H. E. Wong, M.Ed., ACC

Coaching Leaders. Designing Learning. Building Community.


Experience, Training & Credentials


“Heather is a remarkable leader and collaborator. She is warmly personable and deeply attuned to people, while also highly organized, strategic, and efficient. Her ability to translate personal growth into practical application within complex organizational environments is rare. Few leaders possess both the vision and the execution to make that integration successful.”

— VA, Former Team Member

About

I’m H. E. (Heather) Wong (she/they), a leadership coach, systems thinker, and community builder with sixteen years inside complex, high-stakes environments: public education, organizational design, and community organizing.

I work with leaders who are used to carrying a lot and are ready to stop doing it alone.

I know what it costs to lead from depletion. I’ve done it.

I’ve been the last line of defense for kids pushed out of systems not built for them. I’ve coached inside environments shaped by constant pressure, ambiguity, and burnout. I navigated a high-risk pregnancy while supporting leaders through systemic collapse. I returned to coaching seven weeks postpartum and watched the community I poured myself into dismantled by a state mandate.

I’m a creator and I have co-founded community ventures while raising two kids, working full-time, and trying to stay connected to why any of this mattered in the first place.

That experience shapes how I work. I can sit with people in the hard season without rushing to fix, flatten, or force clarity before it’s ready.

How I Work

I hold both the system and the person inside it.

Most coaching focuses on one or the other. My work lives in the relationship between them.

I pay attention to patterns, pressure points, power, pacing, and the stories people have had to tell themselves to survive inside demanding environments. Together, we figure out what is actually yours to carry and what no longer needs to be held alone.

I don’t reduce complexity by pretending it isn’t there. I help people find clarity inside it.

This is what founders and leaders tell me they can’t find elsewhere: someone who can zoom all the way out to the system—and all the way in to the body—in the same conversation.

My coaching is rooted in presence, somatics, and neuroscience. Because insight that only lives in your head won’t hold under pressure.

The work has to land in the body to last.

Who I am

I'm a sixth-generation Texan with deep roots in Austin and ancestral ties to New Orleans, by way of Sicily. I come from an Italian and Irish-Catholic tradition where my family laughed often and was deeply spiritual and community-centered — a lineage of teachers, healers, and midwives on one side, and musicians, artists, community workers, and veterans on the other. Both sides hunted, fished, and grew their own food. I come from people who knew what mattered in life. That's the orientation I bring to this work.

My partner and I have been together since 2014. I'm queer, neurodivergent, and a parent of two. I didn't arrive at this work from the outside looking in. I built it from inside systems that weren't designed for me or my family, and that's why I know how to help you navigate yours.

If any of this feels familiar — if you recognize yourself in the weight, the responsibility, or the season you're in — I'd love to hear from you.