Renée Dineen is an organizational psychologist, transformational leader, TEDx speaker, author, and leadership coach who has been guiding women through identity shifts for nearly a decade—work shaped by what she calls an arc of awakening: the gradual, often painful process of shedding who we were so we can become who we’re meant to be.

Arc One

For more than 25 years, Renée held senior executive and leadership roles in the high-tech and biotech industries. Her career reflected success, financial security, and professional status—yet it required relentless over-functioning and a growing disconnection from her inner life.

Around 2014, Renée experienced a serious health scare. While she had lived with insomnia for decades, she began to develop new and frightening symptoms—a tremor and a stutter—and was initially told she might have multiple sclerosis. Although the diagnosis ultimately proved incorrect, the symptoms were real and confronting. What emerged instead was a sobering truth: years of unrelenting pressure, emotional self-suppression, and chronic over-functioning had manifested physically. For the first time, achievement could not carry her forward.

In 2015, about a year after that scare, Renée made the decision to leave her senior corporate leadership roles. This was not a departure from leadership or impact, but a conscious choice to step out of the inside corporate identity she had known—so she could restore her health, be more present in her life, and listen for what was next.

Leaving her corporate leadership roles was also a deeply personal decision. Renée wanted to be a fully present mother and partner—emotionally, physically, and relationally—in ways she had not been able to be while living inside relentless performance demands. She had grown up with an ambitious, working mother and could feel how easily patterns of over-functioning, emotional distance, and self-sacrifice were being unconsciously replicated. Stepping out of her inside corporate identity created the space to interrupt those patterns—to choose presence over productivity, attunement over achievement, and relationship over role.

Only after leaving did the quiet arrive.

About Your Guide

My Arc of Awakening

Arc Two

In that quiet, Renée received what she now understands as her first profound inner calling. Grief that had long been buried beneath doing and performing surfaced, and with it came the unmistakable emergence of the mother–daughter calling. It was work she had not gone looking for—but work she needed to do if she was to fully step into her purpose.

That calling revealed the unaddressed mother wound—both her own and the collective one she had witnessed for years in ambitious, high-performing women. Before she could guide others, Renée had to face and heal her own mother wound and courageously claim and integrate her childhood trauma. Through grief, reckoning, and ultimately forgiveness, she reclaimed her voice and restored self-trust.

Beginning in 2016, Renée started hosting retreats and immersive experiences for women—initially centered on mother–daughter relationships—focused on healing generational patterns, reclaiming voice, and restoring connection. These gatherings marked her transition from working exclusively inside organizations to facilitating transformation externally, where depth, pace, and presence could be honored.

As this work deepened, Renée found language for what she had been living. In 2020, she publicly named this awakening in her TEDx talk, Authentic Inaction™: Undoing the Doing in a Do-Crazy World, where she spoke candidly about our cultural addiction to doing—and her own unraveling as she learned to slow down, listen inward, and choose presence over performance. The talk became a turning point, bridging her organizational leadership background with the deeper inner work she was now called to facilitate.

In 2021, Renée facilitated her first SoulFULL Living Retreat for Women—created specifically to support women like herself: ambitious, capable, and outwardly successful, yet burned out and quietly longing for greater meaning and alignment in both work and life. This retreat integrated her background as an organizational psychologist and leadership and team performance coach with the inner work she had come to see as essential. It was designed not as an escape from achievement, but as a re-patterning of how women relate to purpose, productivity, and self-worth.

That experience became the blueprint for what SoulFULL Living would become.

Arc Three

In the years that followed, Renée’s arc of awakening deepened yet again—this time through her most profound reckoning: breast cancer in 2025. Cancer did not simply interrupt her life; it dismantled assumptions about time, strength, appearance, and control. The work she had been guiding others through—slowing down, listening to the body, grieving identity, and choosing presence—became her own lived practice in its rawest form.

These experiences did not break Renée—they refined her. They taught her that identity loss is often the doorway to truth, and that grief, when met honestly, can become a source of clarity, compassion, and deep self-trust.

Today, SoulFULL Living carries this final layer of embodied truth. The retreat serves women navigating identity-altering transitions—burnout, leadership thresholds, health diagnoses, loss, and the quiet collapse of old roles—with the care, spaciousness, and emotional safety Renée herself needed at every stage of her becoming. It holds the woman she has been, the woman she has lost, and the woman she continues to become—alongside others standing at similar edges.

Renée holds a Master’s Degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, is an ICF-PCC credentialed coach, and has served on faculty for leadership programs at Stanford University and IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. As a retreat guide, she creates spaces that are grounded, embodied, and choice-centered—where women are not asked to perform healing or stay positive, but are invited to grieve honestly, listen deeply, and rebuild identity with intention.

“Renee is an expert, loving, and deeply caring leader who creates a space where women feel safe and empowered.”