Testimonials
Rachel has worked with hundreds of individuals and organizations in all sectors including entertainment, military, technology, healthcare, non-profit, manufacturing, and education.
Rachel Karu’s Partial List of Satisfied Clients:
Embracing Imperfection and Finding Balance
I started my journey with Rachel two years ago, struggling with perfectionism and feeling overwhelmed by external pressures. I thought my problems were primarily external, but through coaching, I realized that the real challenges were internal and deeply rooted in my expectations and perceptions.
Rachel’s approach to coaching is incredibly intuitive and pragmatic. She doesn’t just follow a pre-set agenda but tailors her guidance to meet my unique needs and circumstances. Her ability to connect on a human level, coupled with her deep understanding of personal development, has been transformative for me.
One of the most significant lessons I learned from Rachel is the importance of prioritizing my values and setting realistic expectations. She helped me see that perfectionism is not about striving for excellence but often about masking deeper insecurities and fears. With her support, I have been able to let go of the unrealistic expectations I had set for myself and embrace a more balanced approach to life.
Through our sessions, she has provided me with practical tools and strategies to manage my time effectively, focus on what truly matters, and cultivate self-compassion. Her guidance on understanding and honoring my values has been invaluable, allowing me to align my actions with my true self and create a foundation for personal and professional growth. I have learned to set boundaries, prioritize self-care, and approach challenges with a growth mindset. Her emphasis on lifelong learning and self-discovery has empowered me to see my worth beyond my accomplishments and find joy in the journey.
Rachel is warm, empathetic, and genuinely invested in her clients’ success. She has a remarkable ability to listen with empathy and provide honest, constructive feedback. If you are ready to uncover more about yourself and learn how to leverage methods that yield sustaining results, working with Rachel will be a life-changing experience. I am deeply grateful for her guidance and highly recommend her to anyone seeking a transformative coaching partnership.
I do not state lightly that working with Rachel has changed my life. Working with Rachel over these past years has resulted in moving away from old traditional frameworks of leadership and goal setting in favor of implementing strategies that lead to sustaining results. With Rachel, I have learned how to set goals that reflect my intrinsic being and inner ambitions and have identified strategies for understanding my progression toward these goals. Rachel has helped me uncover elements of my inner being that I didn’t know how to define previously, i.e., what motivates me, what is important to me, and grounding exercises for creating greater self-awareness—all necessary skills for becoming a more effective leader. Our sessions were often challenging, and if you are looking for easy, quick answers, working with Rachel would not be for you. However, if you want to challenge traditional thinking, uncover more about yourself, and learn how to leverage methods that will yield sustaining results toward your goals, you could find no better partnership than working with Rachel.
Grateful that we got connected. Have learned so much about how to cultivate better relationships with myself and the people I work with. Talking with you has been the highlight of the UCLA MBA experience. Thank you!
Rachel’s coaching was key to my first year as a manager. She provided the tools that I needed in order to build new skills such as time management, delivering developmental feedback, and the art of asking questions. These are immensely valuable in both my professional and personal life. Rachel also challenged me to think differently and to reevaluate my perspective on a regular basis. I have a healthier and more successful approach to my work because of Rachel’s coaching.
Working with Rachel has helped me become more focused in every aspect of my life. Through Rachel’s guidance, I have been able to determine what’s really important to me by defining my values and keeping those values in mind as the guiding principles in my life. I’ve always been a hard working and highly driven individual with high expectations of myself and others. I’ve realized that my expectations were often too high and at times very unrealistic. Rachel has helped me work smarter and not necessarily harder by guiding me to focus on what’s really important and meaningful to me. I’ve developed a foundation for personal and professional effectiveness and am now able to achieve greater balance between work, leisure, significant other, family, friends, and the other priorities in my life. I am now more satisfied with my life as a whole. As a result of working with Rachel, I truly feel that I’m living up to my full potential and achieving more both personally and professionally. Rachel is a true confidante. She’s warm, compassionate, listens with empathy, and gives me honest feedback. She has helped me be more accountable to myself and my intentions so that I can find greater success and fulfillment in my life.
