RENATE HECHENBERGER
FEMALE POWER ARCHITECT
I know power from the inside.
And I know what it lacks.
Power is incomplete without its
female dimension.
I was often the only woman on male-dominated leadership teams.
For three decades, I worked and held leadership roles in international luxury hospitality. I carried operational responsibility for large hotels, worked with owners and executive teams, and later took on regional leadership roles. First in the Asia-Pacific region, with responsibility for around 30 hotels across more than ten countries, and later for a smaller group in the United Kingdom, based in London.
My professional path took me through Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Australia. In these organisations, international standards and commercial interests intersected with different cultural codes, ownership structures and informal power dynamics.
I know the value of this international working world. It required me to succeed across very different cultures, to lead people from diverse backgrounds and to achieve shared results across languages, value systems and hierarchies. That world also took me far.
Within these organisations, I learned how power actually works. Who is heard. Which alliances hold. Where a formal mandate ends and real influence begins. And the price that belonging and advancement can demand.
I was successful in that world. But I also learned that competence and performance do not open every door.
That was my professional life then. Today, that experience grounds my work as a Female Power Architect.
Manager by day. At the temple by night.
Energy work entered my life long before I left the corporate world. In Jakarta, at the height of my life as an international executive.
By day, I led a department of more than 250 people in a luxury hotel. On my days off and in the evenings, I studied and worked in the temple of a Chinese healer and priest in Jakarta’s Chinatown.
A Chinese colleague had taken me to Master Ho Lee, known as Ohm Olli. He did not know me. Yet he had instructed her to bring him “the white woman from her workplace”.
After our first meeting, I was invited to be present while he worked and to work with the people who came to see him. His tradition, however, did not permit a man to teach a woman. Only his wife’s support opened a way for me to stay and learn.
For around ten months, I worked regularly at his side. I learned to remain completely focused amid heat, noise and tightly packed crowds. I learned to perceive without needing to explain everything immediately. And I began to trust a force within me, working through me, that I was only slowly beginning to understand.
Ohm Olli did not teach me to adopt his system. He helped me uncover something that was already present within me.
My leadership experience and my energetic perception already belonged to the same life. I simply did not yet understand how they belonged together.
I was no longer in the system.
But the system was still within me.
In 1994, the path I had been following was abruptly interrupted. A serious fall shattered my right heel into many pieces. The medical prognosis was a permanent disability of seventy per cent.
The orthopaedic surgeon who operated on me did exceptional work. Even so, a wheelchair and crutches were part of my daily life for a year. During the second year, I slowly began to walk again.
The prognosis proved wrong. I can walk. Not as I did before. For almost ten years, I lived with near-constant pain. But I walk.
The prospect of permanent physical disability gave my meditation and energy work a new urgency. Alongside medical treatment, they became central to how I dealt with pain, physical limitation and the long path of recovery.
My professional life also came to a standstill. For the first time in many years, I had no sphere of responsibility, no organisation and no position through which I could define myself.
I had assumed that the pressure belonged to my professional environment. Yet many of its rules continued to operate even though I was no longer working. The need to function. The expectation of being dependable. The unquestioned habit of carrying responsibility.
They revealed themselves in the way I dealt with physical limitation, severe pain, dependence, slowness and the loss of my familiar role.
The professional context had disappeared. The inner form remained.
The spiritual and energy work that had begun in Jakarta took on another dimension during this time. My attention turned more deeply towards my own inner structures. I began to understand that systems do not end where we leave them. Their rules can become inner standards by which we continue to organise ourselves.
In 1996, I returned to the corporate world. Partly out of financial necessity. The most significant formal stages of my career, however, still lay ahead of me.
Over the following twelve years, I took on my major regional leadership roles and continued working at an international level. Those years were not simply a repetition. They showed me that I could carry substantial responsibility and lead successfully within complex international structures.
It was only in 2008 that I chose to leave that world.
That decision was preceded by an experience in which competence and performance were no longer enough.
I could not win this game without betraying something within myself.
Towards the end of my years in London, I came up against the glass ceiling. The door to the next stage of my career stood slightly ajar. It was a board-level mandate. But to walk through it, I would have had to undermine my own superior and take part in a power game I rejected.
I did not pay that price.
I did not get the position. Professionally, I could go no further at that point.
