Client Testimonials
Executive, Leadership, and team Coaching
“Sara has a great breadth of knowledge and is a great listener. She’s the ideal person to help unstick you from uncertainty and decision paralysis.”
- Paul -
“Sara is a thoughtful, empathetic coach who helps you see the forest for the trees! She brings great insights and sharp questions to each conversation and is genuinely passionate about and invested in her clients' growth.”
- Amrit -
“Working with Sara is a true pleasure. She was able to help my co-founder and me connect with and grow our team in novel and thoughtful ways. She is able to listen and create order from noise and chaos, but equally as important is how she creates impactful and specific plans to take action that help us and our team change for the better. I wouldn’t hesitate to work with Sara on executive coaching for team building and looking forward to continuing our relationship for years to come.”
- Tom -
“I met with Sara around a time where I was new to a new leadership role in a challenging landscape. With so many things on my plate, and a big project deadline coming up, Sara was able to help me map out the necessary steps, stakeholders, and hold honest conversations with my team. We were able to identify key factors that held me back from fulfilling my role and come out with essential tools for management, facilitation, project management, and the strength and confidence to be in my role. Because of this, our team was able to complete the campaign's first work plan and create an inclusive and consensus based model for this work. Really grateful for Sara's thoughtfulness, experience, and step by step guidance. Sara has clearly found a calling in this work that is so essential to our movement and often goes unrecognized.”
- Nancy -
“Working with Sara has been an absolute game-changer for me. As a stay-at-home mom balancing the demands of motherhood while helping with our family business, I often felt stuck—unsure of how to define my own goals and lacking the confidence to pursue them. From our very first session, Sara made me feel seen, heard, and understood.
She has a unique ability to ask the right questions, challenge limiting beliefs, and provide thoughtful guidance that feels both empowering and practical. Through her coaching, I gained clarity on my strengths, built confidence in my abilities, and developed a clear path forward that aligns with both my personal and professional aspirations.
Sara’s encouragement and expertise have not only helped me rediscover my confidence but also given me the tools to take actionable steps toward my goals. I cannot recommend her enough to anyone seeking support, clarity, and motivation in their career journey.”
- Neelam -
“There are so many coaching and communications tools to help improve our work, but Sara’s guidance and resources helped me clarify how to best use my skills, time and energy to help me achieve my short and long term objectives.”
- Jessica -
“Working with Sara over the past deeply challenging months of my life has been nothing short of life-changing. I began our journey feeling uncertain about my future, disconnected from my strengths, and unsure of my path. Through her calming presence and gentle, grounded reflections, Sara helped me reconnect with my intuition, trust myself, and step fully into my power. I now feel more aligned, confident, and clear about who I am and what I have to offer. Sara created a space where I felt deeply supported and seen—her coaching has been a true gift.”
- Gwen -
Client testimonials
Career Transition Coaching
“Working with Sara during the Career Visioning Program has been transformational. I used to feel so overwhelmed and riddled with indecision. I felt that I needed to have all of the answers right away and needed my whole life mapped out, but I couldn't do that because I didn't know what I wanted. Sara really helped me dig deep to figure out what I value, what my strengths are, and how we can combine those to find the right career path for me. She has provided fantastic feedback as well as actionable steps each week to bring me closer to building my dream career. Sara is incredibly dedicated to her clients - not only is each session highly personalized and thoughtful, but she summarized each session in an email for reference later along with further thoughts and ideas. I can't recommend Sara's coaching enough!”
- Eliana -
“I was skeptical about even the concept of career counseling prior to working with Sara, but getting the chance to work with her gave me a change of heart on the practice or at least her version of it. She was incisive, curious, methodical and kind in her approach to understanding, on a fundamental level, where my passions lie, what those mean in terms of skills, what I want in a job and how to get it. I walked away with a clearer sense of myself and how to approach evolving and transitioning my career. Would recommend to anyone who is in doubt or just curious about their current state!”
- Dan -
“I came into Sara's program feeling disillusioned and demoralized, and left feeling excited for my future and ready to make it happen. Sara is empathetic, brilliant, and really caters programming to a specific person. I loved working with Sara and would recommend her coaching services to anyone feeling burnt-out at their current role and confused about their next step.
