I’m Your Coach, Ellie
I began my coaching journey in Flint, Michigan in 2014 where I worked with nonprofit leaders and high school students to gain the personal resilience skills they needed to navigate the Flint Water Emergency. I soon began facilitating in workforce development programs and working with individuals with significant barriers to employment so they could gain the social-emotional and personal management skills essential to gaining and maintaining employment.
I spent time as a training and development consultant in Australia in the late 2010s and then served as a Denver Public Schools Career Coach while also serving as the financial officer of a small non-profit that supported research and developed and delivered education related to developing everyday heroic behaviors. Today, I’m happy to call Colorado home and to be supporting incredible leadership teams in the Front Range.
Why I Coach
My career has been inspired by Fr. Gregory Boyle of Homeboy Industries and Sr. Carol Weber and Sr. Judy Blake of the St. Luke N.E.W. Life Center. These leaders taught me to stand in community with those at the margins, prioritizing a relationship as a neighbor and partner before I sought to be a helper. They centered employment, skill-building, and spiritual repair for clients with significant needs so they could embark on a dignified new beginning and achieve independence.
Dr. Philip Zimbardo, taught me another landmark lesson about the power of one and asking the right question. I taught his social psychological interventions in schools and workplaces for eight years. His 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment asked, “what makes people turn evil?”. Recognizing this phrasing created opportunities for evil action during the experiment, he then devoted the next five decades to discovering “what makes people act heroically?” The lessons derived from that rephrased question inspire thousands of everyday heroes around the world today.
Each of these leaders taught me about redemption, servant leadership, and revealed a truth about “the system”…not any one system in particular, so much as how, as Dr. Zimbardo would say, “the barrel” or situation was often as important a factor in a tricky situation as “the apple”, or the individual.
Systems have the power to facilitate, fester, or frustrate. They crush or enable societies, organizations, and individuals. If we can pause putting out fires in the system, we have the luxury of working on the system, placing a force multiplier on all our efforts thereafter. The outcomes we can achieve by accessing that source of power are why I coach.
Personal Life
I was raised in beautiful, rural southeastern Michigan, where I grew up reading books, building cornstalk forts, and playing ball sports. I attended Michigan State University, where I majored in international relations. Two internships - one at the Michigan House of Representatives and another at the Lansing Refugee Development Center - directed me away from politics and towards human services and personal and professional development.
I had first discovered the joy of slogging uphill in harsh, high-altitude environments in 2010. In 2019, I knew it was time to go West. I have the word “awe” tattooed on my right wrist, reflecting a commitment to going far and high to seek out the quietest and harshest cathedrals of Mother Nature here in the Rocky Mountains. My modalities of movement are trail running, backpacking, scrambling, climbing, and skiing. A recent foray into mountain biking left me with a fractured hip. This injury cut me off from my sacred outdoor practices, but the recovery has made me more patient, grateful, and deliberate in how I recreate.
When I’m not racking up the miles, I’m probably playing games, having potlucks with friends, bothering my houseplants, or scratching around in my garden. Through my years of coaching, being a ski instructor and a personal gardener have supplemented my income and provided me flexibility to travel. Today, you’re most likely to find me digging in my neighbor’s yards, on the Mesa Trail, or on a ridge in Indian Peaks Wilderness. I live with my partner, sister, and dog, Mesa, in Boulder, Colorado.
