Annie Severson
Consultant and Coach, Olympia, Washington
“Trust your inner voice and your own wisdom because what you have to bring needs to be brought to the world. Show up to do the work while still just experiencing the full messiness of being a person.”
Meet Annie - The Full Human Being
Annie is a deep well of knowledge, care, and compassion. Being fully human for her means engaging through her four values: connection, courage, creativity, and community. She sees these values as deeply interconnected and as how all revelatory work in organizations gets done. Annie describes Connection as the link that binds us to our fellow humans or our ideas of what we’d like to change or amplify in the world. Then one must use Courage to actually attempt this meaningful work; to step out of our habitual ways of doing things and into the unexplored possibilities that exist beyond our comfort. While exploring these new possibilities, one must tap into their Creativity. Annie sees this as the energy that is exposed when people are freed up to give what they are meant to give through actions like dreaming and creating. Through the use of connection, courage, and creativity, we open the door through which we can actually create change: Community. By leveraging our collective strengths and connections through dialogue we are able to create solutions from our expansive shared experiences and knowledge. When we truly care about one another, we do better work and do it more efficiently. Connect with Annie.
How Annie Can Help You Transform Your Organization
Annie is an Organization Development and Change Management Consultant who thrives while working with teams to create real change. Her offerings include executive team coaching, program development, strength-based coaching in which she helps teams organize their talents and gifts into a stronger team to in turn strengthen the organization at large, and more. She is invigorated by the connections that people can make within teams, communities, and organizations which reveals how much work teams actually care about each other. Annie is certified as a Prosci Change Management Practitioner, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, IEQ9 Enneagram Assessors, and Human-Centered Design Learning principles. She believes that team conversations within organizations are complex but not complicated. If we can create environments full of respect, trust, care, nurturing, and patience, then teams and organizations open themselves up to the possibility of growth at all levels. Not that we would create the illusion of togetherness, but rather actually step into the feeling that you can be vulnerable, that your colleagues have your back, and that you can be lifted up by your team. Through this, she reminds us all that the organizational benefits of having loving teams are real. Interested in learning more about the ways Annie could transform your organization?
Annie’s Story
Annie, originally from Fargo North Dakota, now resides in Olympia Washington. Her story is deeply marked by the influence of her family, especially each of her parents. She describes an early awareness that such a loving family was a tremendous blessing and felt very inspired by the accomplishments and characteristics of her parents. Her Dad taught her resilience, openness to new experiences, fearlessness in the face of failure, a disregard for societal expectations, and her first glimpses of entrepreneurial spirit. Simultaneously, her Mom taught Annie how to learn by doing, access innate human creativity, experiment, solve problems, and speak her mind. Annie also recalls being hugely influenced by a speech and debate coach who taught her how to hone her communication skills, speak with poise, and bolster the confidence of herself and others, especially other women. She honors this kaleidoscope of people who have deeply impacted her and brings this into her work with teams by keeping relationships at the center of the work. Throughout her years, Annie has received Bachelor’s in business management from Western Governors University and a Master’s in Organizational Development from Pepperdine University. If you’re looking to learn more about Annie’s professional story, connect with her on LinkedIn.
Guiding Through the Squishy Middle of Team Dynamics
Annie is uniquely talented at leveraging all strengths, gifts, and talents of a team to optimize performance and strengthen connections within the team. When working with a client, be it a team, an individual, or an organization, Annie describes that there is often a “squishy middle” in which real, actionable insights are revealed, but one must be skilled enough to see these gems and mine them for what they are. She aims to be this guide for each of her clients and support the discernment of their own wisdom. Moving at the speed of trust, she helps hold space for clients to show up exactly as they are by bringing positive, authentic, thoughtful, and collaborative energy to each engagement. She speaks truth into the room, embraces quirks, and encourages others to be entirely themselves by doing this herself. Gleaning wisdom from her favorite book, Lessons from Emergent Strategy by Adreian Murry Brown, Annie believes that there is a conversation within each room, each team, that only the people in that setting can have. She is dedicated to helping these teams find that unique conversation while holding grace for authentic participation from each person so that her client teams can uncover the invaluable insights they already hold about themselves.
Everything Else You Wish You Knew About Annie
Annie is a joy to be with and lights up every conversation with interest for her conversational partner(s) through genuine connection and interpersonal sharing. She absolutely loves food – to cook it, to share it, to shop for it, to read about it – and she is on a mission to perfect her own hollandaise sauce recipe. She admits that her opinions of restaurants are typically correlated to the quality of their hollandaise. Annie moves through life with the goal of not taking herself too seriously. To lean into her self-described “super-nerdy” humor, to find joy in the little moments she observes around her, and to remember that even when things don’t feel like they are going to be okay, they really will be.
“Annie averted potential conflict deftly moving us toward collaboration”
Interested in working with Annie?
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