Founder of Born With a GIFT | Executive Career & Leadership Coach | Personal Branding Specialist | Training Facilitator | Panel Moderator | Public Speaker
She had spent years reading rooms. The shoulder that drops, the pause that goes on a beat too long, the shift in energy that tells a coach the real conversation has finally started. So when the work moved onto a screen, Careeta Robert-Green did not believe it could survive the translation. More than two hundred live virtual sessions later, it is how she does almost everything.
Sixteen Years of Telling People What They Already Are
Careeta Robert-Green is the founder of Born With a GIFT, an award-winning executive, career and leadership coaching practice she started in London in 2010. She is an ICF-credentialed coach who has trained and coached more than 2,000 professionals worldwide, built on a decade inside FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies alongside running her own private coaching practice. Her argument fits in a line she repeats often: without self-belief, the gift stays hidden.
Waitrose, Dell, and the Two Careers She Ran at Once
After leaving school, she started working as a checkout assistant at Waitrose in 2000. She worked her way up to become a supervisor and trainer.
It was at Waitrose that she learned what she considers the gold standard of training and people development early in her career. Over seven years, she watched people learn in real time, saw the difference great training could make and discovered how much she enjoyed helping others grow.
That foundation stayed with her.
In 2007, she moved into corporate learning and development at Dell EMC, supporting people across EMEA, before continuing her career at NetApp.
In 2010 she qualified through The Coaching Academy with a personal performance diploma and became, by her own account, one of the youngest certified Black female life coaches in the UK. There was no platform behind it and no backing.
“I didn’t step into this because it was trendy. I stepped into it because I kept meeting brilliant people who didn’t realise how powerful they already were.”
What followed was eleven years of two careers running in parallel. From 2013, she led employee onboarding for more than 500 people a year and was nominated twice at the company’s internal awards. She took a master’s in international human resource management at Kingston University while working. At a FTSE 250 she handled employer brand and talent attraction and designed a careers website. She was an interim HR specialist at bp in 2020 and an HR consultant at GSK the year after.
After her contract ended at GSK due to the pandemic she went full time in her business Born with GIFT and switched to virtual coaching and training. She went on to be finalist for Coach of the Year at the Precious Awards 2025 and 2026 Women To Watch by Black Leaders Worldwide.
The corporate decade is not a preamble to the coaching. It is the reason the coaching connects to what is actually happening inside an organization, which is a distinction her clients tend to notice.
Two Thousand Professionals, and the Cohort That Would Not Speak Up
Born With a GIFT today is a virtual practice that partners with organizations as an associate coach, trainer and facilitator. The numbers behind it: more than 2,000 professionals coached and trained globally, over 200 live virtual coaching and training sessions delivered, and more than 300 people supported through live online masterclasses.
The delivery list is wide. She has coached and facilitated for Google, Sony, Zoom, the BBC, the UN, Dow Jones, Duolingo and Juniper Networks. She spent two years as an associate coach delivering executive one-to-one coaching to eight leaders on a year-long development program for diverse leaders at The Orchard, part of Sony. She has run three cohorts of a leadership program for doctoral researchers at a UK university. She facilitates for Hone, where she has delivered group coaching to thousands of employees globally and became an ambassador in January 2026, and spent three years doing comparable work through TaskHuman. As a gold tier facilitator for Google’s IAmRemarkable initiative she has hosted workshops for more than 200 people.
She also teaches personal branding to MBA students as a guest lecturer at Kingston University, hosts the Unwrap Your GIFT podcast across two seasons and 22 episodes with 17 guests from five countries, sits on the board of the International Black Coaches Alliance, and serves as global community leader for the International Coaching Federation Young Professionals group.
The work she points to as most representative came out of her own group coaching program, with a cohort of senior leaders from different industries and backgrounds. On paper they had nothing to be uncertain about. In practice, almost none of them were comfortable being visible or talking about what they had achieved.
“The issue was not capability. It was mindset, self belief and clarity about the leader they wanted to become.”
The outcomes were concrete rather than atmospheric. Some secured promotions inside their organizations. Others were approached through LinkedIn and moved into new roles. Careeta Robert-Green measures her work by behavior for exactly this reason, and the questions she asks afterward are deliberately plain.
“Did you speak up in the meeting? Have the conversation you were avoiding?”
“As an introvert myself, I want quiet leaders to know they do not have to change who they are to be visible and influential.”
What Sixteen Years Taught a Coach Who Nearly Didn’t Try It
The scepticism was reasonable. Coaching had always depended on presence, and a screen looked like a thinner version of the room. What changed her mind was not an argument. It was two hundred sessions of watching the same thing happen anyway, at a scale the room could never have reached.
She built a career telling people their gift was already there, waiting to be claimed. It took a format she did not believe in to prove the same thing about her own.
Careeta Robert-Green is the Founder of Born With a GIFT, an executive, career and leadership coaching practice based in London, United Kingdom. She partners with corporate organizations, universities, professional bodies and membership networks to deliver virtual group coaching and leadership development for senior, emerging and diverse leaders. To connect with Careeta or learn more, visit her LinkedIn Profile or Born with a GIFT | Official Website.
