Dr. Jacinta Jiménez brings together poise, intellect, and warmth in a way that feels both rare and deeply needed. She is a Stanford-trained psychologist, a leadership expert, and an author whose work has reached audiences across the globe. People who meet her often notice her presence before they notice her accomplishments. She carries herself with the kind of poise that commands attention without demanding it, and with a kindness that makes people feel safe in her company. These qualities are not separate from her science but an extension of it. They are part of how she communicates ideas about resilience, performance, and thriving under pressure.
Her earliest lessons came through movement. As a young woman she trained at the Alvin Ailey School in New York, one of the most demanding environments a dancer can enter. There she came to understand that resilience lives in the body as much as in the mind. The studio required discipline, repetition, and the ability to recover after failure. Dance gave her a language for persistence and grace that has carried into every part of her career. That foundation in movement shaped how she would later approach psychology and leadership: with an understanding that knowledge must be lived and embodied.
At Stanford she studied psychology, and at the PGSP–Stanford Consortium she earned her doctorate in clinical psychology. She became board-certified as a leadership coach and licensed as a psychologist in California. Her training could have led to a quiet life in practice or academia, but she chose a broader canvas. She wanted to bring behavioral science to the places where stress, uncertainty, and change were reshaping lives on a massive scale.
That drive led her to BetterUp, the pioneering coaching platform. She joined at an early stage, eventually serving as head of coaching and later as vice president of coaching innovation. There she helped design the scientific framework behind the company’s model and scaled a network of more than 1,500 coaches working across continents. It was a bold effort to combine human connection with technology, bringing science-based coaching to tens of thousands of people. Her leadership there set standards for the coaching industry and established her as a figure who could translate complex science into real-world impact.
Her work at BetterUp prepared the ground for her book, The Burnout Fix, published in 2021. The book distilled years of research and coaching into a guide that spoke directly to individuals and organizations confronting exhaustion. It was widely acclaimed, winning international awards and being recognized as one of the best books on burnout and recovery. What gave it power was its honesty. It did not present resilience as a quick fix but as a practice that must be cultivated and renewed. Readers found in it both the authority of a psychologist and the compassion of someone who understood the fragility of human strength.
Her understanding of resilience has been shaped by her own experiences with health challenges. Over the course of her life she has endured a series of serious medical crises requiring multiple surgeries, including neurosurgery. These ordeals forced her to rebuild her strength again and again. They taught her that resilience is not toughness at all costs but adaptation, patience, and the quiet determination to keep moving forward. She does not dwell on these episodes, yet they give her words unusual weight. When she speaks about recovery and renewal, she speaks from lived experience.
Today Dr. Jiménez advises leaders at every level, from startup founders to Fortune 500 executives. She has delivered keynotes at NASA, Google, Columbia University, the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and many of the world’s largest corporations. Her ideas appear in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, Bloomberg, and NPR. She has been recognized among San Francisco’s top women leaders and named one of the most influential coaches to follow.
What remains most striking is not the list of honors but the qualities she brings into every room. There is poise in her posture, beauty in her expression, and kindness in her manner of listening. She embodies the discipline of a dancer, the clarity of a scientist, and the humanity of someone who has faced adversity and chosen to grow through it. In her presence resilience is no longer a distant ideal but something immediate, embodied, and real. She reminds us that strength is not found in the absence of hardship but in the art of meeting it with steadiness and grace, one deliberate step at a time.
