Rachel Karu Found Her Voice Again
With more than 20 years of experience in leadership development and organizational change, she built a coaching practice - and a book, and a companion album - around the insight that the parts of ourselves we push aside are often the very parts that lead us back to purpose.
There is a version of the executive coach the professional world has come to expect: someone who speaks the language of productivity, optimizes performance metrics and keeps the conversation safely within the borders of what can be measured. Rachel Karu arrived from a different direction entirely. She came through a long career in Human Resources and organizational development, through the particular pressure of building leadership programs for thousands of employees at global companies, and through a personal reckoning with perfectionism that ultimately sent her back to something she had abandoned at eighteen. The work she does today through Stepping into More is where all of those threads finally come together.
The credentials behind that work are substantial. Karu holds the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) designation through the International Coaching Federation, is a Certified Positive Intelligence® Coach and holds a strengths coaching certification as well. Before founding her own practice, she held Human Resources and Organization Development leadership roles at EMI Music Distribution and Easton Sports. At Easton, she designed and built a global corporate university and a competency-based performance management system that served more than 1,500 employees. None of it was accidental. It was the product of more than two decades of deliberate, cumulative work in the field of human development.
Her coaching and facilitation practice has since reached leaders and teams at organizations including Disney, Meta, Paramount+, Intel and the U.S. Navy. She served as President of the International Coaching Federation's Los Angeles chapter and spent seven years on the chapter's board. And she has written about the interior dimension of all that outward achievement in her book, "Stepping into More: Lessons from a Recovering Perfectionist" - a work that is simultaneously a memoir, a self-help framework and a reckoning with what success actually costs when it is built on the need to prove oneself.
The twenty years of silence - and what ended them
The most revealing chapter in Karu's story is not a professional milestone. It is a gap: nearly twenty years during which she did not sing. Singing had been a defining part of her identity from childhood. Then, at eighteen, she was rejected from the second-year program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She stopped. For nearly two decades, that part of herself went quiet while everything else - the career, the credentials, the programs, the clients - kept moving forward.
It took a car accident, and the unexpected opportunity it created to attend a singing workshop, to reconnect her with that part of herself. The experience shifted how she understood success and eventually shaped the coaching work she does today. She has described it as a realization that people can become so focused on achieving that they lose touch with the very things that make them feel most alive.
That insight became the organizing metaphor of her practice. The parts of a person that get pushed aside in the pursuit of accomplishment are not incidental. They are often pointing toward something important. Karu turned that realization into a book, a companion CD of original songs - both titled "Stepping into More" - and ultimately into a business built around helping other high achievers find their way back to themselves.
The hidden cost of perfectionism
Karu has been direct about the pattern she spent years mistaking for a strength. For much of her career, she believed that perfectionism - being prepared, responsible, accomplished, getting things right - was what was driving her success. In many ways, those qualities did help her build an impressive career. But she came to understand that perfectionism carries a hidden cost: it can make a person so focused on getting everything right that they stop asking what they actually want.
The distinction she draws is between pursuing excellence and trying to prove one's worth. That distinction, she has said, has profoundly influenced both her own life and the way she coaches high achievers today. Her book, "Stepping into More: Lessons from a Recovering Perfectionist," is built around that insight - an autobiographical account of building a successful career while feeling disconnected from an essential part of herself, and the journey back toward creative self-expression and authenticity.
Her coaching practice, Stepping into More, focuses specifically on the population she knows from the inside: high achievers who may look successful on the outside but feel burned out or disconnected on the inside. Using executive coaching, facilitation and Positive Intelligence® principles, she helps clients develop mental resilience, recognize the patterns that hold them back and reconnect with what matters most to them.
What great leadership actually requires
Karu's view of leadership is grounded in self-awareness rather than authority. She has said that great leaders understand that leadership begins with themselves - that they need the self-awareness to recognize their own patterns, the humility to acknowledge what they do not know and the courage to have difficult conversations. People, she argues, do not simply want to be managed. They want to be seen, heard, trusted and given the opportunity to contribute.
The shift she describes as most consequential for leaders is moving from "How do I get people to do what I need them to do?" to "How do I create the conditions for people to do their best work?" The best leaders she has encountered, she has noted, do not need to have all the answers. They know how to ask better questions and to identify and leverage the strengths of the people around them.
She is also paying close attention to what she sees as the growing recognition that mental resilience is a leadership and organizational capability - not simply an individual wellness issue. As organizations ask people to navigate increasing amounts of change, uncertainty and technological disruption, she believes that offering wellness resources alone is not sufficient. People also need skills for managing their thoughts, emotions, reactions and relationships in the midst of that change. And as AI handles more tasks that once required human expertise, she argues that uniquely human capabilities - self-awareness, empathy, creativity, discernment and the ability to navigate ambiguity - become even more important.
Twenty years of building, and what she is most proud of
Karu's career before founding Stepping into More was itself a record of substantial institutional work. At Easton Sports, she built a global corporate university and a competency-based performance management system for more than 1,500 employees. She went on to coach and facilitate for leaders and teams at some of the most recognizable organizations in the world. She served as President of the ICF Los Angeles chapter and, over seven years on the board, helped bring meaningful change to the chapter that she says lives on today.
But she has said that what she is most proud of is building a life and business that bring together the different parts of who she is. Stepping into More is not simply a professional services firm. It is, by her own account, the integration of her experiences in leadership development, coaching, perfectionism, mental resilience and her own journey of reclaiming her voice. She did not set out to build a business around her personal story. She has come to understand that some of the most meaningful work emerges from the experiences that changed a person most.
She defines success today not by title, income or the impressiveness of a resume, but by a simpler and more demanding standard: being able to look at her life and recognize herself in it. Success, she has said, is having the courage to make choices aligned with who you are and what matters to you - even when those choices do not fit someone else's definition. She describes it as finding glimmers of joy and being able to truly feel at peace.
This profile is reported from publicly available information and materials provided by Rachel Karu. Nothing in this article is presented as a quotation unless it appears in quotation marks with attribution.