Finding balance from health care to self-care: A leadership journey
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In quiet palliative care rooms, Deny Thomas began asking patients the question that would change his life: What have you learned from your life that I can carry forward?
Their answers became his compass, guiding him across 59 countries, through hospital wards and into northern communities, and eventually to Royal Roads University, where reflection became renewal.
“I’d done a lot of community work,” he says. “But I realized it was time to do some soul work.”
Exploring balance in community and self
That realization shaped everything that followed. As a registered nurse, Thomas worked in public health across Alberta, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories before becoming a health director at Woodland Cree First Nation in northern Alberta.
“I’m not from a First Nations background, but I was really honoured that the chief and council welcomed me,” he says.
After years of caring for others, Thomas began to feel an inward call. “I’ve learned that in the current of life, if you flow with it, you’ll go further. If you resist, you risk drowning,” he says. “I’ve learned to surrender, to let life guide me where I’m needed.”
Still, he wanted to find balance between purpose and presence. “I want to serve the Nation, I want to serve society, but how can I also ground myself for family life?” he says. “That perfect balance I’m looking for is the same one everybody is looking for.”
Lessons from Royal Roads and remote places
That turning point brought him to the Master of Arts in Leadership (Health) program at Royal Roads University. “I met graduates in airports and remote places,” he says. “There was so much synchronicity that I finally said, ‘I’m going to sign up.’”
Once in the program, his understanding of leadership shifted from management to mindfulness. His capstone project, titled Discipline, Gratitude and Self-Care, explored how awareness and reflective practice can sustain both health leaders and the people they serve.
“It completely pivoted my thought process,” he says. “I asked myself, what can I bring back to the world?”
Creating a self-care sanctuary
That question became tangible at home in Niagara Falls. Thomas began turning his property into a “self-care sanctuary” designed for renewal, with natural light, plants, spaces for journaling and meditation, and places that invite stillness and reflection. He started by tearing up the lawn and sowing a pollinator garden. The attempt did not take.
“The first version failed,” he says. “But some seeds need winter before they rise. That taught me to respect timing and patience.”
The sanctuary reflects what he absorbed through his studies at Royal Roads. “Everything I learned through the MAL program helped me translate theory into action,” he says. “It became a way to merge leadership with creativity and community well-being.”
Thomas also found reflection and expression in writing. His first book, 89 Life Lessons from a Palliative Nurse, gathers insights from the people he has cared for. His second, Magic Within, is a children’s book that invites readers to see the body as a universe of living cells.
Cultivating leadership with gratitude and self-care
Thomas’s next project, gratitude and self-care journals, expands on the practices he explored through his capstone. Through each chapter of his journey, Thomas continues to integrate reflection into daily life and leadership. He says Royal Roads helped him find the connection between awareness, service and creativity—lessons he now carries forward in all he does.
Thomas's three journals, Rebuild, Reset and Rise are available for purchase online, with 100% of all royalties dedicated to social causes.
“All the answers you seek are already within you,” he says. “Be still, and sooner or later the answer will come.”
In many ways, the wisdom he once gathered from his patients has come full circle, carried forward and now shared with others.
“Awareness lives in every soul. The wisdom in these pages is not mine alone, it rises from the Divine within, the same spark that breathes quietly inside each of us. In honour of that shared light, 100% of all royalties from these books will be dedicated to uplifting social causes and nourishing the world that has nourished me,” says Thomas.