After more than a decade as a volunteer for the charity Look Good Feel Better, North Shore resident Renee Rigden is now one of the organisation’s facilitators, running mindfulness as well as skincare and make-up classes. Christine Young talked to her to trace her career from corporate high-flier, to mindfulness facilitator and nutrition and lifestyle coach, towards becoming a qualified naturopath and medical herbalist.

This year Renee completes a Bachelor of Natural Medicine degree at South Pacific College of Natural Medicine. She initially trained as a make-up artist after leaving Westlake Girls High School, then worked for Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido for eight years, first in retail and later, as she progressed through the ranks, in the company’s New Zealand head office, including in brand management, and ultimately as national sales manager. She loved the industry – and had no intention leaving until she hit a health crisis, an unfortunately all-too-common story for over-busy achievers in the corporate world.

“I returned to work with a one-year-old,” she says, doing more than a full-time job (“you were there when you needed to be there” including national and international travel), and with her entrepreneurial husband in the throes of developing his own fast-growing business. These were the days before flexible working hours or working from home, and she commuted from North Shore to Glen Innes on a daily basis.

“I had high expectations of myself,” she says now, “and my body started sending strong messages…. It wasn’t sustainable.” She faced fertility issues, including a miscarriage, before an ectopic pregnancy led to emergency surgery. Successfully treated, but wanting to know why this was happening to her, she followed a friend’s recommendation to see a naturopath, and the seed was sown. Something had to give, and unless she wanted her children to be brought up by a nanny (she didn’t) she needed to change her lifestyle.

She enrolled in a one-year online health coaching certificate with New York-based Institute for Integrative Nutrition, self-described as the “world’s leading integrative health and education platform, offering courses on health coaching, Ayurveda and more”.

This certificate was Renee’s entry into the natural health industry, providing personal knowledge as well as the “tools and information to work with people straight away”. The school’s philosophy, she says, is that there are lots of little things people can do to make a real difference to their health, working on areas like lifestyle, diet and sleep.

Renee was already involved with Look Good Feel Better, the charity of the cosmetics industry, that supports women (and now men) with tools to help them feel better about and cope with the physical changes they face as they go through treatment for cancer. Through this, she knew that seemingly small practical actions can improve outcomes for people, and the ethos of the health coaching certificate gelled well for her.

Look Good Feel Better’s wellbeing programme began more than 35 years ago, offering skincare and make-up classes. It provides a range of free sessions for anyone with any cancer, at any stage. It is, says the charity’s website, “time away from the world of diagnosis, treatment and recovery, to help… navigate cancer with confidence, feel stronger and live better.”

 Renee first became involved as a volunteer while working for Shiseido, as part of Shiseido’s corporate volunteer programme; she was immediately taken with the benefits of the charity's approach after her first volunteer experience. Adding some of her own time to the corporate volunteer hours, she remained actively involved as a volunteer for 11 years, taking only a short break when she had very small children.

In 2018, she was asked if she would take on a part-time role to facilitate mindfulness as well as skincare and make-up classes. As facilitator, she is responsible for planning the content as well as running classes and taking everything needed (the cosmetics, donated by the cosmetics companies, plus tea and coffee) to the class locations, usually community spaces. Since Covid, says Renee, Look Good Feel Better has “diversified hugely”, and she now also offers mindfulness classes in person and on Zoom, alongside online skincare and make-up classes. The full Look Good Feel Better programme now also includes online classes run by others, that include chair yoga and gentle Pilates, men’s classes, on-demand refresher videos, and expert Q&As and podcasts.

The charity’s general manager and head office staff organise the programme schedule and tutors for each of the classes, while Renee works alongside volunteers who assist in her facilitator role. Her mindfulness class is offered monthly from February to December, and for the past five years she has she also run monthly skin care and make-up classes, though her study schedule prevents that this year. In addition, she takes classes at Starship Hospital for teenagers with cancer, and works on special events, for example events associated with Feel Better month in association with Farmers. Last month she was a speaker at the Cosmetics New Zealand Innovation and Connection Day, talking about her shift from the cosmetics industry to a focus on wellbeing, as well as about Look Good Feel Better.

But back to her initial move out of the cosmetics industry. The online health coaching course “is a life-changing experience for many people,” she says. And so it proved for her. Inspired, she worked on her own lifestyle and nutrition changes, before starting to work with others, within the “narrow framework” of the knowledge she had gained. However, while she could help with small incremental changes, she increasingly found that for deeper insightsand treatment, she needed to refer clients to a naturopath. “I had to stay in my lane as a health coach,” she says. “All the basic things do make a difference, but some people had more complex conditions and I couldn’t get to the root cause.”

In 2021 she enrolled in the three-year Bachelor of Natural Medicine programme at South Pacific College of Natural Medicine, aiming to become a clinical naturopath and medical herbalist, in a course that provides students with in-depth knowledge of the philosophy of natural medicine, herbal medicine, nutrition, research, anatomy and physiology, and pathophysiology. Opting to study part-time, she’s now in her clinical (final) year, working directly with patients under supervision at the college’s clinic in Ellerslie. As a student practitioner, she has a much greater understanding of all the body systems and will be able to prescribe supplements, read blood tests, and order specific testing. “I’ve realised how in-depth and evidence-based [naturopathy] is,” she says. “It’s helped me appreciate the scientific evidence that supports it…. I have learned so much from practitioners and others.”

Her career change has “worked out well”, she says; she’s successfully returned to study as an adult (including sitting a pre-requisite paper in chemistry before she started) alongside prioritising time for her two children (now aged 12 and nine). She has continued her role as facilitator at Look Good Feel Better, and is also developing her own wellbeing consultancy.

The latest chapter in the latter journey has involved one-on-one, group and corporate wellbeing and nutrition work. She runs a wellness workshop targeted at teenage girls, covering information about nutrition, diet and awareness of puberty and development. She’s currently working on rolling this out further, including nationally online as well as to school groups or classes, and on developing a pay-it-forward initiative so that it can be offered to teenagers from families that may not have the necessary discretionary income. “The things I teach are very practical and evidence-based,” she says; she hopes that the courses counterbalance some of the inaccurate online information and perceptions teenagers are particularly susceptible to.

She has also started offering group coaching, a 21-day personalised detox programme, and a 10-day teenage programme with accompanying e-book. Corporate workshops, covering 12 principles to better health, involve participants looking at and analysing their lifestyles and putting in place some group goals, with Renee making a return visit after three or four weeks. “For some people, making sustainable changes needs support and accountability,” she notes wryly.

Add to this the recent publication of a ‘Healthy Start – Lunchbox Edition’ e-book, a joint project with holistic wellness advocate Sarah Turner (she sees potential for breakfast and dinner editions) and it’s clear that while busy, Renee has embraced a fulfilling lifestyle that offers her the wellbeing she sought as she left the cosmetics industry while also assisting others to do likewise.