This is not generic leadership coaching.
❌ Generic leadership coaching:
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Adds more frameworks on top of pressure
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Trains executive presence as "fake it til you make it"
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Emphasizes productivity and output
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Frames burnout as a time-management problem
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Minimizes the systemic and political realities shaping mission-driven leadership
✅ My approach:
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Expands your nervous-system capacity to metabolize pressure
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Develops real, embodied presence you can feel
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Strengthens discernment for strategic, high-stakes decisions
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Addresses survival mode at its source
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Integrates a systemic lens into your decision-making
"Highly recommend working with Caitlin!”
“It’s very rare that I engage in deep vulnerable work with non-BIPOC practitioners and coaches. With Caitlin, I’ve seen the ways she embodies humility, presence, confidence, and activism. It’s been an absolute gift to experience her 1:1 coaching. Each session uniquely weaves leadership development, somatics, and strategic planning.
As a former Healing Justice Program Director, the political climate weighed heavily on my colleagues and I, making hope and possibility feel distant. Caitlin provides practical tools to transform fear, anxiety, and rage into a grounded vision. I would have benefited from her compassionate inquiries, firm encouragement, and guidance into emotional depth.
Our work together renewed my determination, agency and creativity, and my professional and personal relationships have improved. I’m forever grateful and highly recommend working with Caitlin!”
- Dominique Cowling, Black Seeds Project
WORKING TOGETHER
Executive Leadership Coaching (1:1)
6 months of focused, high-touch partnership with directors, executive directors, and C-level executives.
This is a trusted space to think through challenges you can’t process with your team.
What’s included:
- Kickoff and goal-setting session (75 min)
- Ongoing coaching (2–4 sessions per month)
- CliftonStrengths or Enneagram assessment + session (60 min)
- Voice or email support between sessions
- 360 interviews (optional)
In our sessions, we:
– Work through real situations + experiences as they’re happening
– Get clear on what matters and what doesn’t
– Prepare for conversations that carry the most weight
– Map stakeholder dynamics so you can move with intention
– Build your capacity to stay steady and function well under pressure
Outcomes
Other Ways to Begin
Not ready for a full engagement? Here are other ways to work together.
New Leader 60-Day Intensive
A focused, four-session 1:1 engagement to help you stabilize your footing and start leading with confidence in your new role—so you can think clearly, trust your judgment, and stop carrying the pressure alone. We focus on the real situations you’re navigating so you can make better decisions, sooner.
If you continue into a six-month engagement within 30 days, this fee is applied toward the larger container.
What changes beyond you
This work is 1:1 but the impact is broad.
Your organization can have:
- Healthier, more effective dynamics
- Shared responsibility instead of everything sitting with you
- More creativity and joy across departments
- Improved relationships with staff and board members
Often within the first few months.
I’d love to hear what's challenging you right now.
LET'S TALKEveryone has a role in the revolution.
This is mine.
Hi, I’m Caitlin.
I was raised working-class in the Midwest and learned early how to question authority, think outside dominant narratives, and move between different worlds.
From a young age, I saw how systems shape people’s lives—across race, class, gender, queerness, and disability. I also saw how often leadership reinforces those systems, even when the intention is to change them.
I’m now an executive leadership coach with 20 years of experience inside fast-growing startups and mission-driven organizations in San Francisco. I’ve advised CEOs and senior leaders, built strategy and systems, and influenced decisions that impact hundreds of people.
Along the way, I saw patterns that most leadership development doesn’t name.
Urgency. Martyrdom. Unexamined power.
Leaders—especially women and femmes, and particularly women of color—expected to absorb pressure, override their instincts, and carry more than is sustainable.
When leadership operates this way, it doesn’t just burn people out, it limits what organizations can actually do. That’s the level my work operates at.
I integrate strategy, systems thinking, and somatic psychology, because leadership isn’t just what you think. It’s how your body holds pressure, how you show up in the room, and how your presence shapes what happens next.
I work with women & femme leaders because too many are expected to exhaust themselves to prove their commitment.
I help them build capacity instead—because sustaining yourself inside this work is crucial to honoring your mission.
"Working with Caitlin made a tangible impact on our organization"
About a year into my role as Executive Director, I was fearful, overwhelmed and under constant pressure—worried about not showing up as my best self 100% of the time, stressed by self-imposed productivity standards, and unable to embrace vulnerability and authenticity with my team. Through working with Caitlin, I was able to get to the psychological and physical roots of that pressure, lifting a huge weight off my shoulders.
I’m now approaching my work from a place of trust in myself and in my team. I can discern what’s truly urgent (and isn’t) without guilt, and I'm more confident in my ability to lead well without stepping into “superhero” or “victim” mode when things get hard.
Working with Caitlin made a tangible impact on our organization: delegation with my leadership team is easier and more effective, and we’re sharing responsibilities and operating with greater trust and grace. I feel supported instead of threatened.
I appreciate Caitlin’s attentiveness to the nuances and sticky aspects of my struggles, really hearing me, and her guidance that balanced comfort with in-depth exploration and encouragement. I’d recommend Caitlin to anyone navigating the complexity of leadership roles—juggling the many levels of responsibility leadership demands is hard! Caitlin brings the joy back to it.
– Consuelo Tupper Hernàndez, Executive Director, La Peña Cultural Center
Read my success story with Consuelo here >
Rooted, spacious & imaginative leadership creates different futures.
Despite good intentions, nonprofit culture can reward overwork, martyrdom, and exhaustion—especially for women and femmes. When leadership operates in survival mode, everyone downstream feels it.
When you are rooted instead of reactive, spacious instead of urgent, and imaginative instead of defensive, your leadership expands. You delegate more clearly. You tolerate complexity better. You make decisions aligned with long-term strategy rather than immediate pressure. You model sustainable authority for your team.
“What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”
– adrienne maree brown
No great leader does it alone.
This work supports you as a change-maker while strengthening the people, relationships, and systems that depend on you.
When leaders are empowered to lead well, that difference ripples outward.
Curious?
SCHEDULE A CALL