Step into Your Eldership Era
Let’s clear away the BS and distractions that keep you and the community or organisation you lead stuck.
Ways to Work With Denise
300+
Organizations and communities transformed
25+
Years of practice
200+
Local and international presentations
15+
Strategic long term partnerships with government agencies throughout BC
We all reach the limits of what we know and can do on our own
I’ve worked with all kinds of people over the years and while each one is unique, the problems they faced shared a common theme.
Complexity that leads to problem-solving fatigue.
When you’re deep in the daily running of an organization, things can get crazy, and it can be hard to see the forest for the trees.
The usual go-to is more expensive training.
If you know more things will be easier, right?!
The leaders I work with call me once they’ve learned the hard way that more knowledge doesn’t change things. It happens to every leader eventually, and it says nothing about your competence. The people I work with are exceptionally good at their jobs.
But people choose their words carefully around a leader. By the time you hear about an issue it’s been smoothed by everyone who tried to handle it on the way, so you often don’t have the real version of events to make decisions from.
My job is telling you what your team decided they didn’t feel safe enough to say.
When you finally see the dynamics that have been running underneath, choices open up that weren’t available to you before. Finding those is what I do when we sit down together.
"It's so fulfilling for me when a client gains a new perspective and, subsequently, the freedom to make different, braver choices."
Denise Findlay
Courageous leadership is a decision you make
Some of the common problems leaders bring to these calls
- You're facing a complex problem with no easy solution
- You're weighing a change in your career or your organization
- You've been handed a change process to lead and you don’t know where to start
- Other trainings and approaches have been exhausted without success
- You want your own philosophy and values clear, along with your organisation's, so your policies and practices follow from them
- Toxic culture, gossip, stress leave and HR complaints are taking over
Strategy Sessions
GET INSIGHTS + CONFIDENCE TO EXECUTE
In this private consulting session, I’ll give you honest feedback on your current situation and concrete recommendations for what to do next. You’ll leave our call with insight you can’t get anywhere else and the confidence to execute.
What’s Included
- 90 minutes online together
- Pre-session questions to work through to give me the context I need to help you
- A call recording to refer back to
- A written summary of the session within 24 hours
- Priority action steps that you can implement immediately
- Inquire for pricing
Everyone wants transformation. Almost nobody wants to be uncomfortable. This is for the ones who do.
The hardest part of your day is the conversation you’re currently avoiding.
You know the one. If you say what needs to be said, you risk breaking the trust you’ve spent months building with your team. But if you keep quiet to protect their feelings, the work suffers and resentment grows.
Most corporate training teaches you to manage these moments with scripts and checklists that try to sterilise the friction. But you can’t checklist your way out of human tension.
You heal it by showing up differently today. Coaching opens up what’s still possible.
Eldership is the authority that comes from how people experience you.
Eldership is a way of moving through the world fully in tune with who you are and what you stand for. It’s a state of becoming that requires you to release the old you and reclaim the inner power you were born with.
Connecting with your inner power happens in small moments, and in the beginning you have to be intentional.
- You hold boundaries kindly and firmly.
- Someone asks what you think and you tell them the truth, even when it's difficult.
- You take a stand when something doesn't sit right with you.
- You have the difficult conversation at the point you notice it's needed.
Foundations of my coaching practice
I’m a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh knowledge keeper with a PhD.
My approach integrates the Co-Active Coaching Model, developmental psychology, process psychology and relationship systems theory. It’s trauma informed, and draws on research into Indigenous healing and education alongside decades of my own practice in community contexts and agencies serving diverse populations.
I know how to support people through thick psycho-social-cultural systems dynamics so they can influence change from a place of inner knowing and power.
On its own each one is nothing. Stacked up over years, they become how you lead.
I meet a lot of leaders who have no power in the room they are meant to be leading. They have the title and the budget, and none of it helps, because they are showing up inauthentically and people can feel the incongruence.
True authority means walking into a room, saying the exact thing everyone is thinking, and leaving the relationship stronger for it.
That is Eldership and it means being willing to go first.
Your people won’t speak honestly until somebody else has, and the person they’re watching is you.
Going first is a lot to ask a leader to do alone. Finding my own inner power was a process and I was guided by courageous mentors who helped me into my own Eldership.
What I learned from them is that leaders need someone who will give them honest feedback in service of their growth and dreams, because they need to believe in their vision enough to make big, sometimes risky decisions in front of everyone.
I know what going first asks of you, and I want to be the person standing beside you while you do it.
Coaching with Denise
GET BELOW THE SURFACE FOR IMPACTFUL CHANGE
Everything we do gets built around your organization and what you are trying to change inside it. Going deeper than surface level workshops and one-day training means staying in the room while people get defensive or finally say the thing they have been holding for years.
Most of the coaches in this industry can’t hold that. At the end of our engagement your team will tell you things they would not have told you at the start.
What’s Included
- Online sessions every two to three weeks for 45 minutes each
- A recording of every session to reflect back on between calls
- Work in both directions between sessions. You take away something to execute, and I take away the situation you’re stuck on
- Access to the knowledge base and frameworks I’ve built across 25 years for community building, conflict resolution, relationship building, communication and team dynamics, none of which have been published before
- A coaching agreement setting out how we work together
- Inquire for pricing
Sometimes the fastest way to say the hard thing is to have someone else say it first.
Book a Kenote with Denise
A keynote presentation is 90 minutes and includes teaching, reflection activities, dialogue and a question period. I build the content around what your people are dealing with, because it only works if they recognize themselves in what I say.
I speak online and in person on lateral violence, internalised oppression, courageous leadership, and relational healing inside organisations.
My signature keynote is When the Oppressed Become the Oppressor.
The rooms where I do my best work are the ones where people have been avoiding something for years.
Every leader has felt the pull toward the version of themselves who knows something is broken but chooses comfort over courage.
Questions leaders ask
How is a strategy session different from a coaching engagement?
A strategy session is one conversation about one situation. You bring the problem, you get honest feedback and concrete recommendations, and what you do next is yours. Coaching is a six to eighteen month engagement working at the level of who you are as a leader and the system you lead. Most people book the session first.
Do I have to complete the coaching readiness questionnaire before we work together?
For coaching, yes. You’ll be sent the questionnaire after you apply, and we’ll go through your answers together on a complimentary 30 minute call. It tells us both whether the timing is right, and it has saved people from spending money on something they weren’t yet ready for. The strategy session doesn’t require it.
Do you work with non-Indigenous organisations?
Yes. Most of my work is with non-Indigenous organisations, and has been for years. My relational approach comes out of decades in Indigenous communities and it works wherever people have to do hard things alongside each other.
Where do you travel to for keynote speaking?
I speak across Canada and I do international speaking engagements online. Get in touch with your dates and location.
Do you have a payment plan for long-term coaching engagements?
Yes. Payment plans are available for both coaching tiers. Once you’re offered a coaching place we’ll agree on a schedule that works for both of us and fits your budget cycle or your organisation’s approval process, and it goes into our coaching agreement.
Do you coach teams?
Yes. Working with teams is my specialty, but the coaching on this page is one to one. Team and organizational work gets built differently.