CSK Coaching · Caroline Keetch
I coach professional women through periods of personal and professional change – the promotions, the returns, the transitions that might look straightforward from the outside but rarely are.
Thirty minutes, no obligation and no pitch. Sessions are online.
A different kind of conversation
Who I work with
Most of the women I coach work within financial services or another demanding corporate environment. What they tend to have in common is that they are all going through a period of change that, from the outside, looks a great deal like success, and which, handled well, usually turns out to be an opportunity for reflection and growth.
Scrutiny tends to intensify as your career advances, and self-doubt has a way of arriving with a new title. Asking for help can feel like the wrong first move, but support during these stages of your career is often vital.
Perhaps your team has changed and the company's priorities have moved on, and yet everyone seems to expect a seamless transition from who you were before to whoever you are meant to be now.
In the middle of a significant life transition, sleep, focus and confidence are often not what they once were. You seek support and understanding, but you also want a strategy that helps you get on with your life.
You may well have learned to manage this, and to manage it very capably. However, being in this position can carry a cost of its own, and it is one that rarely gets named out loud.
You know that nothing is broken enough for you to leave, and yet for some reason you are not quite sure you want to stay. These periods can be a harder place to sit than the middle of a crisis, and I can help you make sense of it.
A non-executive portfolio, a plural career, or a business of your own are all genuinely exciting prospects. I can help you think those transitions through properly, before you commit to one.
About Caroline
I began my career in executive search in 2004, joining the family business alongside my late father, Nigel Halsey. In 2015 I led the rebrand to Halsey Keetch, where I am Founding Director and COO of a retained executive and board-search practice for governance, regulatory and controls functions across financial services.
Two decades of that work amounts to two decades of confidential conversations with very capable people at turning points: the promotion they weren't sure about, the return that didn't go to plan, the success that had somehow stopped feeling like enough. Over time I realised that the part I cared about most was never really the placement at all. It was the person sitting opposite me.
So I trained properly, qualifying as a professional coach with Coaching Development and working to the ethical framework of the International Coaching Federation. For nearly eight years I have coached alongside the search practice, entirely by word of mouth, and this is me finally being deliberate about something I love doing.
Alongside all of this I run The Careers In Group, and I am launching Regulatopia, a new careers hub and job platform for the industry. I mention it only because it means I understand building something from nothing, and the particular kind of nerve that takes.
My coaching philosophy
Every coach works differently, and every coaching relationship has its own character, so I think it is important to explain a little about what coaching means to me and how I work.
We live in a world with a lot of noise. We talk constantly, communicate quickly and are surrounded by opinions, advice and information. And yet, despite all of that, it can still feel surprisingly rare to be properly listened to. Rarer still to feel genuinely heard.
For me, coaching creates the space to step outside of that noise. It gives you the opportunity to speak openly, to think out loud, to be listened to carefully and without judgement, and perhaps most importantly, to hear yourself clearly, for the very first time.
That matters because when life is busy, demanding or emotionally complicated, our own thinking can become crowded. Ambition, responsibility, expectation, fear and possibility can all become tangled together. Coaching creates the space to slow that thinking down, make sense of it and begin to see what is really going on.
The way I was trained to coach is very coachee-led. I believe the person I am working with should do far more talking than I do, and that the conversation should always come back to their own thinking, instincts, values and psychology.
I do not see coaching as consulting, and I do not believe my role is to tell someone what to do. I will offer a perspective or advice if it is genuinely useful or if I am asked, but much more often my role is to listen, notice, question, reflect and sometimes gently challenge the way a situation is being understood.
The real work belongs to the person I am coaching.
My role is to create the conditions in which that work can happen: a warm, measured and completely non-judgemental space where you can think honestly, make connections, recognise patterns and find your own way forward.
Coaching will sometimes involve looking backwards in order to understand what has shaped you, but I am naturally future-focused. I am interested in forward movement, possibility and what comes next. Even in difficult situations, I believe the coaching conversation can help create greater clarity, agency and a sense that there is a positive way forward.
How I work
Twenty-five years working in, with and for financial services has taken me inside organisations of every shape and size, from global institutions to small boutiques, and exposed me to more or less every culture the industry can produce. Boards, regulators, promotion rounds, office politics, mergers and acquisitions: I know the language and I recognise the terrain. You will not spend a session explaining it to me.
What you bring to the first conversation is typically just the surface of the issue. We work hard to go beneath it, find the real pressure points, and make progress quickly from there.
