Alexis Ren on venturing into the wellness space with the founding of interactive platform We Are Warriors

• Model Alexis Ren secured Instagram fame before it was cool, and now she's ready to take "influencing" a step further as a mentor for her We Are Warriors community, as told to Insider.
• We Are Warriors is Ren's mental wellness and fitness community that aims to empower young women with the confidence, self-love, and peace of mind to achieve their dreams and full potential.
• Members of the interactive online community have access to 30-day course packs that pair movement and mindfulness with pre-recorded and live Zoom calls.
• This past April was dedicated to a Finance Challenge, which Ren co-led with Nicole Lapin and Monique Coleman.

Beyond her most famous title as an Instagram model, 24-year-old Alexis Ren is many things. She's a dancer, actress, environmentalist, and mental health advocate - and, most recently, a mentor to the roughly 3,000 girls who make up the We Are Warriors community.

Having reached influencer status before the term "influencer" was a thing, Ren is now focusing her energy on serving as a guide for the next generation of girls who grew up with her on Instagram. That's where We Are Warriors (WAW) comes in, her mental wellness and fitness community that centers around equipping young women from over 70 countries with the tools to cultivate a healthy relationship with the mind and body.

The interactive online platform provides members with 30-day course packs that balance mental and physical components to achieve a holistic sense of self. These courses, also referred to as "challenges," include meditation, yoga, sculpting, ballet, journaling, and weekly live Zoom calls led by Ren and various expert Warrior guides with personalized teaching focuses.

"My goal for this is that it becomes so powerful on its own, that it will stand on its own," Ren told Insider. "I don't want We Are Warriors to be associated with me. I want it be so authentic and whole and powerful that it stands on its own, and then we just have these amazing leaders and people in spaces."

The inspiration for WAW was brewing inside of Ren long before quarantine pressed pause on everyday life and induced a time of forced reflection. Ren grew up homeschooled by her mother, who served as her mentor and triggered Ren's awareness of the education system's lack of a curriculum based on real-life knowledge. While her mother passed away when she was a teenager, Ren keeps her memory close and harnesses it to drive her passion for service and building meaning in human connection.

"I saw there was a huge lack of mentorship within the education system - that's how I have gotten to where I am, that's how I am who I am," Ren said. "We find pieces of ourselves within older people who have accomplished what we would like to accomplish, so if we don't have those reflections, then we don't know what to grasp onto, because we are just a product of our environment."

Ren herself leads weekly Zoom calls on Fridays with a group of around 50 to 100 girls - girls who she now knows intimately by name. They practice manifestation and journaling together in hour-long calls, and each girl is encouraged to share her entries with the class, whether it be a vision of herself having achieved her dream job or relationship, or a conversation with her anxiety. Insider tuned into one of these meetings and noted the open flow of dialogue, ranging from weekend plans to internal struggles, with many of the girls chiming in to wish a fellow Warrior member a happy birthday.

A strong believer in spirituality, reflection, and finding a purpose, Ren admitted that she wasn't always this grounded in her identity and sense of self. She fell into the social media world at a young age, waking up one morning as the talk of the town all over news channels in Los Angeles, she said. Starting out as a traditional model for a fashion brand, Ren's catapult to internet fame came suddenly and rapidly, allowing for minimal time to process her newfound celebrity standing.

Before she knew it, she was jetting off to picturesque destinations all over the world and posing on tropical islands adorned with white sand, to then post about it to her millions of Instagram followers. Her followers lapped it up, marveling at her "dream life" and perfect image without being privy to the insight that only someone in Ren's personal sphere could hold. In reality, Ren felt she was contributing to the larger social media "illusion," losing herself in the process.

"I was a huge people pleaser; it's something that I had to overcome," Ren said. "I was creating essentially an illusion. It's not real. So, I was like okay, I don't really want to be part of an illusion anymore, so I just did exactly what I did on the live calls." And that meant sitting down with her feelings and addressing her purpose in life, namely what she wanted do with this life and how she wanted to serve.

This is precisely what Ren has sought to accomplish with her Warriors community since its founding in the past year. Her hope is to lead teenage girls along the path of self-reflection and self-love before external influences take control, to have them "dig into [their] brains and see what it's been telling [them]." In addition to weekly manifestation work and mindful fitness challenges, Ren also welcomes outside speakers to help further empower and inspire the Warriors community.

Last month, Ren put together her latest Warriors course, dubbed the WTF Challenge, which stands for "What the Finance." With the guidance of Nicole Lapin, the New York Times best-selling author of "Rich Bitch," and Monique Coleman, a fellow Warrior Guide and actress, Ren led a two-week special series that aimed to familiarize community members with the ins and outs of personal finance. Lapin tasked the girls with making budgets and crafting 10-year plans, which she views as "two powerful things you can do to set yourself up for financial success and peace of mind."

Many community members sought similar passions of starting their own businesses, which Ren and WAW co-founder Anthea Taeuber helped to develop in these workshops by encouraging everyone to write down their dream job descriptions. A major assignment was reading Lapin's book, "Rich Bitch," and collectively discussing its key takeaways, with Lapin's main intention being to "simply spark the idea of financial awareness."

"It's my mission to open the world of finances to young women so they can create the life they dream of living - one free of money stress and full of financial security and freedom," Lapin wrote in an email to Insider.

Throughout the Finance Challenge, Coleman served as an additional mental and emotional support system for Warriors as they explored their understanding of money. Coleman also leads her own program at WAW, tailored to unlocking the power in women's voices and instilling confidence in their ability to reach their dreams.

"The Warriors community is a space that encourages girls to stand in her power and be unapologetically themselves," Coleman added in the email to Insider. "Being a guide within the community holds me accountable to my own personal growth and has served as an incredible outlet for me to share the lessons I've accumulated in my over 20 year career."

Coleman joins seven other teachers on the platform, including Ren, who each uniquely relate to WAW's mission and find as much benefit in the community as its members.

As far as advice for future influencers building themselves around a brand, Ren had one major tip: "Don't look at social media for the answer."

It's important to take a step back, turn off your phone, and allow the silence to do the guiding, she said.

"Boredom is actually so valuable now. We're never bored because there's always something distracting us. Boredom is where creation comes from," Ren said. "Back in the day, our fight or flight was either you live or die, survival mode. And it's weird now that our version of survival mode is making sure we're entertained all the time."

She added, "How are you supposed to know who you are when you're looking for yourself in this crazy virtual space?"

From the time Ren was first pegged as an influencer, the social media landscape has seen a massive shift in the response from brands and marketing agencies. When Ren's modeling career simultaneously took off with her social media platform, Ren felt as if "there were so many doors being opened, but they were being opened to cliff edges, essentially."

Many fashion brands were unfamiliar with the concept of "influencing" and preferred not to risk entering such unknown territory. Traditional modeling was still viewed as separate from online content creation, and the idea that models could curate their own image through social media was novel.

"When I first came on, brands were like, well, I'm just going to use you. Now brands are going, well, how do you want to use our brand?" Ren said. "Because you know what's right; you are your own agency, studio, development, everything. That's what's so special about influencers-we're everything."

Social media influencers wield the unique power of engaging with their followers, essentially their community, in authentic, meaningful ways. With Warriors, Ren takes this a step further than Instagram DMs, eliminating any remaining divide that still exists between influencers and their followers.

Doing so has helped Ren obtain the level of depth in human connection she long sought after in her life and career, culminating in her role as a mentor.

"Before social media there was a huge gap, where there were celebrities and people, and there was no way to really meet that," Ren said. "And then social media came, and it became another medium where we can get a little closer, a little closer, and so I just wanted to get a lot closer."