Working with Sara has been incredibly helpful, and inspirational and gave me a clear path forward for my future. I loved Sara's programming and found that her activities and sessions really got me out of my own head and day-to-day so I could refocus on my own actual skills, goals and needs. I left Sara's program with a much clearer sense of jobs I want to pursue, an internal sense of prioritization when it comes to wants/needs in my next role, and a desire to actually do the work to get there.”
- Maddie -
“Before I worked with Sara I felt paralyzed with indecision about where I wanted my career to go, or even how to go about making a change. Working with Sara helped provide me with clarity about what my options really were and equipped me with a practical and actionable plan to go about changing my situation. Sara also provided great advice on how to make my current approach to work better, reframe my thinking and gave me greater confidence in myself and empowered me to think about my future differently."
- Craig -
“Sara is an incredible coach who helped me with motivation, focus, and skill building! Together we identified key priorities that grew my confidence and allowed me to have increasingly more effective networking conversations. She has useful tools and smart suggestions that set me up for success, making it easy to get to work, and stay effective. I would happily recommend Sara to all my closest friends!”
- Sasha -
“During a career transition point Sara was incredibly thoughtful, encouraging and strategic in how she worked with me to align my skills, goals and values into my search.”
- Elizabeth -
Client testimonials
strategic planning and group facilitation
“We brought on Sara to lead a strategic planning process and were so happy with her work that we expanded her contract to include coaching as well. She was easy to work with, thoughtful, communicative, flexible, never missed a deadline, and brought unique insights to all aspects of the work. In addition, her in-person facilitation was fantastic and she skillfully guided our team through the process to get a great product out of our time together. She exceeded our expectations and we will definitely be working with her again in the future!”
- Andi, Executive Director -
“Sara has been a critical thought partner, facilitator, and coach for our team. Her creativity, energy, and empathy produced productive, impactful team retreats. Her natural ability to spark curiosity and make people feel at ease created an impactful space for my team to explore innovative approaches to our work and our culture.”
- Robbie, Chief of Staff -
“Sara Gold is a joy to work with. Her love of the work shines through the entire process. She is an outstanding and inspiring facilitator who beautifully balances structure and flexibility to create productive and energizing events. With her laser clarity and advanced solutions, you are guaranteed a superb meeting truly appreciated by all. She weaves her charm through a well thought out agenda inspiring the participants to collaborate, elevate and build community. Did I mention ZERO stress? I am psyched for our next event because I know Sara will be there to make it a huge success!!!”
- Kellee, Director of Community Engagement -
“Having a facilitator made the biggest difference - it helped the group think beyond our day to day work and challenged us to think more creatively and bigger picture. You also helped us build consensus on how we want to approach our work together and consider what we're each contributing to our larger cause.”
- Anonymous Retreat Participant -
“I appreciated how thoughtful you were and pushed not just for concrete/tangible outcomes but also introspection. That's been the most impactful change I've seen a week after the retreat! It was nice to have someone in the room that made us all feel comfortable, but also challenged us to do better.”
- Anonymous Retreat Participant -
“Sara did a fantastic job pulling out answers, consensus and takeaways, and seamlessly addressed moments where not all of us were aligned to lead us to a shared learning.”
- Anonymous Retreat Participant -
I thought your facilitation was really wonderful at teasing out more precise thinking and putting our ideas into a more coherent structure. It was great to see everyone so engaged too.
- Anonymous Retreat Participant -
You were amazing!! I truly appreciated your patience as well as your work in helping us move through the different phases, sticky moments, and more. Thank you!
- Anonymous Retreat Participant -
case studies
5-Year Strategic Plan
On the precipice of a pivotal presidential election, a narrative change and advocacy nonprofit (which I’ll refer to as “my client”) hired me to help them develop the organization’s first multi-year strategic plan. This case study illustrates how I design and facilitate highly customized strategy and planning experiences to achieve your goals. My rigorous focus on outcomes and my commitment to developing deep knowledge about your team lead to higher-quality experiences for all participants—yielding a significant return on your investment of staff time.
Leadership Retreat
My client organization approached me following the executive director’s leave, a subsequent strategic shift, and a re-organization that resulted in new reporting lines and a new set of priorities. The executive director and chief of staff decided to hold their first-ever leadership team retreat and, in a break with tradition, to hire an outside facilitator. The work together unfolded as follows: