Today we’d like to introduce you to Angie West.
Hi Angie, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I came into the world with a soapbox in my diaper, at least that’s what my mom always said. I grew up in Hutchinson, Kansas, where agricultural wealth and working-class poverty lived right next to each other, and my family sat squarely in the middle, one paycheck away from the other side. I never needed anyone to explain to me what it felt like to be overlooked by a system. I watched it. And from a very young age, I couldn’t stay quiet about it.
It was the birth of my oldest child, Ashling, that set my professional life in motion. Witnessing that experience introduced me to midwifery, a practice rooted in knowledge passed through women for generations, and I knew I had to go to nursing school. I graduated in 2010 from what was then Saint Luke’s College of Nursing Science, top of my class, ready to change things.
I went on to work across almost every corner of healthcare: acute care, ICU, cardiac intensive care, perioperative, procedural, ambulatory. I never once took the easy assignment. If a team was struggling, if they were overlooked, if leadership had left them on an uncharted path, that’s exactly where I wanted to be. Not out of stubbornness, but because I knew what it felt like to be one paycheck from the margins. Those teams knew it too. And so did their patients.
The pandemic accelerated everything. I was part of a special projects team supporting over 15,000 employees and students through COVID: testing, education, return-to-work guidance. That experience cracked something open for me. I could see, clearly and painfully, what repeated impossible asks were doing to the people around me. What I also discovered was that creating a psychologically safe place to land, even in the middle of chaos, made a measurable difference. The team told me so directly. They nominated me for the DAISY Nurse Leader Award, and receiving it from the very people doing the impossible work meant more to me than any recognition I’ve ever received. It solidified something I’ve never let go of since: even when it isn’t popular, ensuring that a team feels like they have a voice will always be my guiding light.
In 2021, the Riley Nursing Leadership Fellowship changed everything. I started building what became a divisional culture committee, working with about 30 managers to create real space to speak honestly about what they were carrying. The outpouring was extraordinary. Their stories were hard. And they were not burned out. They were injured, by systems that asked them to act against their values, over and over, without ever naming what that costs.
Coaching came into my life through that fellowship in 2023. A year working with an executive coach helped me see clearly what I valued, and just as clearly where healthcare had stopped aligning with why I ever got into nursing in the first place. I went through iPEC’s rigorous 12-month coaching process, thinking it would make me a better healthcare leader. What it actually did was show me my next chapter.
In 2025, I went full-time with Genuine Growth LLC. The work I do now, coaching, writing, speaking, is the same work I’ve always done. I’m still standing up for the people inside the system. I just finally have the right tools to do it.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Ha! No, it has not been a smooth road. The most honest thing I can tell you is that there were seasons where I was standing in front of teams telling them it was safe to speak up, while I was completely falling apart behind closed doors.
One of the biggest struggles has been imposter syndrome. In healthcare, you get rewarded for being unique, but only in the ways that are palatable. I was never quite that. And so I found myself doing something that went against everything I believed in: quieting my voice to appear compliant, to appear mission-focused, to appear like I belonged in the room. And every time I did that, I lost a little more trust in myself. It broke me down in ways I didn’t have language for until much later.
The hardest part to say out loud is this: there were times I had to sell a message I knew was against my values. I had to perform okay so that others felt safe coming to me, when I was not okay at all. My family felt it. I would walk through the door at the end of the day with nothing left, no energy, no light, and then shame myself for not being able to show up for my children the way I wanted to. That shame was its own kind of weight.
This year I made the leap to go out on my own with Genuine Growth LLC, and it has been the most uncertain and the most clarifying year of my career. Building something from scratch as a solo entrepreneur means spending a lot of time figuring out where the next paycheck is coming from. But it has also meant relearning how to trust my voice, revisiting the stories from my past, and remembering who I am actually doing this for. The marginalized. The underrepresented. The patients. The communities that have carried me forward when I couldn’t carry myself.
Leaving a six-figure job is not a small thing. But I am more fulfilled than I have ever been. And that, finally, feels like solid ground.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Genuine Growth LLC is a coaching and consulting practice built on one foundational belief: that the people who hold healthcare together deserve someone who will tell them the truth about what is happening to them, and then actually help them do something about it.
I work primarily with healthcare leaders — nurse managers, directors, executives, and the clinicians who are still inside systems that are slowly breaking them. What I specialize in is the thing that most wellness programs refuse to name: moral injury. Not burnout. Moral injury. The wound that happens when a system repeatedly asks you to act against your values, and then hands you a massage membership as a remedy. My work is about naming that wound accurately, doing the real healing work, and figuring out what comes next.
What sets me apart is that I have lived every level of this. I have been the bedside nurse, the unit coordinator, the director walking into rooms and delivering messages I didn’t believe in, the leader crying behind closed doors while telling her team it was safe to speak up. I am not coaching from a textbook. I am coaching from a career that cracked me open and forced me to rebuild from my actual values. That lived experience is the credential that matters most to the people I serve.
My offerings reflect that. I work with individuals through 90-minute intensive sessions for leaders who need to get clear on something specific — a decision, a direction, a conversation they’ve been avoiding. For deeper, sustained transformation I offer a six-month one-on-one coaching container where we do the real work: values excavation, identity reconstruction, learning to lead from a whole person instead of a split one. I also facilitate the Brave Culture Shift Lab, a 90-day cohort experience for healthcare leaders who are ready to stop white-knuckling through their careers and start building something different together. And I speak — for organizations, conferences, and teams who are ready to have an honest conversation about what is actually happening in their culture.
The thing I am most proud of brand-wise is the voice. I built Genuine Growth on the belief that the people inside this system are smart, they are tired, and they have been lied to long enough. They don’t need another presenter who tells them to take their PTO and practice gratitude. They need someone who sees them clearly, tells the truth, and walks alongside them as they find their way back to themselves. Because when we lose the heart of our healthcare workers, we lose the heart of healthcare itself. Patients feel the cracks in the system. They feel when the person caring for them has been hollowed out by impossible asks and misaligned values. When we focus only on the money and ignore the humans doing the work, we are not just failing our staff. We are failing our patients. Bringing the heart back to healthcare is not a soft goal. It is the most urgent work there is. That is what Genuine Growth is. That is what I do.
Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
The times I felt most uncomfortable walking into a room full of people were the times I didn’t fully understand what my business was becoming. Once I got clear on that, networking stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like a conversation.
If you’re struggling with networking, ask yourself whether this is actually a networking problem. In my experience, it usually isn’t. It’s either a vision problem or a voice problem. You don’t know clearly enough where you’re going, or you haven’t found the language to describe it out loud. No amount of business card exchanges will fix either of those things.
Do the vision work first. Get clear on your values. Understand your why. Know who your client is and what you are offering them. When you walk into a room with that clarity, the right conversations find you.
And then get yourself a coach and a mentor. These are not the same thing, and you need both. A coach holds you accountable and supports your vision. A mentor makes visible the roadblocks you can’t yet see and becomes your spokesperson in the rooms where you are not present. That last part is not small.
Networking at its best is not about volume. It is about clarity and relationship.
Pricing:
- I offer options at every level of readiness, from a single 90-minute intensive to a full six-month coaching container, with flexible payment options available, so that leaders can find an entry point that fits where they are right now.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.genuinegrowth.org
- Instagram: @genuine_growth_coaching
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61577030699246
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/genuinegrowth
- Other: https://substack.com/@genuinegrowth