That was a real loss. Not because I lacked the competence or experience for the next step. But because I could not win this game without betraying something within myself.
In 2008, I left London and the corporate world. I was fifty years old. I did not leave because I had failed or had not gone far enough. I left from a position of proven competence, knowing that I was unwilling to pay the price for the next step.
At the time, I knew only that this path had come to an end for me. It was only later that I understood how fundamental this experience would become to the work I do today.
My work today grew out of two distinct worlds of experience.
After leaving the corporate world, I founded my own business and placed spiritual and energy work at the centre of my professional life.
I have worked independently for seventeen years. During this time, I developed my own method, CoReOn, led groups and a Masterclass, and worked with people across a total of around 5,000 sessions.
Through this work, I have engaged deeply with inner structures, attachment, fear, loyalty, strength and authority.
What may appear from the outside to be two very different paths through life is, to me, part of the same whole.
My international leadership experience taught me how organisations, formal mandates, loyalties and informal power dynamics actually operate. Energy work sharpened my perception of how these external forces can continue to live within a person. As attachment. As fear of losing belonging. As learned adaptation. As authority that is still waiting for approval.
Over time, I understood that I was not bringing together two separate fields. I was looking at the same reality on two levels: the outer and inner architecture of power.
I see where a woman holds formal power yet still holds back her authority. Where she confuses the boundaries of a system with her own. Where she remains attached to a successful form she has long outgrown.
Female Power Architect is not a creative label for traditional consulting. The name describes the work that grew out of these two worlds of experience.
This is where my work begins.
What I bring
International leadership & systems experience
30 years of international leadership and management experience.
Ten years in London, and twenty years living and working in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Australia.
Regional leadership responsibility across the Asia-Pacific region, overseeing around 30 hotels in more than ten countries, followed by responsibility for a smaller group in the United Kingdom, based in London.
Experience working with owners, executive teams and complex stakeholder structures, as well as with new hotel developments, franchise models and international standards.
Energy work & inner architecture
Spiritual and energy practice since the late 1980s, grounded in intensive work with meditation, energetic perception and consciousness processes.
Seventeen years of independent work. Founder of my own business and developer of the CoReOn method.
Work with people across a total of around 5,000 sessions, including individual work, groups and Masterclasses.
A precise perception of the inner attachments and conditioning that constrain personal authority, and of their connection with external power dynamics.
I came to know Renate’s work at a time when I was functioning as an entrepreneur with more than 360 employees, but had lost my inner space. I was successful and disciplined, yet no longer truly connected to myself.
Renate guided me back to intuition, feeling and trust. She has the rare ability to be fully present exactly where we ourselves have become blind. She recognises which impulses arise from our own strength and which come from adaptation or fear. This clarity creates order. It helps us stand upright again.
Today, as an artist, I encounter old doubts in new forms. Renate reminds me time and again that creation does not arise from performance, but from presence.
Renate is an architect in the truest sense. She shows us how to rebuild our inner form until we can feel our own compass again.
To every woman who recognises something of herself in my story, I would say: Have that one conversation with Renate. It is worth every minute. Not because it is easy, but because it is real.
We are not fruit trees to be trained into shape.
I do not want women to keep binding their power to a form that others have designed for them.
I know these systems. I have led within them. And I know what they do to women.
They support women as long as they succeed within the familiar form. It becomes more difficult when a woman no longer makes her authority dependent on approval, sets a boundary that truly holds, and thereby changes the existing order.
A woman’s own authority will not always be agreeable. It sets boundaries, shifts power relations and brings consequences. That is not a flaw she needs to correct in herself.
Women therefore do not need more instruction in how to adapt.
They need a place outside their system where what still binds them to the familiar form becomes visible. A place where they can reconnect with their own vitality and flourish in a form that is truly their own.
As a Trusted Advisor, I occupy an independent, discreet position in that space, with no vested interest in the outcome.
At 69, I do not do this work because I still have something to prove.
I do it because today I know what my experience is needed for.
Working with me
If you no longer want to shape your authority to fit the existing form, but instead inhabit your own power, this is where our work together begins.
Together, we bring into view the external power dynamics, loyalties and internal conditioning that still limit your room to act.
Stop adapting. Leave the form. Inhabit your own power.
In selected cases, I also work with men within this framework.
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