This orchard letter traces the long arc of my relationship with Power — from ambition and exhaustion to coherence. It’s a story about what Power demanded, dismantled, and finally returned.
There was a time when I believed that power could be earned — a title, a seat at the table, a name on the door.
If I worked hard enough, if I did everything right, I would finally stand in a place where I could lead my team with fairness and respect.
I began my hotel career in the most unglamorous part of a grand hotel — housekeeping. It was the quiet foundation on which everything else was built.
The women (and some men) who worked with me came from everywhere — from across Southern Europe, and from the first wave of refugees arriving from Afghanistan and Iran — each one with a story folded inside her uniform pocket. Among them were former doctors and lawyers, now cleaning rooms with quiet precision.
I was their Manager, conductor of an invisible orchestra.
My work was inspection, coordination, control — keeping more than a hundred people aligned in rhythm and precision.
Yet when the hotel overflowed and time ran out, we all made beds together, hands moving faster than thought, bound by urgency and pride.
I was young, determined, and proud of the small empire of order we created.
But I also learned early that respect can be demanded, yet never forced — that authority is the tone you hold in a room, not the badge on your chest.
Still, I wanted more.
I wanted power to make things fair.
To be seen.
To speak for the ones who couldn’t.
I thought that if I rose high enough, I could make the system kinder.
Root – Invisible Power
The housekeeping floor was my first classroom in leadership.
Every detail mattered: the way a sheet was folded, the way a guest was greeted in the hallway.
Invisible work builds visible worlds.
Yet in those years I began to feel the slow ache of limitation: responsibility without voice.
I could organise, care, even defend — but I couldn’t change the rules that kept my department and the work we did insignificant.
So I promised myself: one day, I’ll stand where decisions are made.
Branch – Reaching for Visibility
In the late 1980s, that promise carried me across oceans to Jakarta.
A few colleagues and I dreamed of starting a cruise line — to bring the elegance of hotel life onto the sea.
We had courage, imagination, and no capital of our own.
As foreigners, investing directly in Indonesia wasn’t simple, so we built the concept and approached major Indonesian conglomerates who were curious enough to listen.
We crossed borders and industries — hotel to shipping, service to entrepreneurship — a leap of pure power-to.
It felt like standing at the frontier of something bold — a woman at the helm of a company in an industry that had no place for her.
In boardrooms of men in dark suits, our vision was treated as curiosity.
One of them laughed and said, “You do realise you’re female?”
They admired the idea, but not the hands that carried it.
Still, we kept going — late nights, paper plans, faxes through bad lines.
It was a wild, radiant time — daring vision meeting patriarchal disbelief head-on.
Then came the shadow: the myth that leadership requires a killer instinct — and my supposed lack of it, as if power only counted when it drew blood.
One consultant even asked whether I had the ability to navigate the shark-infested waters of the shipping industry — a question that, in hindsight, revealed more about the waters than about me.
It turned out the project was not feasible without the involvement of the military, as the inclusion of a casino (to open in international waters) became a condition. But Indonesia had (and still has) a very strict anti-gambling law.
Suddenly, the talk was about guns, corruption, and how deeply the government itself would be embedded.
The energy shifted.
What had begun as creative flow turned dense and distorted.
I realised we had to step away from our dream — the risk had grown larger than the vision.
So I withdrew — not only from fear, but from recognising both the danger and the cost.
But walking away wasn’t easy. It was painfully hard — two years of work, endless pitches, presentations, negotiations — suddenly written off.
My partners were furious; they wanted to take the risk.
But I knew what was at stake. As the designated CEO, I would have carried full responsibility and standing unprotected when the tides turned.
For years, I called that moment failure.
Now I see it was my system’s early wisdom — choosing coherence over conquest and achievement regardless of cost.
Power can expand or distort; without ground, expansion becomes fire that consumes its source.
Wound – The Descent and the Door
Not long after came the fall — literally.
During a holiday in Austria, a makeshift balcony gave way beneath me, and I plummeted from the first floor onto the granite terrace below.
My right heel — the part of the body that pushes forward, that anchors direction — was shattered.
The body stopped what the mind refused to slow.
For six months I couldn’t walk. I was in a wheelchair.
I sat still while the world moved on, my foot reconstructed with titanium plates and screws, my career in fragments.
One full year out of action — out of work, out of rhythm — haunted by the question: Will I ever be able to walk again?
In the hotel world, movement is survival; stillness felt like erasure.
In that forced stillness, something unexpected opened.
Meditation became my new landscape — eight hours a day of silence, breath, and the slow unravelling of noise.
Pain was a constant companion — and remained so for nearly a decade — but it became a portal.
I began to feel currents inside the quiet, threads of awareness moving through the body like light through water.
That was the deepening of my personal journey that began in Indonesia many years before — the consciousness path, long before I had language for it.
Slowly I understood that power wasn’t in the motion I had lost — the meetings, the fights, the constant doing.
Power was not movement; it was presence — the capacity to stay, to inhabit a moment fully without needing to control it.
It is not what you build, but what remains when everything collapses.
That realisation didn’t arrive as a sentence; it came as a life lesson.
The old ambition began to melt, and in its place came a new kind of strength — raw, unfamiliar, even frightening.
I felt exposed, vulnerable, unsure of who I was without the armour of achievement.
But beneath that uncertainty, something steady was forming — quiet, unshakeable, alive.
Field – The Return to Structure
After a year, when I could finally walk unaided, life carried me back into form — this time as Regional Director for Asia-Pacific.
