Rachel Rider

Founder and CEO of Mettaworks

Rachel is a Columbia University certified executive coach with over a decade of coaching experience. She sets her practice apart by drawing from both traditional and alternative modalities, including Somatic Experiencing, Polarity Therapy, Zen Buddhism, Inner Relationship Focusing, and antiracism. Her aim is to see, hear, and feel a client’s needs with utmost clarity in order to bring about profound, lasting, and measurable results.

Rachel also draws from firsthand in-house leadership experience, first as Bloomberg’s HR Business Partner responsible for developing and coaching leaders and teams, and then in charge of leadership coaching at AppNexus (since acquired by AT&T) and Digital Ocean, the third-largest hosting company in the world.

It was in these roles that she began to develop the modalities that underpin the MettaWorks method. And it was one instance in particular that motivated her to launch her own coaching practice. Early in her career, she was in charge of laying off 60 long time colleagues – face to face. Deeply conflicted, she did the only thing she could think to do: she went inward, and attended to her own sense of conflict, and made space for the task at hand, which she carried out with empathy, and attention.

The results were clear, and so was the path forward. After earning her executive coaching certification through Columbia University, Rachel founded MettaWorks in 2015.

Since then, she has completed a three-year intensive certification in Somatic Experiencing.She has also received training in Polarity Therapy. She continues her decades-long meditation practice with Shugen Arnold Roshi, successor to Zen Mountain Monastery founder John Daido Loori Roshi.

As a very important part of her ongoing growth and study, Rachel works with antiracism coach, Makeda Pennycooke. This work is vital to what MettaWorks offers, ensuring she continues to closely examine the racism that lives within her and challenge white thinking she may be bringing to the coaching she provides and the company she runs.