About
I'm Renée Motley, an executive coach for leaders in high-growth environments. My clients are founders, operators, investors, and senior leaders navigating the moments that shape careers: a promotion that changes what the job asks of you, a life event reshaping your priorities, a reorg bringing new team dynamics, an itch to make a career jump, or a decision that will shape the next decade.
HOW I GOT HERE
I was fortunate to learn about executive coaching very early in my career. As an analyst at J.P. Morgan, I watched managing directors bring in coaches to navigate an organization running at enormous scale. I was a psychology major who defected to economics, so the business case made instant sense. I filed it away and kept moving.
Stanford GSB is where coaching stopped being a footnote. I took Interpersonal Dynamics, the flagship "Touchy Feely" course, was selected for the Arbuckle Leadership Fellows Program, and spent my second year coaching first-year MBAs through career pivots, imposter syndrome, and at least one very bad breakup. I still remember how exciting it was to have found work that didn't feel like "work," work that matched how I'm wired.
But it's hard to deviate from the norm, from the career path you'd spent 30 years carefully architecting. So I still took the path that made sense on paper: Wall Street to Silicon Valley, joining Robinhood as a senior manager in strategy and operations as the company scaled toward its IPO. Startup life was like drinking from a firehose, a real life business school case study. But one moment brought me back to the spark I had felt coaching at Stanford: After I presented to the CEOs and the executive leadership team, two associates reached out asking how they could build that kind of presence and fluid communication style. I had spent a decade learning to hold a room across Wall Street and venture capital without ever naming what I'd built. Their question named it, and I couldn't unsee it: this was something I could help other people build.
Here's the part that surprises people. Public speaking did not come naturally to me. I was painfully shy through high school. What changed was one core belief: I have something worth saying, and people will want to hear it. That shift in self-talk is the work I do with clients every day.
After the IPO, I coached with a firm focused on cofounder dynamics, work I still do and still love (I joke that it's couples therapy for startups). But I wanted to serve the full range of leaders I'd sat beside my whole career, and so RM Coaching, LLC was launched.
Looking back, the thread is obvious: leaders in high-growth environments making high-stakes decisions at pivotal moments. It had been the arc of my own career all along.
HOW I WORK
My coaching is built for those committed to developing the internal side of leadership: where you're headed, how you show up, and what gets in your way. The work is structured and honest, grounded in real accountability.
We start with a 6-month commitment, meeting biweekly over Zoom or the phone for 60 minutes. All engagements begin with an extended 90-minute discovery session to set the foundation of our work together and align on desired outcomes. Many clients choose to continue with coaching on a biweekly or monthly cadence.
PERSONAL
I'm a Pittsburgh native who traded snow for sand in 2018 and now calls Venice Beach home. After hours, you'll find me at the driving range working on my golf swing or upside down at a yoga studio.
The longer version of how I got here, including what I tell everyone who asks me about becoming a coach, lives on the blog.