PLSEMINARS - Key Persons
Adair Linn Nagata, PhD, is an educator who teaches, facilitates, and coaches with an emphasis on integrative transformative learning through Personal Leadership.
She has taught intercultural communication and Personal Leadership at the university level in Japan and the U.S.A. since 2002. Since 2008, she has taught PL at the graduate-school level, both in the Master of Arts in Intercultural Relations (MAIR) program in Portland, Oregon, and at Waseda University Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies in Tokyo, Japan.
Angela founded Lodestar Life Skills, LLC to bring PL learning to a younger audience. She loves to meet children and youth where they are in life. She creates engaging PL resources, and facilitates accessible learning experiences for mentoring, workshops, summer camps and family-centric courses.
Angela volunteers with Women of the World, a non-profit organization empowering forcibly displaced women who are making Salt Lake City their new home. During her mentorship work, she discovered that PL practices brought immense benefits to her own resiliency as well as the refugees she works with. She therefore offers to facilitate monthly workshops to lend intercultural support and resilience training to service providers and mentorship volunteers.
Bego Lozano has advising companies and individuals for the past 20 years. As a Personal Leadership facilitator she has worked with nonprofits, teams, individuals, and parents. She has worked with PL in both English and Spanish.
She is an avid proponent of Mindful Leadership as a tool for improved performance and well-being. With her first-hand intercultural work experience, she helps corporations and their executives to understand, manage, and utilize cultural differences to build successful business relationships.
Her intercultural coaching for major international corporations includes clients such as Daimler, Siemens, Swarovski, HSBC, Junior League of Mexico City, Osram, among other leading companies and individuals. Prior to her work as a consultant, Bego gained first-hand experience in international business through positions with Procter & Gamble in Mexico and Sony Ericsson for the Latin America region, as well as an advertising and marketing consultancy in the New York focusing on the U.S. Hispanic market.
A native of Mexico City, she has lived and worked in seven cities in four countries. She holds three passports and speaks English, Spanish, and Portuguese fluently. Calling herself a "global nomad" she says that one of the hardest questions for her to answer is: ‘Where are you from?'
Bego holds a BA in Business Administration from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, and a Diploma in Corporate Social Responsibility from ITESM. She is a Senior Facilitator for Personal Leadership®, a Facilitator for EPIC (Essential Practices of Intercultural Communication), and is pursuing her certificate of Integral Coaching at New Ventures West in San Francisco.
She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family and tri-lingual boxer dog. You can find her doing yoga, running, or watching the latest episode of the Great British Baking show.
Catherine Menyhart, MEd, has been learning from Personal Leadership since 2014, and facilitating since 2015. She has used PL to support intercultural initiatives within the field of international education, as well as in employee training and development programs.
Esther Louie, MS, supports leadership teams in assessing and evaluating their intercultural awareness. She facilitates visioning and goal-setting for both teams and individuals interested in personal and professional growth.
For the past 15 years, she has trained students at a small private university in the Pacific Northwest. She uses PL as a means of helping the students in study-abroad programs develop the skills to make their way through intercultural challenges at their highest and best. Her work includes pre-departure and re-entry preparation, as well as guidance during the trips themselves. She also offers PL training for student leaders, staff and faculty as a tool for team development, conflict resolution, and personal growth.
Esther is a 200-hour registered yoga teacher, and a certified therapeutic yoga practitioner. She teaches therapeutic yoga and, as a volunteer, offers a gentle chair yoga class for seniors in her community. She also volunteers with Zeus, her Doberman pinscher dog, with the Palouse Paws with a Cause, the local Pet Partner organization.
Heather Robinson, MA, has been involved with Personal Leadership since 2003. As a Senior PL Facilitator, she has designed and facilitated a variety of face-to-face and virtual PL training programs that appeal to many different audiences.
For those just beginning their practice, Heather has facilitated the PL Introduction seminars, as well as co-facilitated both the Introduction and Foundations seminars.
For those looking for more in-depth study, Heather worked with Barbara Schaetti to design and facilitate the eight-month virtual course, Personal Leadership: A Year of Living the Practices. They offered the course together for three years, and Heather continues to co-facilitate it with other Senior PL Facilitators. Also with Barbara Schaetti, Heather developed a customized five-month virtual Personal Leadership Foundations course for the Council on International Education Exchange (CIEE). She and Barbara facilitated the course for two years.
With Barbara Schaetti and Dianne Hofner Saphiere, Heather developed the Essential Practice for Intercultural Competence (EPIC). Based on that work, she co-authored the EPIC Toolkit and co-facilitated the five-month virtual EPIC seminars.
