Her Story
About Felise
Felise T Matlock Brown is a human resources executive, wellness advisor, and the Founder of Sanctuary of Self — a bespoke whole-being coaching practice created for high-performing women who have built impressive lives and are now asking a deeper question: What is all of this actually for?
With over 25 years of experience partnering with C-suite leaders at globally recognized organizations — including Google, Bank of America, NBCUniversal, Pepsi and Citigroup — Felise understands from the inside how high-achieving women can lose themselves inside systems that were never designed to see them whole. She has lived the tension between external success and internal depletion. That lived experience is the foundation of everything she now builds.
She holds a Master's degree in Human Resources and Industrial Relations from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has spent two decades leading enterprise transformation, organizational design, workforce planning, and culture work at scale.
In 2025, her role at Google was eliminated — a moment she describes not as a loss, but as an invitation. What followed was a period of deep recalibration: rest, reflection, and a return to herself. She invested in a coaching certification, began a doctoral journey in holistic medicine, and engaged in her own transformative coaching work. The shift she experienced — inward, not just professional — became the blueprint for what Sanctuary of Self now offers others.
On April 3, 2026, she launched Sanctuary of Self: a whole-being coaching experience grounded in the integration of Mind, Body, and Soul. Through individual coaching, retreats, and select corporate wellness programming, Felise guides accomplished women beyond the performance mask and toward the kind of wholeness that sustains everything they are building — in their careers, their relationships, and themselves.
She is a Certified Life Coach and a certified holistic health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Felise is also a classically trained chef from the International Culinary Center. She believes that nourishment, like healing, is deeply personal.
Felise is based in New Jersey, where she lives with her husband and two Little Humans.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Felise
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Believe in yourself. Trust yourself. And do not allow fear to stop you.
Not the fear of not having a plan. Not the fear of not knowing enough. Not the fear of what someone else will think. Not the fear of imperfection. None of it.
I am speaking from exactly where I have been. Every day I wake up and simply ask: Lord, what are we going to co-create today? And something opens. A nudge toward a website, a piece of research, an idea I hadn't considered. One thing would lead to the next. And the next. And before I knew it, a full day has unfolded — not from a plan, but from faith and trust.
That is what I want you to know. You do not need to see twenty steps ahead. You need to take one divine, inspired step. The next will reveal itself. And the next after that.
Growth does not wait for certainty. It waits for courage. So take the one step you can see. Everything else will follow.
02What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
My faith is my foundation. Family is my rock. I have two Little Humans, and my time with them is not negotiable — it is sacred. The same is true of my own centering practices. I walk outside. I put my feet in the grass. I pray. I meditate. I travel. I rest without apology.
These are not indulgences. They are the source.
I have learned — truly learned — that I cannot pour from an empty vessel. If I am not whole, I cannot be fully present for my clients, my family or friends. So I invest in myself with the same intention I bring to everything else. Consciously. With purpose.
My deepest value, in work and in life, is this: I believe that every human being carries everything they need inside themselves. The sanctuary is not somewhere you go. It is who you already are. My work is simply to help people remember that and to stop looking outside themselves for what has been within them all along.
I love people. I love helping people thrive in the spaces where they spend most of their lives. That has always been true. It is the thread that runs through everything I have ever done — and everything I am building now.
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