Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
about esther walker
Leadership beyond performance. Grounded in truth.
I’m Esther Walker — a former senior global leader in one of the world’s most complex and extractive industries, where I spent a decade operating at the highest levels of commercial, operational, and governance responsibility.
At the age of 32, I was headhunted into the oil and gas sector to lead a failing global operation.
Within seven years, I had reached directorship level.
Year after year, I was recognised as a top performer across thousands of leaders internationally — for restoring stability, clarity, and results in complex environments.
I didn’t succeed because I pushed harder.
I succeeded because I led differently.
presence not performance
What I did differently — and why it worked
In environments defined by pressure, targets, and performance, I focused on something most systems overlook:
how people relate.
My leadership journey began in global CRM and loyalty marketing strategy before I was headhunted into the oil and gas industry to lead a complex global operation, I learned early that no matter how complex a system is, it is ultimately held together by human behaviour:
- trust
- fear
- responsibility
- communication
- decision-making under pressure
By restoring clarity, accountability, and relational coherence, performance followed — consistently and measurably. Within months, outcomes stabilised and improved — not through process alone, but through people.
That experience confirmed what I had always known intuitively:
when you restore trust and connection, systems self-heal.
I went on to design and implement an Operational Excellence Service Model that became a global framework for supplier and service governance across 35 countries. It was externally audited and recognised as best-in-class.
Budgets stabilised.
Teams re-engaged.
Outcomes improved.
Not through force — but through coherence.
Not through performance — but through presence.
altitude sickness
What I began to see from the top
The reflections shared in this section are drawn from my own lived experience of leadership within high-pressure, performance-driven environments. They are offered as insight into a broader way of leading that is common across many complex systems, and are not intended as criticism of any specific organisation or individuals.
As I rose into more senior leadership roles, a pattern began to come into focus for me.
The pressure leaders were operating under was immense — and within many high-stakes environments, there can appear to be only one way to survive it: performance.
Not performance as excellence — but performance as identity.
Certainty can be prioritised over truth.
Compliance can take precedence over conscience.
Process can begin to outweigh responsibility.
From my perspective, what is often interpreted as strength in these settings may in fact be emotional suppression. What can appear as control may be a way of managing fear.
In this sense, leadership itself does not fail — it can become unwell.
And the higher the stakes, the harder it can be for systems to hear this.
Through my experience, I became increasingly aware of how fear, hierarchy, and unchecked authority can shape the way people relate — both internally and with external partners — in many performance-led organisations.
Certain leadership styles may become normalised and even rewarded: dominance over dialogue, force over listening, certainty over reality. In such cultures, emotional intensity and control can be mistaken for strength.
In high-pressure environments like these, it can begin to feel safer to comply than to speak. Experience may be overridden by status.
Expertise can become obscured by hierarchy.
Challenging reality — even when it is technically or operationally necessary — may start to feel personally risky.
The impact of this way of operating is often systemic.
External partners can become guarded. Internally, people may stop raising issues early, stop thinking creatively, and lose confidence that honesty will be met with respect. Organisations can remain highly capable — yet become relationally constrained.
When I stepped more fully into leadership responsibility, it became clear to me that the underlying issue was rarely intelligence, talent, or technology.
It was the way people were relating.
When psychological safety, respect, and genuine listening were restored, solutions tended to emerge quickly. What had appeared complex was often not technically blocked, but relationally blocked.
The cost of belonging inside performance systems
Like most people, I carried a fundamental human need for belonging. In my early leadership years, I attempted — consciously and unconsciously — to adapt myself to the roles, behaviours, and expectations required to succeed within performance-driven systems.
By conventional measures, I did succeed.
What became increasingly clear over time, however, was the cost of continuing to belong once I stopped conforming to ways of relating that were causing visible harm — not only to me, but to those around me.
As pressure intensified, the space to speak honestly narrowed. Expectations tightened. The emotional load increased. What had once been professional challenge began to take on the weight of personal strain. I was not responding to isolated moments, but to a sustained environment in which fear, performance, and emotional suppression had become normalised.
I witnessed capable people around me struggling — anxiety, exhaustion, distress, and breakdown were no longer exceptional. Many carried this quietly. Others did not. I found myself repeatedly holding space for colleagues who were overwhelmed, frightened to speak, or uncertain how to survive within the culture they were expected to perform inside.
The more I remained grounded in presence, responsibility, and human connection, the more misaligned I became with the prevailing norms. The pressure to adapt did not lessen — it increased. Over time, it became clear that there was no neutral ground left.
My departure was not a singular decision made in comfort or clarity. It was the outcome of a prolonged period in which continuing came at too great a personal cost. The system could not accommodate a way of leading rooted in relational integrity — and I could no longer absorb the impact of remaining.
That experience — of being slowly edged out once I stopped performing identity — nearly broke me.
