Helena Demuynck spent twenty years placing brilliant women into executive roles before realizing that she was sending them into a system rigged against them.
As founder of oxygen4leadership Ltd., she watched exceptional female leaders navigate boardrooms where they were the only woman—again. She saw them fragment themselves in an attempt to fit into leadership molds that never quite felt right, performing competence in systems that were designed without them in mind.
This experience led to a fundamental shift in her perspective. Fifteen years ago, Demuynck moved from executive search to coaching, focusing on what traditional leadership development completely ignores: the invisible weight of proving yourself worthy of seats at tables that weren’t built for you.
Her work with female executives at companies like Microsoft, KPMG, and Johnson & Johnson revealed something essential. These women didn’t need more skills—they needed permission to lead from their own inner architecture instead of someone else’s blueprint.
“The problem isn’t that women aren’t capable,” Demuynck explains. “It’s that they’re trying to embody leadership styles that require them to abandon themselves at the door.”
Through individual coaching, masterminds, and VIP retreats, she guides what she calls the “identity-ambition bridge”—that crucial space where deepest values meet highest aspirations. Her approach combines women-centered holistic coaching, systemic coaching, NLP, and embodiment work because authentic transformation requires multiple entry points.
The women she works with often describe feeling like they’ve been holding their breath for years. Demuynck’s role is helping them exhale into their own power.
Her clients frequently report subtle but profound shifts—making decisions from inner knowing rather than external validation, communicating authority without performing it, shaping organizational culture from a place of authentic presence rather than borrowed credibility.
Beyond individual coaching, Demuynck cultivates platforms like The Boundary Breakers Collective and Power Talks for Remarkable Females. She’s building something larger: a new model of feminine leadership that doesn’t require self-abandonment as the price of admission.
“Women don’t need to prove their worth in systems that weren’t built for them,” she emphasizes. “They need to re-center their identity, claim their narrative, and lead from the inside out. That’s where real power lives.”
This isn’t about quick confidence boosts or surface-level adjustments. It’s about the lasting transformation that happens when brilliant women finally stop performing leadership and start embodying it.
For further information, visit oxygen4leadership.com, or follow Helena Demuynck via LinkedIn, Speaker Media Kit, Book Site, or Shorby Profile.
