Flow State & Peak Performance Coaching
Create your ideal work/travel lifestyle that combines high performance and deep meaning - with neuroscience-backed coaching
What Can Open Horizons Coaching Do For You?
Peak Performance
Your Perfect Work/Travel Life
Optimal Experience
Ready to boost your productivity and thrive above uncertainty, stress, and overwhelm - becoming a powerhouse of resilience and achievement?
Optimal Experience
Your Perfect Work/Travel Life
Optimal Experience
Want to feel fully present and deeply engaged, so that you're living a creative and unique life full of freedom, connection, curiosity, passion, and purpose?
Your Perfect Work/Travel Life
Your Perfect Work/Travel Life
Your Perfect Work/Travel Life
Excited to make the most of 21st century possibilities to integrate work and travel - so that every day is filled with high performance, lifelong learning, mastery, and deep meaning?
Want More Flow? Meet Your Coach.
Hi! I'm Kara Joia Houheneka Kizis. You can call me Coach Joia.
Thanks for your curiosity about my coaching and my backstory!
My life journey began in 1980 in a little suburban town in Connecticut, where I grew up as the small girl with the big dreams.
I eagerly pursued multiple creative activities, including singing, writing, and bringing stories to theatrical life.
Simultaneously, I was intrigued by deep philosophical and moral thinking (yes, I was the thirteen-year-old who hid thick philosophy tomes under her bed), and I was fascinated by scientific psychological studies and research.
I guess you could say I was a “polymath” long before I ever learned the word. Curiosity and a love of learning (including learning about learning) were my favorite obsessions.
In college, I ultimately decided to major in Literary Studies, as analyzing and engaging with important texts allowed me to pursue so many of my diverse interests: intellectual inquiry, artistic production, human psychology, universal philosophical themes. I decided I wanted to be a “professional intellectual.”
College was also a time when I got to spend a year traveling and studying abroad, learning first-hand about worldwide cultures.
I worked hard to get accepted into an elite graduate program and became a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English and American Literature at NYU. While developing skills in my field, I also pursued interdisciplinary interests in Philosophy, History, Psychology, and Neuroscience – I even had the opportunity to serve as a lab assistant for a project at Harvard researching mental imagery.
But…
…in my late twenties, after a life spent accelerating in a standard straight line from achievements in high school to college to graduate school, I realized I wasn’t satisfied with the career path I was on.
Though I still wanted to be a “professional intellectual” and I definitely enjoyed teaching, I realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a college professor. In the challenging process of uncovering my deepest motivations, I realized my deeper calling was to be “a mission-driven entrepreneur.”
So, I did something I had never done before: I quit.
I left graduate school with the infamous “ABD” (All-But-Dissertation) distinction, and I embarked in a new direction. And it turned out to be the best decision I ever made.
Though certainly not right away.
Admittedly, the next several years were difficult, especially financially. I was single, broke, renting a tiny room in a tiny shared NYC apartment, and working an assortment of odd jobs in order to get by month-to-month. But, for the first time in my life, I felt true creative freedom, and the sense that I was carving a path that was uniquely and authentically my own.
I learned to accept that managing the obstacles was going to have to be part of the process. Through more study and lots of trial and error, I did figure out how to rise above and become “a mission-driven entrepreneur.”
I began studying and earning certifications in mind-body fitness, including Pilates, Tai Chi, and Yoga. I became particularly interested in meditation and all the recent scientific research on its benefits. I began as a volunteer teacher and then started building my own business coaching clients one-on-one. I got involved in several fascinating related start-up projects, including developing a meditation and poetry program with the Arrow Institute of Meditation, leading a creative kids yoga program called Hello Sunshine Yoga, and founding a meditation and singing project, Voices in Flow.
Working with ambitious clients as their meditation and fitness coach, I began to see that these practices were fundamental but only part of a larger solution that would be necessary if my clients were to deeply transform their inner worlds, successfully create and lead ventures of their own, and sustain a joyous sense of living.
Ever the autodidact and passionate researcher, I began studying the methods of the world’s leading high performance and leadership coaches as well as the works of experts in innovation, creativity, motivation, personal growth, business, and entrepreneurship.
I threw myself into learning the best, most cutting-edge results that have emerged from scientific research in psychology and neuroscience. I started training with The Flow Research Collective.
I became a Fellow Member of the Institute of Coaching (a Harvard affiliate program) and studied leadership training based on a model that’s come out of Harvard Business School.
In addition, I enrolled in the world's first-ever Certified Travel Coaching Program.
Through a process of careful research, creative & critical thinking, and methodical practice working with ambitious clients and colleagues, I developed my own signature approach that combines Transformational + Peak Performance + Leadership + Travel Coaching - this is Open Horizons Coaching.
And now it’s time for the next chapter - will you be a part of it?