It also clarified everything.
It showed me, unequivocally, that leadership cultures which prioritise performance over coherence do not simply fail organisations — they exhaust human beings.
And it is from that lived reality that my work now exists.
FROM CORPORATE CONTROL TO CONSCIOUS COHERENCE
Why my career ended — and my work began
My career did not end because I failed.
It came to an end because I spoke honestly — clearly, directly, and consistently — about ways of working that were no longer sustainable, and because I could not continue to conform to a definition of leadership that prioritised performance over humanity.
At the time, I was not operating from spiritual awareness or conscious leadership theory. The Psychology of Being did not yet exist. I was deeply embedded in the same performance-driven structures as those around me, and much of my identity was bound up in role, achievement, and external definitions of success.
I was driven, capable, and outwardly successful — but increasingly disconnected from my body, my inner life, and my own wellbeing. Like many leaders in high-pressure environments, I had learned to push through exhaustion, override physical signals, and measure my worth through output rather than wholeness.
What distinguished me was not enlightenment, but instinct.
Even before I could name it, I found myself consistently challenging and reshaping ways of working that had become dominated by pressure, hierarchy, and performance identity — supporting teams to return to more responsible, relational, and human ways of leading and working.
I questioned modes of relating that reduced leadership to performance rather than presence — including scripted interactions, performative certainty, and transactional approaches that distanced people from responsibility, truth, and genuine engagement.
This was not a conscious mission. It was simply how I related.
In part, this may have been shaped by my early career. I began in CRM leadership within marketing agencies — environments that were far more autonomous, where leadership was allowed to align with one’s natural persona rather than conform to a single, standardised approach.
I had been free to shape my own way of leading - and as it always delivered results, there was no real pressure to change it.
Even then, I senses something fundamental: that sustainable success, fulfilment, and enjoyment in high-stakes leadership comes down to how we relate - to ourselves and to others.
These qualities were not indulgent; they were essential. They became my antidote to a culture of all work and no play - proof that leadership does not have to rely on numbing the senses to endure pressure.
The irony is that this relational style of leadership was precisely why I was later headhunted into the corporate system. The organisation I moved into had been a client I managed for seven years prior. I was already recognised by them as a subject-matter expert in supplier relationship management and in building highly motivated, high-performing teams that consistently delivered operational excellence.
I led through relationship rather than leverage.
Suppliers were not managed as expendable counterparts, but engaged as partners within a shared system. By listening deeply, understanding lived expertise, and bringing the right people together across boundaries, long-standing operational issues were resolved without escalation, coercion, or excessive investment.
In multiple instances, this relational approach not only stabilised delivery and protected critical contracts, but strengthened supplier capability, trust, and long-term performance — outcomes that no system upgrade alone could have delivered.
My approach to leadership was grounded in moral responsibility rather than competition, and in connection rather than control. While I judged myself harshly and pushed my own limits, I did not compete with others. I felt the impact of competition around me, but my struggle was inward — a constant attempt to prove, to endure, to be enough within a system that rewarded disconnection.
With hindsight, I can see something clearly.
My relentless striving was not driven by ambition for status or material success, but by a deeper misalignment. However senior the role, however generous the reward, leadership defined solely by profit and shareholder value never delivered the sense of fulfilment I intuitively expected success to bring.
There is a certain irony in this. For a period of time, my title was Global Fulfilment Manager — while I was quietly searching for fulfilment myself.
What did create a sense of meaning for me was different: restoring operational excellence through genuine human relationships. That was where fulfilment lived — in purpose, in coherence, and in helping others feel it too.
This is what I consistently created within the teams I led. People felt motivated, engaged, and fulfilled — not because of hierarchy or pressure, but because their work was grounded in connection and shared responsibility.
The language at the time spoke to "making the difference real." What I didn't yet have words for was that the difference I was making was relational - and that was precisely why it worked.
In roles that were, by design, largely purposeless, I learned how to create purpose.
And that, more than any title, explains both why I was effective — and why I could not remain.
As these differences became more visible, the space to lead in this way narrowed. What I was advocating for — coherence, accountability, and authentic human connection — increasingly sat outside what the system was able or willing to hold.
My departure was not a dramatic exit, nor a decision made from comfort or clarity. It was the outcome of sustained misalignment between how I was instinctively leading and what the system ultimately required in order to function.
In that sense, the system could not accommodate a way of leading rooted in relational integrity — and I could no longer absorb the cost of remaining.
That ending was not a defeat.
It was a threshold.
Only afterwards — through breakdown, recovery, and deep reflection — did I begin to understand what had been happening beneath the surface. What I had lived unconsciously within leadership became the foundation for the conscious body of work that followed.
That journey — from disconnection to coherence, from performance to presence — is where my work now begins.
