Thrive Under Pressure. Lead with Purpose.
Team training for high-stress professionals. Coaching with a Karen, Karen Hurley's team-based practice, offers three training tracks: Executive Leadership Training, First Responder Resilience Training, and team training for other high-stress teams.
Executive Leadership Training
Executive Leadership Training is the Coaching with a Karen team model applied at the leadership level: a leadership cohort works through the same framework together.
It is built for executives, directors and founders who want to lead with authenticity, vision and clarity in high-stakes environments. It is not a separately coached individual program. Leaders rarely get permission to say they need support while supporting everyone else. The shift Karen Hurley sees most often isn't a leader admitting weakness; it's a leader realizing this was never meant to be a solo job.
A leader's internal state sets the tone for everyone below them. Values-driven leadership training gives leaders practices for staying steady under pressure, and that steadiness is what reaches the field.
What Leadership Teams Leave With
- Shared language and mutual accountability in place of a rotating series of private sessions
- Practices for staying steady under pressure
- A shared foundation that survives turnover at the top, so the investment holds after one leader moves on
- A clearer way to align decisions with the team's values
First Responder Resilience Training
First Responder Resilience Training is Coaching with a Karen's team training for police and fire chiefs, command staff and frontline leadership in high-pressure public safety roles.
In public safety, the impact of difficult experiences doesn't always end when the shift does. Karen Hurley has spent 20+ years in public safety and legal environments, including crisis support work with a fire department during the pandemic. The training draws on that experience and on her ongoing work on moral injury: the weight of carrying decisions and scenes that conflict with a person's own values, which rest alone doesn't resolve.
Training starts from language, not diagnosis. A values-driven, high-performance lens borrowed from elite sports gives command staff a way to open these conversations that reads as strength.
What Public Safety Teams Leave With
- An understanding of why the brain clings to negativity, and how to break the cycle
- Science-based spiritual practices for focus, recovery and alignment
- Daily habits that protect against disengagement and support emotional control
- A common language for talking about stress and recovery across ranks
Team Training for Other High-Stress Teams
Coaching with a Karen also trains teams and project groups outside public safety that want to improve cohesion, trust and values-driven collaboration.
Anyone who absorbs other people's worst circumstances for years at a time carries this kind of weight: litigators, educators, emergency managers, and the field crews who respond to disasters and outages. Staffing shortages, competing priorities and changing expectations affect how people communicate, lead and connect. Leadership culture erodes when teams lose connection to what actually drives them.
Teams This Track Fits
- Emergency management teams
- Law firms and legal teams
- School district leadership and staff teams
- Utility and disaster-response field crews
- Project groups that need to work through change together
Start With a Conversation
Karen Hurley meets with every organization first and decides whether Coaching with a Karen, PIF Samaritan Services, or both fits.
Teams Train Together
The whole team, or the whole leadership cohort, works through the same framework at the same time. No one-on-one sessions.
Fewer, Deeper Sessions
The engagement is built as fewer, deeper sessions rather than another recurring commitment, designed to lighten what your people carry instead of adding to the calendar.
Built for Your Team
Customized resources support your organization's people, performance, recruitment and retention, built around your team's actual work.
Draft Length and Setting
Session length, number of sessions and in-person or virtual delivery are set with Karen during the first conversation.
Culture Isn't What You Say. It's What Your People Experience.
When values, purpose and leadership show up consistently in the way people work, teams are better positioned for engagement, resilience and sustained performance.
Karen Hurley helps leadership teams turn culture from something you talk about into something you practice. Let's build a team that can perform under pressure without losing the people behind the performance.
Draft Pricing for Coaching with a Karen trainings is shared after an introductory conversation, once Karen understands your team's size and needs.
Every Track Draws On
- Values-driven principles: intention, hope and gratitude
- Performance philosophies from championship-level sports
- Science-based spiritual practices
- A whole-person framework: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual
- 20+ years of Karen Hurley's work inside public safety and legal environments
Questions About the Trainings
What is Executive Leadership Training?
Executive Leadership Training is a track within Coaching with a Karen's team-based model, built for leadership cohorts working through the same framework together. It is the team model applied at the leadership level, not a separately coached individual program.
What changes when a leadership team trains together instead of separately?
Shared language and mutual accountability replace a rotating series of private sessions. That shared foundation is what survives turnover at the top, protecting the investment after one leader eventually moves on.
How do you justify leadership training when the team is already stretched too thin?
Coaching with a Karen engagements are built as fewer, deeper sessions rather than another recurring commitment. The goal is to lighten what leadership is already carrying, not add to the calendar.
Who is First Responder Resilience Training for?
First Responder Resilience Training is for police and fire chiefs, command staff and frontline leadership in high-pressure public safety roles. Karen Hurley built it from 20+ years in public safety and legal environments.
What is moral injury, and how is it different from workplace stress?
Workplace stress usually eases with rest; moral injury doesn't. Moral injury is the weight of carrying decisions and scenes that conflict with a person's own values. Karen Hurley is researching it across high-stress professions, and Coaching with a Karen gives teams a non-clinical way to talk about it.
How does values-driven leadership training help with moral stress?
It gives leaders practices for staying steady under pressure. A leader's internal state sets the tone for everyone below them, so moral stress compounds when leadership itself is dysregulated, and steadiness at the top is what reaches the field.
Is Coaching with a Karen therapy?
No. Coaching with a Karen is training, not therapy, and Karen Hurley is not a clinician. It does not diagnose or treat any condition, and it is not a substitute for care from a licensed mental health or medical professional.
Does Coaching with a Karen work with teams outside public safety?
Yes. Beyond first responders, Coaching with a Karen trains executive teams and other high-stress professional teams, such as emergency management, law firms and school districts.
Start the Conversation
- An honest look at where your program stands
- A plan you can act on, with or without Karen
- A clear read on whether PIF, Coaching with a Karen, or both fits
- Support sized to your team's actual risk