Heather also co-developed the Personal Leadership Self-Assessment with Barbara Schaetti, which is used in various PL seminars to enhance participants' skill at practicing PL.
As an organization consultant, Heather balances the right amount of elegance, fun and rigor to optimize productivity. For many years, she has coached multinational corporate teams and business leaders toward success in a complex world. A particular area of expertise for Heather is the design of face-to-face, virtual and blended-learning solutions. This includes great skill at training trainers and facilitators to help them achieve optimal effectiveness.
Jacquelyn Reeves, MS, is a Personal Leadership Senior Facilitator. She implements the PL method most often for intercultural business-administration students expected to enter and work exclusively in a highly-competitive international environment.
Jacquelyn is a intercultural trainer, facilitator and consultant. An adult learning professional with on-the-ground international experience, she has lived and worked in Berlin for 17 years, and in the US for seven.
Job Titles:
- Instructor With the Executive Coaching Institute at the University of Houston
- President and Owner of Culture
Jan O'Brien is President and Owner of Culture-Conscious International. She is an International Association of Coaching Master Certified Coach. As a professional coach, her focus is in the area of global leadership, intercultural competence and personal development.
She is committed to using the principles and practices of Personal Leadership to create a supportive environment in which her clients can develop an integral understanding of themselves and others. PL is front and center when she is motivating her clients to "stay open to inspiration" and to live and work at their "highest and best."
In the educational arena, Jan has worked as a core instructor with the Executive Coaching Institute at the University of Houston, Department of Continuing Education, where she conducted PL-based workshops on Coaching in the Multicultural Workplace.
She also works with coaches and consultants to facilitate their learning of the Personal Leadership method.
Jan is a US/UK dual national. She has experienced first-hand the benefits and challenges of relocating and living overseas. She has lived and worked in several countries, in particular the UK, France, Singapore, Thailand and the South East Asia region.
Jan has been accredited in many areas. She holds the designation of Master Certified Coach from the International Association of Coaching. She is also a Board Certified Coach through the Center for Credentialing & Education in Greensboro, North Carolina, U.S.A., and she is a Certified Group Coach through the School of Coaching Mastery.
Jan is a Qualified Administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory, a certified facilitator with Cultural Detective, and an accredited consultant for The International Profiler. Jan also conducts assessments in social, emotional and spiritual intelligence.
Jill Chesley learned about Personal Leadership as a student in the Master of Arts in Intercultural Relations (MAIR) program in 2007. In 2008, she experienced PL again as a Fellow at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication (SIIC). The next year, and for most of the following decade, Jill was a Coordinator of the Fellows Program at SIIC, where she supported Fellows in learning about PL and putting it to its best use.
Jill's mission is to support organizations and individuals to be inclusive. She uses PL to identify organizational strategy, to support diversity and inclusion committees and employee resource networks, and to act as a consultant to employees and leaders.
Most recently, Jill has facilitated PL sessions at the City of Edmonton, where she is the Senior Diversity Inclusion Consultant. Personal Leadership has become a standard offering in the catalogue of courses at the City of Edmonton, and Jill facilitates general sessions as well as team-building sessions using Personal Leadership.
Jill loves connecting people. She is the founding chair of the Edmonton Business Diversity Network, whose mission is to advance and shape the diversity and inclusion environment in Edmonton by creating opportunities for learning and sharing. Jill also created a National Municipal Network of Diversity and Inclusion Professionals whose members meet regularly to share successes and lessons learned. And she has led and participates in career mentorship programs.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Tokyo, Japan / International Education
Jin first learned about the value of PL as an intercultural communication tool during his 2003 internship experience at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. Then in 2004, as he was balancing his family's need to return to Japan with the chance for career promotion in the U.S., he understood the impact of a PL practice first-hand. The PL visioning process helped him regain a sense of congruence, and made Personal Leadership an integral part of his everyday life.
Job Titles:
- Founder of World Tree Coaching
Jodi Harris, MSW, was first drawn to Personal Leadership in early 2016. When she heard about Personal Leadership's principles and practices, Jodi was convinced they were the perfect way to bring mindfulness to her internationally and culturally diverse clients. She attended the Training of Facilitators on Whidbey Island in the spring of 2017.
She now supports her globally mobile clients through one-on-one coaching, Personal Leadership and mindfulness trainings, and online courses. She has also spoken on PL at the US Embassy in Tokyo, at the Families in Global Transition Conference, and at local non-profits and schools.
Jodi is the founder of World Tree Coaching, LLC. A coaching and training company, it supports globally mobile individuals in accessing their inner compass for better transition, cultural adaptation and personal fulfillment.