My coaching style is about listening to what you are saying beneath the words. I hear what sits underneath your answers and your questions, and I am not afraid to keep asking about it, always kindly, but also helpfully direct.
This holds even when an employer is paying for your coaching. They may be involved, and interested to hear that the coaching is happening, but what we discuss is private.
Thirty minutes to talk about what's going on and whether I'm the right person to support you. No obligation either way.
In your first session we agree how to make your time with me worthwhile, and how we will both know that it is working.
Between sixty and ninety minutes depending on how the conversation unfolds, typically every two to four weeks, and always online.
I am here for a short message whenever you need one: when something lands badly, or goes rather better than you expected.
Change rarely announces itself politely.Caroline Keetch
In their words
In their own words, shared with permission and attributed by role and sector only.
The work I've done with Caroline has helped me think differently about what it means to flourish in my career, the kind of environment I need to be in, and what leadership means to me personally. It's because of that work that I now feel able to pursue opportunities that are much more aligned with where I believe I should be in my career. I'm so grateful for Caroline's support.
I was feeling completely lost and overwhelmed and, to be honest, I wasn't even sure coaching was going to help. I just knew I needed to try something. Very quickly, it felt as though a light had been switched back on. I felt supported, understood and completely safe, even at times when I was quite emotional. Nothing was ever judged. Slowly, I was able to put things back together again, and I love knowing that Caroline is there when I need coaching and support.
Coaching with Caroline has made a real difference to both my professional and personal life. She has helped me find clarity, see things from a different perspective and build the confidence to stand more firmly on my own two feet. I feel much better equipped to work through the responsibilities ahead, and it is incredibly reassuring to know I can reach out to Caroline when I need support.
Programmes and investment
Total transparency around pricing matters to me, so it is all set out below. I work with individuals one to one, and also through employers. A single session might be all you feel you need, and that is a perfectly good place to start, but in my experience real change tends to happen over time, and six sessions makes proper space for that.
£295
One 90-minute session
£1,590
Six sessions · £265 per session
From£2,950
Twelve sessions
The discovery call is free and always will be. Employer-funded coaching is priced differently, because it involves additional stakeholders and contracting, and is put together case by case. See for organisations.
For organisations
When senior women leave, it usually has very little to do with whether or not they could do the job. More often, they have quietly reached a transition – the pressure surrounding a step up, a return from leave, a health change, or a shift in what they need from an employer – and perhaps found themselves lacking the support they required. Replacing a senior hire can cost a considerable multiple of coaching her through it.
I help organisations nurture female talent in a way that doesn't feel conflicted.
From £450 per session. Organisational pricing sits above individual rates because I discuss the shape of the programme with the employer first and take their perspective into account. What I never do is feed back what was said in a session. You will know that coaching is taking place. You will never hear what was discussed.
Discuss a programme
Questions
Coaching. We work from where you are now towards what you want next. Therapy does important work with the past that coaching is not designed for, and I will say so plainly if I think that is what would serve you better, including at the discovery call.
Yes. Most of my clients come from financial services because that is where I have spent my career, but the situations I work with, a step up, a return, a restlessness, being the only woman in the room, are not sector-specific. I have coached women across professional services, technology and the public sector.
Sessions run 60 to 90 minutes, usually every two to four weeks. That spacing is deliberate: the work happens in the gaps, where you try things and notice what happens.
All of my coaching is online. It suits senior diaries, it means I can work with clients wherever they are based, and in practice the conversations are every bit as searching as they would be across a table. I am City-based myself and spend my working life in the same environment as most of my clients, which tends to matter rather more than the room we are sitting in.
Often, yes. Many organisations have a budget for coaching, and I invoice them directly. It is worth asking; the request itself is usually taken as a sign of seriousness rather than struggle.
Confidentiality does not change when an employer pays. They may know that coaching is happening and that we are working towards agreed goals. They never hear what was said in the room.
Then we do something else. Some people want one focused conversation before a decision; others need a year. If part-way through a programme it becomes clear that the shape is wrong, we change it; I would rather adjust than have you finish a package that stopped being useful.
Completely. I work to the ethical framework of the International Coaching Federation, and I have spent twenty-five years in a profession built on discretion. Nothing you say is repeated, to anyone, in any context, including within my search practice. If a conflict of interest ever existed, I would tell you before we began.
Get in touch
A free thirty-minute discovery call. You tell me what's going on, I ask some questions, and we both decide whether to go further. There is no pitch and no obligation, and plenty of people have one call and take it from there themselves.
Email me with a line about what's prompting this and two or three times that suit you, and I'll come back within one working day.
