Karen Waitt

Karen is an experienced facilitator and coach, privileged to be working in this amazing field for the past nineteen years.

She combines a wealth of expertise in facilitating learning and development programmes with ten years’ prior experience as a Manager with Air New Zealand and RCI Australasia.

Her specialist areas include leadership development, changing mindset and dealing with conflict.

She has worked with managers and teams at all levels of both private and public sector organisations within New Zealand, including Inland Revenue, Customs, Treasury, Reserve Bank, NZ Intelligence Community, Metservice, The Natural Resources sector, ANZ, Assurity, Ministry of Justice, Maritime New Zealand, Wellington Zoo and QEII Trust.

Her passion is helping others to understand their strengths and achieve their potential by changing the mindset and behaviours that get in the way of them being their best.

Karen is an experienced coach and is frequently called upon to coach managers facing change and new challenges in their roles.

She works collaboratively with her clients, creating a genuine partnership to help them achieve their goals. She combines a facilitative, encouraging style with an ability to challenge.

Her philosophy is to help people work on their own real ‘stuff’, and while theories are incredibly useful, her focus is on the practical application of skills back at work, and creating ways for people to develop new habits of working, thinking and being.

She believes strongly in the concepts of positive psychology and emotional intelligence™, and wherever possible incorporate these into the work she does.

Karen has a particular interest in working with women who struggle with confidence issues, who doubt their abilities and feel like an imposter. These things had plagued her throughout her life, until she experienced, and became licenced in, an amazing tool Creatrix® and all of that changed. She is now being the person she was always meant to be – feeling confident about herself and her abilities – and helping other women to get rid of the blocks that hold them back. One of her key values is making a difference for people and she loves that she gets to do this in the work that she does!

She uses other evidence-based tools and frameworks and is qualified to use the Team Management Profile, Myers Briggs Type Indicator, Hogan Suite of development tools, The Leadership Circle 360 tool, the Lominger Leadership Architect® suite, DISC profile and Firo-B team instruments.

She is an Aussie girl who moved to New Zealand 29 years ago and loves having new adventures with her partner, Tony, who is actually a Kiwi but lived in Australia for 35 years until she lured him back to NZ 6 years ago. They love travelling and have had many amazing experiences and meeting very cool people along the way. 

Her lovely 25 year old daughter Emma, who she is immensely proud of, now lives back in Wellington after 6 years away in the UK and Australia, and works as an Occupational Therapist.