When starting the journey with Rachel, I really did not know what to expect. Coaching was new to me, and I knew that I had several areas to work on to achieve my personal and business goals. After our time together, I can confidently say that her coaching was easily one of the most impactful experiences that I can remember. From developing time management skills to improving my attitude and appearance, there are countless takeaways from our sessions that have had a lasting impact on my life. Most importantly, it feels like an internal door was unlocked, and now I operate with clarity, intent, and openness. This has changed the trajectory of my life, and I am forever grateful for Rachel’s support. Her energy, attitude, and kindness make the coaching very enjoyable, and her ability to inspire reflection and action is amazing. She is dedicated to what she does, and it shows. Thank you!!!
I feel as if I will be able to prepare better for those important discussions using the tools/ideas you’ve presented. I’ve practiced some of my topics for discussion with people I feel will be open about what I do well and not so well (I was on vacation last week in Philadelphia and “presented” to a friend, to my husband, and also to my mom, LOL). I am a work in progress.
It was a pleasure working with you, and I do believe we will have the opportunity to work together in the future as my role in the sales department grows. Thanks so much for helping me find things I felt I was “lacking”, forcing me to push the envelope on those traits that were already there and helping me to dig them out and “own” them. I feel I may be able to better navigate this road I’m on.
I recently completed a coaching journey with Rachel and I encourage anyone who is afforded this opportunity to take full advantage of it. As a professional who has spent 20 years plugging away at a career, through coaching I was amazed to find how many functional issues we never take time to fully understand or explore. Rachel helped me to further hone my interactional skills. She did so by providing guidance and information, while allowing me to come to my own conclusions. This provided the best possible result as I maintained “ownership” of my goals and outcomes.
Before my first session with Rachel, I read her book. By reading her book first, I felt like I knew her much better, and because she was so open and honest about her own life, it made me feel more comfortable doing the same.
I really appreciate Rachel’s help and am now in a much better place and content with the path I am on both personally and professionally.
Rachel is insightful, easy to talk to, and able to win over even those who, like me, are initially less-than-thrilled about the idea of working with a coach. Rather than using a one-size-fits all approach, she truly tailors the experience to provide meaning and value in the context of the coachee’s unique career and life.
This was my first executive coaching experience, and I couldn’t have asked for a better experience with Rachel. In the time that we worked together she was able to help me identify a few key areas to focus on that have in three short months had a significant impact on my personal energy levels and productivity.
When I started with Rachel I thought I knew what mattered most to me. It wasn’t until I wrote my values on paper and prioritized them, that I saw I was not doing what mattered most to me. With the system that Rachel Karu showed me, I was able to prioritize and do what mattered most to me. It was a life changing experience. In the process I was able to come to grips with my Gremlins, as we call them. I set goals and learned how to accomplish them using intermediate steps. The process of scheduling them into small manageable steps with deadlines was an incredible experience. I would recommend Rachel to anyone who wanted to take the next step in a Life changing experience.
I chose to add one-on-one coaching sessions to my development curriculum; without question one of the best investments I’ve made in myself thus far. As a team, my coach Rachel and I set forth aggressive, yet realistic goals that continuously keep me moving in the direction of revealing my full potential. Rachel most certainly knows when to push, when to lead, and when to inspire: She’s simply great!
I was very lucky to have Rachel Karu as my coach during my C4L leadership coaching session. While I’ve never had a leadership coach before, Rachel was everything I was expecting: someone to help me learn new skills and techniques to succeed in my current leadership position. Rachel’s approach to coaching me felt more like a personalized concierge service rather than a pre-planned training session. The activities and feedback Rachel provided were tailored exactly to my needs at the time and didn’t just follow a pre-set agenda. Rachel also seemed genuinely interested in how successful I was at applying what I’ve learned and was always willing to help me fine-tune the techniques when things didn’t work out exactly how I expected. In addition to helping me identify areas to focus on, Rachel also provided me with many useful tools along the way, including: quick ways to create and maintain schedules, how to create and effectively communicate strategic plans, and strategies on influencing. One of the true tests of time of how effective Rachel’s coaching has been is that I am still using many of the tools and techniques she shared with me in my daily life and I can say it is having a truly positive influence on making me a more effective leader.
