What might be driving you to look for a coach or a mentor?
Are you wanting to raise your game?
Then you’ll want to work with someone that has great depth of expertise across a broad life and business experience base to help you leverage as many different perspectives as you can.

Given my decades of global and local professional, executive and leadership experience I work comfortably with individuals, teams or businesses at every level.
You’ll want someone who has successfully run and grown various departments and divisions. Leading a range of technical and other professionals as a CIO to extraordinary business outcomes in large global multinationals, local corporates and Small to Medium size Enterprises (SME’s). As well as running his own small business over the last 15 years. So you can avail yourself of that experience.
Someone that has also successfully directed and managed numerous large scale multimillion dollar corporate ERP (eg SAP, Walker or PeopleSoft etc) implementations, business change programs and mergers & acquisitions.
Born in Germany, I was raised and educated in South Africa and have lived in Australia for 30 years. I have lived and worked in Africa, Europe and Australia and led projects across Asia, Africa, Europe and the America’s.
This taught me how to comfortably recognize, understand and leverage cultural diversity into harmoniously run and very productive outcomes. Out of the box challenge to your thinking will be your result.
Apart from a decade of multilevel marketing experience in two countries, where I coached so many people to believe that they could build such a business, I have coached, mentored and groomed hundreds of business executives, managers, business owners and acknowledged high-potential professionals to raise their game. Last count in 31 countries. Why not leverage that track record for yourself?
Could you be at a fork in your road?
Perhaps you are looking for that role that enables you to prove to yourself and others what you are really made of and what you can really deliver? Or that deep down you are realizing that this isn’t the right role or career for you? Or maybe it’s even deeper than that. Perhaps you’re wondering what your “life’s work” might be, not just your career?
Maybe you are tired of being employed and know you are ready to “go it alone”?
Could it be that you just aren’t sure which fork to take and how to go about these steps?
What if you had your own sounding board, your own thinking partner with whom you can road test your ideas and have them strongly but supportively challenged, and then held you accountable so that you couldn’t “chicken out”?
Someone who has not only done these transitions themselves, but has helped heaps of others do the same? All over the world. In businesses large and small.
Networking your path to success
Whether you are engaged in a large corporate or smaller business or setting out to or already running your own business, you will want to be working with someone that is not only a born networker with a great personal business network of his own, but someone that continues to live it and also teaches it. I am known to be a great “connector”.
I am able to help you develop a massive network of supportive contacts to help you complement your strengths with theirs.
I am a member of the International Coaching Federation; a certified professional coach with a Diploma in Coaching Mastery; an NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) practitioner and public speaker / trainer. This not only professionally equips me, but connects me with a vast range of complementary professionals.
I belong to a range of networks of mature business professionals with the emphasis to collaboratively coach and mentor small business owners grow through the required thresholds into big business. For over 15 years The Network of Consulting Professionals has been my favourite that has also leveraged the most referrals (in both directions) by far. A valuable extension to my services for areas I don’t do.
What I help most of my clients with most
Whilst relevant tools and surveys help my clients better understand initially what your “stretch” and development needs are, the primary areas my executive coaching work always seems to go back to is around these themes:
- developing adaptive leadership styles that suit not only your own personality, but drive the required results
- polishing personal visibility, credibility, relatability, connecting and influencing skills
- holding the political power in the right rooms
- goal setting and planning for sustainable success
- building and leveraging networks with purpose
- pro-active career checkpointing, “directioning” and challenge
- mentoring small to medium enterprise (SME) owners & management grow through capacity or constraint thresholds, working in association with my peers in The Network of Consulting Professionals
- always focused on setting, measuring and getting the desired outcomes.
My speciality is helping clients identify and overcome behaviours and beliefs that hold you back from playing in rooms and levels you and your business aspire to. I’ve also written a book about that.
Having the right resources
In 2012 I published my first book through Major Street Publications called: “Life learnings of a Life Coach“, which you can get in a Kindle or paperback version.
For over 10 years now I have published or updated a few blog articles each month in which I have shared insights from those weeks of working with my clients for everyone’s benefit. You can avail yourself of almost 300 of these articles across this website. Why not personally benefit from so many years of specific coaching, mentoring and grooming experience from working with people just like you?
Why not take my 1000’s of active hours of coaching, mentoring, grooming, training and speaking experience over hundreds of clients all over the world and leverage that to your benefit?
Location
Based in Melbourne, Australia, Let’s Talk Coaching is the brand name and registered business name of JH Karst & Associates Pty Ltd of which I am founder and director.
If you are based in Melbourne we can leverage this coffee capital’s great working culture right here, face to face.
If you are elsewhere in Australia we can work together in a mixture of face to face and Internet technology interaction. (Within our current pandemic, I’m afraid face to face will have to wait a little while yet).
However, whether you are in Maroochydore, Mumbai, Mombassa, Munich, Manchester, Montreal or Massachussets, we can work together to suit your time zone via Internet technology.
I work with clients all over the world, many of whom I have never actually met personally. My travels take me far and wide and it’s always a pleasure when we then actually meet up face to face
Other Interests:
I am a keen social golfer and enjoy mountain biking, hiking, gardening and touring (particularly through Australia’s wine regions). I also love cricket and rugby and am still a fan of the Natal (Durban) Sharks Super 15 Rugby team, the Australian Wallabies and the Australian Cricket Team.
I spent 8 glorious years in the young men’s services organization Round Table in South Africa, where I served as Kyalami Round Table 203 Chairman and on the Central Transvaal Area Executive; as International Relations Officer (IRO). It was here that, in my formative years, I learned some of my most valuable leadership skills through leading volunteers.
I was a director of and shareholder in Smartsoft International Australia Pty Ltd, an Australian subsidiary of a very successful US based Atlanta, Georgia, SAP services and solutions provider entitled Smartsoft International, Inc (www.smartsoftus.com).
I am a passionate residential property investment millionaire that worked with www.wealthbuilders.com.au who have helped me practice what I preach to my clients: when you have developed a passive source of sustainable income, you can do in your life what you “want to do“, not what you “have to do“.
Go on, what have you got to lose? Why not contact us for a free exploratory coaching conversation and Let’s Talk Coaching.