Michelle Ayala

I attribute my success to God that's the only reason I'm here! I am absolutely spared. I wasn't supposed to survive that brain tumor at 13, but here I am. Especially when I answer surveys from St. Jude asking if I can get out of bed, feed myself, and drive a car - yeah, I can do all those things. I couldn't even drive a car when I was younger because I would have seizures. Just independence and being able to see, you know, things we take for granted. And things I start to take for granted, and it's just like that reminder of, like, no, you can't. You gotta be clear. Stay grateful. All I can hope for is that I am changing lives for the better every day. That is the goal. When instances come up where somebody just approaches me out of the blue and says some crazy stuff, I pay attention, and that's how I know I'm where I'm supposed to be.

The best career advice I've ever received is to focus on gratitude each day and set your intention each day. If you set your intention to that one thing, that is your primary thing for the day, and it looks different for everybody, right? How you set your intention - it could be praying, it could be writing it in a journal, it could be anything. But when you miss that, it makes all the difference in the world. And we never assign ourselves out to prove ourselves wrong, so that mindset is super important, and that's why we gotta focus on gratitude. Because gratitude is the key to happiness.

The biggest challenge in my field right now is AI and how people are using it irresponsibly. There's this really big push - if you don't get into AI, you're gonna get left behind, and everybody is jumping in. But here's the thing: I'm seeing leaders giving out information that they haven't even read, that they got from AI. Just this past week, I saw a man at a national conference with his slide up with jumbled up words and misspelled words. I'm getting flyers that look like ransom notes, and today I got an email where 10 of the links didn't work, and it was obvious it was from AI. Is it AI's fault? No. We're not reading, we're not slowing down, we're not paying attention, we don't care enough to check what we're putting out there. If marketing's whole purpose is to increase relationship, that know, like, and trust factor, we just lost trust. We're insulting the consumer, we're insulting the reader by giving them crap that we didn't even bother to read. It's not good enough. I'm seeing quite the parallel between my 10th graders and adults that are pulling the same crap. Just because AI exists doesn't mean we don't need to monitor it. As a group, we just need to slow down and really pay attention to what we're doing, what we're putting out there. And if something's too long to read, then it's just too long, period. I do love AI, and I do utilize AI, I just think we need to slow down and use it wisely.

Equality is one of my core values. Even when I was teaching, I would have on the board 'passion about equality.' My kids came from everywhere because Myrtle Beach is such a melting pot - we had kids that spoke all different languages, and it was really beautiful. I carried that here to Las Vegas and found an organization that was active in fair housing and getting fair housing laws passed back in the 60s - NAREB, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers. I became local secretary and marketing chair because that organization is near and dear to my heart. It's all about equality! Everybody has a right to be treated the same. Beyond work, I love to go out camping and hiking, I love horror movies, and my best friend has a movie company, so I do work for him, and that is a lot of fun. I've been doing that since 2015, doing PR, connecting with reviewers, giving them screeners, getting materials out there. I do marketing for a living, but then my hobby is also marketing, just in a different realm. And getting sushi - I love sushi and I'm so spoiled here in Las Vegas, the sushi is amazing!