Jennifer McDowell
Coach, Baltimore Maryland
“You are not either a loving leader or not a loving leader. Instead, you are developing a more loving leadership practice at all times.”
Meet Jennifer - The Full Human Being
Jennifer is compassionate, introspective, empathic, and a whiz at creating safe spaces in conversation. She is someone who delights in the co-created wisdom found in communities and self-describes as an idea-inventor and people-connector. She is adamant that workplaces are not defined by the paper they use or the products they make, but the people that find meaning, purpose, and connection within them. Jennifer sees a loving workplace as a space that properly prioritizes their most valuable resource - people - by ensuring that systems, structures, and opportunities are in place for humanity to be equipped properly, enabled fully, and celebrated regularly. As an avid reader, she shares this quote by Osho which highlights the power that is innately mobilized through love: “Love is a state of your consciousness when you are joyous, when there is a dance in your being. Something starts vibrating, radiating, from your center, something starts pulsating around you. It starts reaching people: it can reach women, it can reach men, it can reach rocks and trees and stars.” Jennifer is moved and inspired by the emergent uncovering of meaning when people join together in dialogue and community. She brings a peaceful presence married with an energizing spirit.
Escalating Effective People Leadership through Self-Healing
Jennifer is a skilled coach who helps people step into self-leadership so that they can further excel in other-leadership. She is an evangelist of the notion that one cannot lead others effectively until they are able to lead themselves. In her words, “when we heal our relationship to ourselves, we become better leaders out in the world”. She sees all relationships as opportunities for leadership, so one need not be in a position of formal management to engage in the intentional practice of self-leadership and to see the benefits of this practice radiate throughout one’s life. Jennifer’s mission is to spread the good news that it’s possible to move away from perfectionism, urgency, and individualism and turn towards compassion, dignity, and justice. Jennifer emphasizes that organizations are made solely of people and the results that organizations enjoy come entirely from those people’s actions. This is why investing in people is not just beneficial for organizational health, but quintessential for sustainable growth. She offers ala carte 1:1 coaching sessions for individuals, workshops and trainings for groups of people, and full consulting contracts for organizations who seek to shift internal systems related to people. Connect with Jennifer.
Jennifer’s Story
Jennifer's life and career have involved personal transformations that have shifted her from being a quintessential box checker to living and leading with more compassion, dignity, and justice. She has traversed many different landscapes to live and work. She considers herself from Long Beach California, but spent many of her formative summers in Arkansas, followed by time in the Republic of Georgia working with the Peace Corps, then meeting her husband in New Mexico, and now calling Baltimore Maryland home where she lives with her family. She has an alphabet soup of certifications, including a Bachelor’s in Comparative World Literature, a Master’s in Educational Studies, a Graduate Certificate in Leadership for School, Family, and Community Collaboration, as well as being a Certified Professional Coach. She thanks her formal education degrees for training her to read literature through many lenses including the lens of the author. She remarks that the author’s humanity and life experiences will inevitably shape the narrative and she pulls this lesson into her coaching work now, honoring that we are each the author of our own stories as they unfold. She sees the act of coaching as helping one co-write and co-create the story that they have left to tell. One narrative that was incredibly influential to Jennifer as a young person and a relationship that heavily shaped her life was watching her father and his profession as a tow truck driver. He would often leave at 2 or 3 in the morning to come to the aid of strangers. She remembers thinking, “wow, my dad rescues people!” This was her first glimpse of what it meant to be in service to someone or something else. His dedication to service has stayed with her throughout her life and career. Now aiming to serve people who look to heal relationships with themselves for more effective leadership, this core value of service that her father instilled in her is ever resonating and true.
To learn more about Jennifer’s life, story, or work, reach out to her here.
Everything Else You Wish You Knew About Jennifer
Jennifer loves drawing of the wisdom of written word. Poetic, messy, gorgeous, terribly-human writing stirs her soul to the brink of sharing it with everyone she meets. An average interaction with Jennifer would include a reference to something wonderful, wild, or whimsical that she has recently read. She has a secret passion for inventing which got started with her fourth-grade science project – the laundry folder. Still in the ideation phase of this new invention, Jennifer proclaims every house would be better off with at least one. While the laundry folder may be on pause, her love of inventing bubbles forth as she builds connections between different ideas and people, a regular pastime, or maybe better said, an ingrained characteristic. She lives with her husband and young son in Baltimore, accompanied by their two cats Walter White and Baby Cat. If you were to grab coffee with her and showed up a few minutes early with the unique opportunity to place an order on her behalf, she takes her coffee with one cream and nothing else.
“Her thought and introspection-provoking coaching style will coax you out of your comfort zone into the places where real self-improvement happens.”
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