Fifth Element is the work of Dene Hager, a strategist, systems designer, certified hypnotherapist, and certified coach in Career Coaching, Resilience Coaching, Master Business Coaching, and Productivity Coaching. She is also a somatic practitioner and the creator of the Fifth Element Framework — a justice‑centered methodology for building resilient, liberatory, and ecologically aligned lives, relationships, and organizations. Her work supports individuals, couples, and teams in seeing clearly, acting precisely, and designing structures that can hold real‑world complexity without collapsing under pressure.

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A non‑linear path shaped by embodied practice and structural thinking

Dene’s path has never followed a traditional arc. As a first‑generation college graduate, she built a two‑decade career in bodywork, leadership, and organizational strategy. She led massage therapy teams, coached practitioners through business design, and became nationally board‑certified through the NCBTMB, specializing in neck and shoulder rehabilitation and intraoral work for accident victims. Across more than 100 advanced trainings, she developed a clinical and somatic understanding of the body that continues to inform her coaching, couples work, and hypnotherapy practice today.
 

Her early leadership in the healing arts ran parallel to a growing career in global strategy. As an award‑winning consultant at Accenture and Microsoft, she supported high‑stakes programs across continents, coached executives, and mentored emerging leaders. She contributed to the Kenya One Million Laptop Project, supported UNESCO’s global COVID education response, and led work that earned four Microsoft client awards for outstanding achievement. Her Accenture team’s Corporate Sustainability PowerBI dashboard was featured in The Wall Street Journal, and her work with UNESCO appeared in TIME Magazine.
 

Dene completed her BA in Society, Ethics & Human Behavior and Law, Economics & Public Policy with a minor in Human Rights at the University of Washington. She went on to earn an MBA in Leadership and Sustainability from the University of Cumbria and a Post‑Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Business Strategy from Harvard Business School. She has completed more than 600 professional certifications across management, technology, sustainability, somatics, and coaching — including certifications in Career Coaching, Resilience Coaching, Master Business Coaching, Productivity Coaching, and trauma‑informed hypnotherapy.

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Her non‑linear educational path is not a footnote; it is part of the architecture of her work. It reflects the same principles she teaches: agency, endurance, ecological responsibility, and the ability to build structures that hold complexity over time.

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A methodology built on structural clarity
 

Most coaching models focus on mindset, motivation, or performance. Fifth Element is built on something else entirely: structural clarity.
 

Dene’s work is not about helping people “optimize” or “push harder.” It is about designing the underlying systems — personal, relational, organizational, ecological — that determine whether a life, relationship, or business can actually hold the weight placed on it.
 

Her methodology is distinct because it integrates four domains that are rarely held together:

• Somatic and trauma‑informed practice — understanding how the body responds to pressure, power, and possibility.

• Strategic and operational design — building structures that function in the real world, not just in theory.

• Justice‑centered analysis — identifying the cultural, systemic, and relational forces shaping behavior and capacity.

• Ecological and sustainability principles — designing for longevity, interdependence, and non‑extraction.

At Fifth Element, Dene integrates somatic practice, trauma‑informed hypnotherapy, strategic design, and justice‑aligned coaching into a single, coherent framework.

She works with:

• Individuals navigating burnout, career transitions, identity shifts, and business redesign.

• Couples building relationship agreements, practicing relational repair, or designing sustainable partnership structures rooted in consent, clarity, and mutual care.

• Organizations seeking sustainable strategy, operational clarity, and non‑extractive systems.

Her approach is grounded in the belief that sustainable change requires boundaries, clarity, and structures that honor human complexity rather than flatten it. Whether she is supporting a couple through a living relationship agreement, guiding a founder through burnout recovery, or helping an organization redesign its operating model, her work centers on the same principles: justice, interdependence, and the capacity to endure.