive, access and experience.

And today, the oaks are teaching me that we cannot understand ourselves only as individuals.

We exist in relationship.

With ourselves.

With one another.

With the circumstances of our lives.

And with the living world of which we are part.

Across all three seasons, one idea returned in different forms:

Much of what we seek is not necessarily something we need to acquire.

Presence. Perspective. Creativity. Choice. Connection. Wisdom. Possibility.

These are already available. The question is how much access we have to them.

Our access is not fixed.

It can narrow. And it can expand.

As our access changes, so does the way we meet what is happening — what we perceive, how we experience it, the choices available to us, and what we are able to create and contribute.

This is the territory I now call Open Leadership.

Not a model for becoming a better version of ourselves.

An ongoing inquiry into what becomes possible when more of who we already are is available — and when we remember that we are already part of something larger than ourselves.

The Work Today

Today, all three seasons are alive in my work.

I don't experience leadership, human inquiry and the living world as separate disciplines anymore.

They are different ways into the same inquiry:

What becomes possible when we have greater access to ourselves, to one another and to the living world of which we are part?

I explore that question with people in many different ways.

Sometimes through a conversation.

Sometimes through practice and embodied experience.

Sometimes through sustained inquiry over months or seasons.

Sometimes in a room with an audience.

And sometimes beneath an ancient oak.

The form changes. The inquiry is alive.

And perhaps that's the most important thing about the work.

I am not standing outside it, teaching something I have finished learning.

I am living the inquiry too.

Ways Into the Work

There are different ways to enter this inquiry.

You may be navigating pressure, standing in transition, or sensing that something more wants to emerge.

You may want a single experience that opens something.

A place to practise and deepen over time.

A sustained inquiry held in relationship.

Or a conversation that brings these ideas into your organisation, community or gathering.

The work currently takes several forms:

Oak Presencing Experience
A direct encounter with the work through relationship with an ancient oak — for moments of pressure, transition, expansion or simply the curiosity to discover what might become available.

The Practice Space
An ongoing place to practise greater access to yourself within the circumstances of everyday life.

Living Inquiry Circle
A shared exploration of the questions that shape how we live, relate and participate — held in inquiry with others.

Residencies
Sustained experiential inquiries for people wanting to explore a question, threshold, body of work or possibility over a season.

Private Mentorship
A dedicated partnership for those wanting depth, continuity and a highly individual space in which to live and explore the work.

Speaking & Conversations for Organisations
Talks, workshops, retreats and conversations exploring human capacity, pressure, transition, possibility, relationship and what the living world can reveal about how we live and lead.

There is no single path through this work.

You enter where it feels alive.

A Little More About Me

I live in Windsor, with my daughter and my dog, close to the ancient oaks that have become such an important part of my life and work.

I am endlessly curious about what it means to be human and how we might live this life more fully — with greater presence, relationship, freedom, creativity and participation.

I am a mother. A former corporate Director. A photographer. A long-time student of the body and human experience. A mentor, speaker and founder.

And increasingly, I think of myself simply as someone paying attention.

To people.

To relationship.

To what life is asking.

To the living world.

And to what might become possible when more of us are more fully available to meet it.

Denise Balyoz
Mentor • Speaker • Founder of Open Leadership
Windsor, United Kingdom