RENATE HECHENBERGER
FEMALE POWER ARCHITECT
I know power from the inside.
And I know what it lacks.
Drawing on international leadership experience, responsibility carried firsthand, and many years of work with the inner structures that shape how fully a woman can live her own authority.
Ich war oft die einzige Frau in Führungskreisen, die fast ausschließlich aus Männern bestanden.
For three decades, I worked and led in international luxury hospitality. I held operational responsibility in major hotels, worked with owners and leadership teams, and later took on regional leadership roles: first across the Asia-Pacific region, with responsibility for around 30 hotels in more than ten countries, and then for a smaller group in the United Kingdom, based in London.
My career took me across Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Australia. I learned to lead people from different backgrounds and cultures and to navigate cultural codes, owners’ interests, hierarchies and informal power dynamics. This world shaped me and took me far.
It taught me how power actually works: Who is heard. Which alliances hold. Where a formal mandate ends and real influence begins. And what belonging and advancement can cost.
I was successful in this world. Yet competence and performance did 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.
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”.
At our first meeting, a stocky man stood before me, bare-chested and wearing bright yellow trousers. Two kris, short ceremonial daggers, crossed through his cheeks. What I saw challenged much of what I had understood reality to be until then.
Ohm Olli said to me: “I have a message for you from my gods. You know how to heal, so do it.” As far as he was concerned, there was nothing further to discuss. For me, it was an enormous challenge.
He invited me to be present during his work and to work energetically with the people who came to see him.
For around ten months, I worked regularly at his side. I tried to understand what he was doing. Yet what took place there as healing bore little resemblance to my Western understanding of it. Again and again, he said to me: “You have to do this. You must do this. This is your work.”
That period pushed me to my mental and emotional limits again and again. I had to let go of the idea that I first needed to understand everything before I could trust my own perception. I learned to stay focused amid heat, noise and dense crowds, and to trust a way of perceiving that I was only beginning to understand at the time.
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. In 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 a permanent physical disability gave my engagement with meditation and energy work a new urgency. Alongside medical treatment, they became an essential part of how I dealt with pain, physical limitation and my long recovery.
My professional life also came to a standstill. For the first time in many years, I had no organisation and no position through which to 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 became visible in the way I dealt with pain, dependence on others, slowness and the loss of my familiar role.
The professional context had disappeared. The inner form remained.
The energy work I had begun in Jakarta now turned my attention more fully towards my own inner structures. I began to understand that systems do not end when we leave them. Their rules can become internal 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 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.
It was not until 2008 that I chose to leave this 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. My career went no further at that point. It was a real loss. I lacked neither the competence nor the experience for the next step.
In 2008, I left London and the corporate world. I was 50 years old. I did not leave because I had failed or had not gone far enough. I left from a position of proven competence and by my own choice.
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 been working independently for seventeen years. During that time, I developed CoReOn, my own method, and led groups and a Master Class.
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 operate. Energy work sharpened my awareness of how these external forces continue to operate within a person: as inner bonds, as fear of losing belonging, as learned adaptation, or as an authority that still waits for approval.
Over time, I came to understand that I was not bringing two separate fields together. 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 mistakes the limits of a system for her own. And which parts of her have grown quieter beneath the demands of function, adaptation and belonging.
Female Power Architect describes the work that emerged from these two worlds of experience.
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 for around 30 properties in more than ten countries across the Asia-Pacific region, followed by 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.
Around 5,000 one-to-one sessions, groups, Master Classes and seminars.
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.
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.
That is why I would recommend that any woman who feels this speaks to her have that one conversation with Renate. Every minute is worth it 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. I know how far they can take women, and where the familiar form becomes far too narrow.
They advance women as long as they remain successful within that form. It becomes more difficult when a woman no longer ties her authority to approval, sets a boundary that truly holds, and in doing so changes the existing order.
A woman’s own authority is not always comfortable. It sets boundaries, shifts power dynamics and has consequences. This is not a flaw she needs to correct in herself.
Women do not need further instruction in how to adapt.
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.
We make visible the external power dynamics, loyalties and inner 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.
powered by Borlabs Cookie