Ava McGee
Transformation Coach, Tacoma Washington
“Our time, our energy, our actions are valuable. What we focus on grows. We have to be change agents in our own lives.”
Meet Ava - The Full Human Being
Ava is motivational and inspirational. She is wired to be collaborative and creates the space around and with her for others to be the same. She believes that for most heightened effectiveness, organizations and teams need to have love at the center and exude it out to all of the people that they touch. Her view of love comes from lessons she learned from her dad: “You can love someone, even though you may not like them. It is because you love them that you can help them, see them, resonate with them, or speak to them before you are realizing you are doing it. The love you have for them persists, even through moments of relational challenge”. It is this unwavering and action-forward love that Ava implores is critical for successful leader-follower and peer-to-peer relationships. She insists that this type of love can be most easily built or demolished by the words we chose to use with one another. We can choose to uplift or tear down. This choice permeates every relationship, even the one we hold with ourselves. Ava wishes to encourage all leaders who want to ooze love to their employees to give space for mistakes, investigate with kindness, togetherness, and a desire to understand, then offer empathy and an opportunity for creative problem solving together. This compassion and embrace will cultivate a working relationship with the strongest bonds. Learn more about Ava at her LinkedIn here.
Transforming Organizations through Education, Collaboration, and Cultivation
Ava is dedicated to bettering organizations in deed rather than in word. She is a Transformation Coach who specializes in DE&I, Mindfulness, Organizational Development, EI, and Change Management bringing these lessons to life through training, facilitated meetings, and community gatherings. Her work is led by her mantra: Education, Collaboration, Cultivation. She helps clients see their opportunities for change and then enables that change through education around ownership of action, collaboration around transformation, and the cultivation of desired results. Ava aims to infuse all spaces, processes, and policies with equity and inclusion for all people. She creates safe learning moments for leaders and teams in which participants can co-create and innovate their collaborative preferred future together. With this in mind, she flags upfront, “When you leave the room, that’s when the real training begins.” Ava equips and empowers all people in organizations to take ownership of the change they want to see and she gives them practical tools to create this change.
Want to understand more about the work Ava does and how she can help transform your team or organization? Reach out to her here.
“I am no longer accepting the thing I cannot change, I am changing the things I cannot accept” – Angela Davis
Ava’s Story
Ava was born in Mississippi and moved to Washington in her early years. She started her career in HR where she began to see the overarching narrative through policy that rules were meant to favor the manager or the organization and not fully defend, protect, educate, equip, or empower the people who were employed there. This stirred in her the conviction that there is something greater beyond the “us vs. them” mentality that many organizations adopt with their talent. Rather that there could and can be a ”we” mentality in which each person is seen, understood, appreciated for their unique skills and strengths. She is a learner by nature and is always on the lookout for her next degree, certification, and life lesson learned through exposure and curiosity. Ava attributes this obsession with learning to her father’s openness to her curiosities and yearning for the investigation of life’s biggest questions. Her father, a Mississippi-raised pastor, has been her biggest influence and supporter throughout life. Instilling Ava with a dedication to love and kindness, he also taught her how to be accountable for actions, correct discipline for the circumstances, and why and how to always be aware of other people. Many major life experiences for her have been marked by questioning the inner workings of collective thought. Said more simply, the ever-present questions of ‘who are we in relation to each other’ and ‘how do I operate in this’ have been critical factors in Ava’s personal development. While she currently resides in Washington State, she has always dreamed of living in another country, perhaps in the Caribbean or on the Ivory Coast.
Interested in connecting with Ava? Reach out to her here.
Everything Else You Wish You Knew About Ava
Ava is someone who speaks the truth to herself and others. She doesn’t allow negative self-talk, rather, she infuses all dialogue with empathy and sincerity about all humans’ innate worth. As a life-long learner, Ava uses the analogy of a backpack when she speaks about her lessons- learned: “My backpack is so full and I just keep stuffing more in there. Even all of the pockets on the outside are overflowing! Just when you think I can’t shove one more gem or lesson into the bag, I somehow find a way to stuff it in!” With this curiosity comes a love for new and adventurous foodies. She is a foodie at heart and one of her favorite dishes is Thai fish dishes with hot savory curry sauce over rice with veggies. She loves to laugh and has learned to find humor in all corners of life from her dad. She has fond memories of his booming laugh filling the room and infecting her with uncontrollable laughter as well. Ava has lived a delightful life full of beautiful memories, and she is most touched by the memory of giving birth to her two awesome children. She is in awe of the thought that we can expand our own selves through the creation and nurturing of a family.
“Ava is really good at getting to the heart of the matter; grasping who a person is at their core, what drives them, and connecting that back to what makes us all human.”
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