About
I'm Renée Motley, an executive coach who works with the whole person behind the job title.
I coach high-performing leaders as their careers grow and the questions get bigger: how they want to lead, how they want to show up, what they want from their work, and what they want their success to make possible outside it.
My clients are often navigating greater responsibility, more visibility, harder relationships, more consequential decisions, or a changing definition of what they want next.
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: ambitious people learning how to trust themselves, lead in a way that feels like their own, navigate the moments that stretch them, and make intentional choices about what comes next. It had been the arc of my own career all along.
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.