Ten fully managed hotels. Thirteen franchises. Seven large new properties under construction.
On paper, I finally had what I’d always wanted: scope, responsibility, influence.
I met with architects and designers, reviewed blueprints, decided how future hotels would evolve.
In my day-to-day work, I inspected and audited every property in my region — reviewing performance, ensuring adherence to our five-star standards, guiding pre-opening teams, and travelling endlessly across Asia-Pacific.
And yet, every time I stepped into one of our luxurious hotel lobbies, I felt something sharp — as if two thousand knives turned toward me the moment I entered.
General Managers sent their cars to collect me from the airport, but often disappeared the day I arrived.
I had become the symbol of control from above — part of the regional team, therefore the enemy.
Suspicion hung in the air each time I arrived.
When I finally held authority, it made people hide — and I was devastated by that realisation.
The very thing I had worked so hard to achieve had turned into a wall between us.
Years of living in hotels and airplanes followed — unfamiliar rooms, polite distance, a sense of being everywhere and nowhere at once.
Still, from the General Managers down to the department heads, people opened up almost instantly.
It surprised me — and them — how quickly the conversations deepened, as if something in my tone made it safe to speak.
They shared their frustrations, their anger, the feeling of being left alone by Head Office — as if they had waited for a safe ear.
They expected me to respond in the old way, to assert, to correct, to command.
So I led differently.
I stopped performing authority and began listening to the architecture of energy — how people spoke to one another, how a team exhaled after tension.
I discovered that power could be gentle and still effective.
Sometimes a pause in a meeting changed more than an instruction from me.
I learned the art of active listening, of entering the situation rather than hovering above it.
Leadership became design — arranging space until resonance appeared.
It was around that time that I discovered the writings of Mary Parker Follett — a woman who, almost a century earlier, had already sensed what I was just learning.
She wrote that power is not a possession but a current — a flow that arises between people when they act together.
“Power-over” breaks the current; “power-with” amplifies it; “power-to” creates.
Reading her felt like finding language for something I intuitively already knew.
In her current, I recognised my own field.
Where she saw energy moving between people, I felt it moving through space.
Where she spoke of co-action, I experienced coherence — that invisible alignment which reorganises a room without words.
Follett saw power as current; I experience it as field.
When current becomes field, power turns into coherence — the steady alignment between what we think, feel, and do.
Coherence is not perfection; it is the moment when inner rhythm meets outer action, when the inside and the outside stop contradicting each other.
That was my turning point — the moment when everything I had once fought against began to stabilise inside me as quiet strength.
Release – Dissolution into What Remained
And then — overnight — the company was sold.
Within a week, everything vanished: title, office, salary, certainty.
The outer structure dissolved, leaving a silence so wide it felt unbearable.
Just when I had found my rhythm — when the work finally made sense, when results began to show — it was gone.
I was devastated, tired, disillusioned.
The ground I had rebuilt for myself broke open again.
But all along, Power had been teaching me through form and loss: invisibility, ambition, collapse, reconstruction, dissolution.
Every cycle stripped another illusion away.
I learned that power was never something to seize; it was a current becoming field — an energy that expands when you stop trying to own it.
When the structure disappeared, the architecture stayed within.
And that, I realised, is what coherence really means: the form may fall, but the pattern endures.
What Power Asked of Me
Power asked many things of me.
It asked me to learn humility in the corridors where no one looked,
to lead without being seen,
to find authority not in position but in presence.
It asked me to dream beyond what was reasonable,
to meet disbelief head-on and keep the vision alive even when the air turned hostile.
It asked me to break — literally — so that I could listen;
to return to structures I had once envied,
only to discover that true influence moves quietly.
It asked me to stand alone in boardrooms,
to stay kind when the air was cold,
to let every illusion of control fall away until only coherence remained.
And finally, it asked me to let go — to allow form to dissolve so that the field could appear.
Now I meet Power as an old companion rather than an adversary.
It no longer sits above me; it moves through breath, tone, and grounded presence.
It hums in the eyes of women who hold their space without hardening.
It builds nothing, yet it lets everything grow.
Perhaps that is what mastery truly is — not having power, but becoming coherence.
And that is my message to women everywhere: don’t fear power — learn to read it, translate it, and let it become coherence —
the quiet code of true feminine power.
Author’s Note
When Mary Parker Follett wrote about “power-with” a century ago, women were rarely allowed to speak of power at all. Her insight—that power is a current generated between people rather than a weapon held above them — was revolutionary and quietly feminine in its logic.
Today, that current has evolved into what I call Coherence Power—the next octave of her vision. It is no longer limited to human interaction; it moves through spaces, cultures, and systems. It is what happens when clarity, emotion, and presence align so completely that the field itself begins to reorganize.
For women in leadership, this is not theory—it is practice. Every day we are invited to hold the tension between strength and softness, between visibility and depth. When we choose coherence over control, we don’t withdraw from power — we restore it to its natural state: power with, power through, power as resonance.
✨ If this resonated with you, I invite you to stay in the Orchard — a field of reflection on women, power, and leadership.
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More of this work lives inside my e-book Unapologetic Power.
About the Author
30 years of international leadership experience — 20 of those in corporate executive positions — and 15 years empowering women in top roles.
Renate Hechenberger opens spaces where the inner architecture emerges—an architecture that anchors women in their feminine power.
© 2025 Renate Hechenberger. All rights reserved.
Visual Credit: From the series “Icons” by Ernestine Faux — image used with permission from the artist.