As an HR Manager, I am trained to listen, solve the conflicts of others, and create a motivating environment for our employees. Rachel worked with me to identify my career and personal goals, learn how to integrate those goals into my current position, and most importantly, how to satisfy my own values to create a positive work balance environment.
The coaching experience opened my eyes to the areas in my professional and personal life that needed more attention in order for me to be fulfilled. The experience also brought to light ways I could better manage my own team, my boss, and colleagues by changing to focus of change to myself rather than trying to change others.
Rachel was able to hit all the main points within the allocated 30 minutes. There was considerable participation by all of us and I am sure some of these points may have some long lasting effects on our thinking and our actions!
I had the pleasure of attending Rachel’s program, “Cultivating Resilience During Uncertain Times,” hosted by the International Coaches Federation. It was a master class in how to run an engaging and effective program. Rachel shared proven techniques to enhance resilience, allowed opportunities for reflection, and built enjoyable exercises that allowed attendees to begin flexing new resilience muscles right away. She created a trusting and energetic space through her clear delivery, warm connection, and subject-matter mastery. I’ll be watching ICF offerings for additional programs from Rachel in the future.
Rachel Karu participated in the creation and delivery of Mattel’s corporate university. As part of this process she effectively facilitated a planning day and numerous pilot sessions with various levels of leaders throughout our organization in order to seek feedback and build ownership for the new program. Rachel has been facilitating leadership-training sessions with Mattel for over one year. She creates a fun, interactive environment. Her energy is contagious and she is able to get people excited about their professional and personal development. Rachel is strong at comprehending the big picture while maintaining a keen attention to detail. She understands how to modify material to meet the organizational culture as well adjust her approach to meet various learner’s styles and needs. Rachel has a strong client service orientation and is willing to go the extra mile to build a win-win partnership. She continually provides valuable feedback to assist us with our continuous improvement. Our leaders are benefiting greatly from working with Rachel.
Rachel, thank you for your time and your wisdom. You leave a special footprint in our lives. We began to create possibilities…looking for things that are in our control; love it!!
The song and your voice are amazing.
I am pleased to offer these comments regarding the training provided by Rachel Karu. Through her efforts, the organization’s management team has been provided workshops on a variety of topics skills including communication, coaching, managing performance problems and facilitating performance evaluation discussions. Rachel has successfully demonstrated her expertise as a facilitator and experience as a knowledgeable professional with every workshop delivered. The positive feedback provided by the participants is an indication that their workshops have been impactful and beneficial. It has been a pleasure to work with Rachel. Thank you.
Rachel ignited a change process at Palomar Displays when our leadership team attended her workshops. Rachel worked closely with us to customize and focus on specific areas that provided common grounds for us to improve our processes and performance both as a team and individually. We are now benefiting from these positive changes. Our teams really enjoyed her style and organization and the attendees felt privileged to participate. Thanks Rachel!
My staff of 11 recently attended the Communications Styles Workshop presented by Rachel. We each took the Strength Deployment Inventory and together as a team we worked together to learn about the strengths, motivations, and values of our team. Rachel was an easy facilitator that kept us all on an even keel, quietly leading and steering us toward understanding and productivity. Since that day, I’ve seen the team work with greater understanding of how each of us responds and communicates to one another according to our own personal strengths. Thank you Karu Consulting!
Rachel has created something truly innovative and new! In combining her singing and theatrical talent with her superlative command of business and corporate subject matter, Rachel delivers a stunning one woman show with a life changing message for everyone in the room. Rachel uses her extraordinary vocal artistry and talent to connect intimately with her audience and doesn’t so much “tell” us her message…but lives it before our eyes! Rachel has set a new Gold Standard for event and conference presentations. She combines the best of event speaking with superb singing and theatrical artistry to deliver a ”wow” factor of 10! Rachel knows that music reaches deep within us to move and inspire us…How perfect that she uses her glorious singing voice to touch us and change our lives.
I wanted to extend my sincere appreciation for singing the Anthems Sunday night. You were great! I haven’t heard such a wonderful rendition of both songs in a long time. Thank you very much for being such an important part of our evening.
