Dr. Susan Sterkenberg

Founder, Catalyst for Renewal

Location: Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

Specialty: Grief, Career, Organizational Development & Life Transitions Coaching

Framework: Sanctuaries of Renewal, The Compass “Within - North Star”

Contact: pennsusan01@outlook.com

Susan Sterkenberg has spent her career in the territory where change meets the human heart. As a senior organizational leader and executive coach working across Fortune 500 companies, healthcare, education, and nonprofit sectors, she built a body of work helping people navigate the moments when everything shifts — in organizations, in careers, and in life itself.

None of that prepared her for September 17, 2015, when a police officer knocked on her door at two in the morning to tell her that her son Greg was dead. He was twenty-three years old.

"What happened next — not the surviving, but the transformation — became the map at the center of everything I now do."

Drawing on a decade of lived grief and the doctoral research she was already pursuing in hope-developmental theory, Susan built what she calls the Sanctuaries of Renewal Inner Roadmap — an integrative framework synthesizing classic change theory, liminal transformation, deep spiritual wisdom, and contemporary grief research. Unlike prescribed stage models, it offers seven interior "rooms" — sacred places to dwell in, return to, and ultimately grow from. This model anchors her grief coaching, her retreats, her speaking, and her book Becoming Sanctuary.

Alongside this work, Susan was bearing witness to another kind of loss: her mother Barbara, whose extraordinary musical gift — present since age three — remained startlingly intact even as dementia dismantled nearly everything else around it. That experience became the subject of her second book, What Remains: Music, Memory, and the Miracle of Barbara, a meditation on identity, love, and what persists when the world goes quiet.

She is also the author of Wavelengths of Wisdom: The John Jaminet Legacy Story — an earlier work exploring legacy, meaning, and the gifts people leave behind.

"My mother became more herself as her mind dissolved. More present, more joyful,
more essentially who she had always been. When everything else fell away,
there she was."

Today, Susan brings all of this — the professional expertise, the doctoral framework, and the hard-won interior knowledge of loss and renewal — to her clients at Catalyst for Renewal. She works one-on-one with individuals navigating career transitions, life reinvention, and grief, and consults with organizations navigating the complex terrain of culture transformation, change leadership, and talent development. She leads group programs, facilitates weekend retreats by the sea, and speaks to healthcare organizations, faith communities, and professional conferences.

She lives and works on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, with her husband John. She has two living sons, Zack and Drew, and carries Greg with her into every room she enters.