Carole Stizza is the founder of Relevant Insight Coaching, a Colorado-based executive coaching practice, a PCC-credentialed executive coach, and a SHRM Senior Certified Professional who has spent more than 25 years working inside corporate and military environments before coaching the leaders who run them.
The Career Arc
Stizza’s path to the coaching seat ran through nearly a decade and a half of doing the work most coaches only advise on. From 1998 to 2012, she held roles in leadership development, HR, and organizational consulting across corporate, nonprofit, and association environments, leading training and facilitation, improving operational and communication systems, and building teams across multiple industries and geographies.
She did much of it as a military spouse, moving across the country and rebuilding her professional footing with each relocation. What might have fractured a career instead became its distinguishing asset: every move meant a new organization, a new culture, and a new set of leaders to read from the inside. Along the way, the vantage point produced a rare comparative education, watching how military environments develop leaders early and often, how corporate environments develop them later or not at all, and what both worlds consistently miss.
She also pursued the formal grounding to match the field experience, completing a bachelor’s degree in industrial-organizational psychology at George Mason University while working, and later a master’s in applied industrial-organizational psychology at Colorado State University.
In 2014, she stepped out on her own as an HR consultant and leadership advisor, working with organizations on talent strategy, succession planning, conflict resolution, and team alignment across corporate and military environments. Two years of that work clarified where she wanted to go deeper, and in 2016 she founded Relevant Insight Coaching, the practice she has now run for a decade.
From HR Rooms to the Coaching Seat
The defining feature of Stizza’s practice is where it came from. She did not arrive at executive coaching through a certification pipeline; she arrived through years spent in the rooms where talent decisions, conflicts, and leadership transitions actually happen, the succession conversations, the departures that surprised no one in HR, the capable leaders who stalled for reasons no skills course addressed. That grounding shaped a practice aimed squarely at senior leaders and leadership teams, delivered through one-on-one executive coaching, leadership programs, and keynote speaking.
The practice grew along multiple lines. Since 2019, she has served as a contract executive coach with Optify, working with leaders inside organizational settings through periods of growth and change. Her credential stack deepened alongside the client work: the PCC credential from
the International Coaching Federation, SHRM’s senior certification, and certifications spanning the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Leadership Circle 360, and strengths-based coaching methods. Her recognitions include US Insider’s top 20 executive coaches to watch in 2023 and HR Tech’s top leadership development training and coaching companies in both 2023 and 2025.
The Author and the Speaker
Stizza is the author of The Ask Framework, the book that grew out of her coaching work on feedback, and the creator of the Altitude Method, her mastermind program for senior leaders, built deliberately small and run virtually. Her keynote, No Ego at Altitude, has become the speaking arm of the practice, carrying her work on leadership blind spots to conference and corporate audiences. Book, mastermind, and keynote all draw on the same source: a quarter century of watching what actually happens between leaders and their teams, and a conviction that the gap is rarely about skill.
What’s Next
Ten years into Relevant Insight Coaching, Stizza’s focus is on deepening the work rather than widening it: senior leaders and leadership teams navigating trust, accountability, and the conversations that determine whether talented people stay. The mastermind and speaking sides of the practice continue to grow alongside the one-on-one coaching that anchors it, and the through line holds across all three: leadership development that starts with what the leader cannot see rather than what they should do next.
Carole Stizza Today
Carole Stizza is based in Breckenridge, Colorado, where Relevant Insight Coaching operates. A life that has included its own hard chapters, serious car accidents and a cancer diagnosis among them, shaped the steadiness she brings to leaders chasing large goals, though she keeps the focus on theirs. Twenty-five years inside organizations, and ten years coaching the people who lead them, now inform a practice built on a simple conviction: the leaders worth developing are the ones willing to look at what everyone else already sees.