MY PERSPECTIVE
Why my leadership style felt different
At the time, I did not have language for this. I was not consciously working with feminine leadership principles, nor did I understand the dynamics I was navigating. I was simply leading in the only way that felt truthful and effective to me.
Only later did I understand why I often felt like a square peg in a round hole — successful on paper, yet subtly out of step with the prevailing culture.
As a woman operating in highly competitive, male-dominated, profit-driven environments, I wasn’t interested in replacing masculine leadership — but in restoring balance.
I brought:
- reflection where there was reactivity
- listening where there was dominance
- responsibility where there was deflection
I was once told to “stop being so nice” and to “raise my voice more”.
What I understand now is this:
Kindness is not the absence of strength — it is its refinement.
Balance isn’t weakness. It’s intelligence.
At the time, I assumed my difference was simply personal — a matter of temperament or style. What I had not yet recognised was that I was leading through qualities traditionally dismissed as “feminine”: relational awareness, intuition, care, and coherence.
The same imbalance persists today.
Diversity has become a metric rather than a transformation. Even when women reach decision-making tables, they are often expected to lead in the same ways as their male peers. Qualities such as reflection, collaboration, compassion, and intuitive intelligence are still routinely undervalued, while pressure, fear, and control are rewarded as strength.
I lived this imbalance. I felt the pressure it created — and I walked through it.
That lived experience has become both my perspective and my purpose:
to help leaders restore coherence between power and care, strategy and soul, the masculine and the feminine.
Because when leadership returns to balance, people thrive.
Organisations stabilise.
And systems begin to heal.
what i do now
Today, I work with senior leaders who are successful on paper — and deeply uncomfortable inside.
People who:
- feel the pressure but can’t name it
- sense something is wrong but don’t know how to change it
- are tired of performing certainty while carrying silent doubt
My work does not begin with strategy.
It begins with the leader.
The foundation beneath my work
Over the past five years, alongside my professional work, I have been studying human psychology in the deepest way possible — not through formal courses or academic pathways, but through lived experience at the highest levels of leadership, pressure, breakdown, and transformation.
From this emerged a body of work I call The Psychology of Being — a practical, human understanding of how people behave, decide, relate, and lead under real-world conditions.
It is not a theory or an ideology.
And it is not something leaders are asked to “study”.
It simply underpins the way I work.
I don’t carry letters after my name, and I am not an “ologist” — but I do carry decades of lived leadership experience, and the clarity that comes from seeing how humans and systems actually operate inside complex organisations, when the stakes are high.
A deeper insight
What I came to understand is this:
We don’t just have performance-based leadership.
We have performance-based humanity.
Most people are operating from carefully constructed identities designed to survive pressure, comparison, and fear — often without realising the cost.
It was from this lived reality that my work evolved into a deeper exploration of the Psychology of Being: how people are shaped, constrained, and conditioned by performance-driven systems — and how coherence can be restored.
How I work
Through the Oak Tree Leadership Ecosystem, I help leaders restore coherence — between who they are, how they decide, and what their systems produce.
From that place:
- organisations stabilise
- cultures shift naturally
- governance becomes responsible rather than defensive
- performance becomes sustainable instead of extractive
This work is not about becoming more.
It is about stopping the performance —
and leading from truth.
career & credentials
- Former Senior Global Leader within a Fortune 500 multinational organisation, leading major B2B programmes with budgets exceeding €60m across 35 countries.
- Developed and implemented a global Operational Excellence Service Model, independently audited and recognised as Best in Class. This model became the organisation’s global framework for service and supplier governance, setting a new benchmark for performance and integrity.
- Appointed General Attorney, responsible for the legal and commercial governance of supplier contracts across Europe, ensuring compliance, transparency, and operational alignment across all agreements.
- Negotiated and managed a major global outsourcing programme, holding single-point accountability for a $350m contract and introducing a Global Contract Framework recognised externally as a model of governance integrity.
- Delivered $2.2m in annual cost savings within 12 months through service delivery transformation and operational excellence.
- Oversaw a customer loyalty programme with 1.3 million cardholders, recognised as a global best-practice model for engagement and retention.
- Awarded seven consecutive global service recognition awards for leadership performance and innovation.
- Extensive experience building and leading multicultural global teams across operations, customer loyalty, marketing strategy, and organisational restructuring.
- Founder of The Psychology of Being™, and developer of The Oak Tree Leadership Ecosystem™ and The I-ACE Method™ — integrative models for conscious leadership, human coherence, and systemic transformation.
- Developer of The Covenant Trilogy — frameworks for environmental integrity, economic equity, and planetary stewardship.
- Creator of The Seed Paper Library — a public commons of essays and frameworks for conscious governance and systemic change.
- Today, partners with CEOs, boards, and leadership teams to deliver bespoke consultancy and education for lasting cultural and organisational transformation.