Jodi grew up in the Texas Hill Country. She studied abroad in Spain as an undergraduate, and in Northern Ireland as a graduate student. She has also lived in Japan, the Dominican Republic, and Madagascar. Beginning summer 2019, she will call Belgium home.
She is fluent in English and Spanish, and speaks passable French and basic Japanese. She and her spouse, a diplomat, are raising three Third Culture Kids.
Jodi has a BA in English and a BA in Spanish from the University of Texas at Austin. Also from UT, she has a Masters Degree in Social Work, with a focus on clinical social work and conflict resolution. She is an accredited coach (ACC level) with the International Coach Federation.
Jodi loves being outdoors, and enjoys sports of any kind, but especially running and basketball. She loves to read. She adores cooking, and enjoys having a house full of people with whom to share food, fun and community.
Job Titles:
- Independent Leadership Coach, Business Consultant
Katsuko Sugiyama, MA, is a practitioner as well as a Facilitator of Personal Leadership. As a practitioner, she uses Personal Leadership practices to align her personal and professional life with her life purpose and vision.
As a Facilitator, she is involved in various PL seminars and PL Community-of-Practice events in different capacities. She has facilitated and produced Introduction to Personal Leadership seminars for business students in Europe and for global leaders in a nonprofit educational organization. She has led discussions for the participants in a Training of Facilitators seminar, and has initiated and hosted PL Regional Gatherings in the U.S. Northeast region.
Katsuko has also been the producer of Personal Leadership: A Year of Living the Practices (PLAY-LP) since 2014. In that role, she provides support to the Facilitators and the participants before, during and after the sessions. She ensures that the sessions run smoothly, attends to technical issues, injects clarifications and adds her perspectives into discussions.
She also provides PL-based coaching, supporting individuals and organizations in their personal and/or professional transformation.
Katsuko is an independent leadership coach, business consultant and cross-cultural facilitator specializing in global effectiveness and cultural competency. Katsuko has over 25 years' experience in international business, both in Japan and in the U.S. She has worked as an internal business partner and an external consultant and coach in several industries including financial services, information technology, life sciences, management consulting, and education. She has engaged in the areas of product development, project management, sales and marketing, customer support and training.
Leni Marshall, Ph.D., has many roles: educator, author, and facilitator. Working with active learning for more than a decade, she leads Personal Leadership events for clients from colleges to summer camps to government organizations. She is experienced at using validated assessment tools in applications of data-driven best practices. Leni is co-founder and a principal consultant with LeaderSHIFTin, facilitating diversity, inclusion, and equity experiences for individuals and groups from Seattle to Bangalore.
Leni comes from a traveling family. When she started college, it was her 13 th school. Having lived from coast to coast in the United States, up and down the economic ladder, and across multiple faith traditions, Leni values the ways in which many kinds of difference enriches a family. Before entering academia, she worked for home health-care agencies, senior care homes, and a managed health-care consulting firm.
Leni is the Intercultural Development Ambassador and a professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin - Stout. She has a Ph.D. in Literature with minors in Gerontology and Women's and Gender Studies. Her publications include articles on intercultural awareness, age studies, and disability studies in literature and culture. Her most recent book is Age Becomes Us: Bodies and Gender In Time.
Leni's commitment to multicultural agility comes from her values, awareness, ethics, and beliefs in social justice. In her free time, she roams across a six-acre wooded farm and launches on road trips with her three kids, two dogs, and a cat. She also has a sense of humor!
Maureen Lancaster, EdD, offers opportunities to learn the practice of Personal Leadership in Ireland and the U.S. She works primarily with community and nonprofit organizations and in university settings.
Job Titles:
- Freelance Trainer and Coach for Personal
- Training Coordinator at Young SIETAR
Nadine Binder, MA, is a Senior Facilitator with Personal Leadership Seminars. She brings Personal Leadership into her work with clients from the nonprofit sector, educational institutions, and the corporate world. The workshops she facilitates focus on intercultural competence and communication. She has facilitated Personal Leadership for intercultural competence development among university students, as well as for staff members in for-profit and nonprofit organizations and train-the-trainer programs.
Lately, Nadine is particularly passionate about using Personal Leadership in personal and professional development coaching for young professionals and women in leadership positions.
Nadine has also conducted research on Personal Leadership as a way of practicing intercultural competence as part of her doctoral research.
Nadine has served as Training Coordinator at Young SIETAR, where she continues to be an active member and mentor to new trainers.
Nadine was born and raised in Germany. She lived in Australia and the Netherlands as she completed her studies.
Job Titles:
- Founder and President of INTERGLOBE Cross - Cultural Business Services, Inc
Rita Wuebbeler, MA, PPC, is a Senior Facilitator with Personal Leadership Seminars. She has been facilitating Personal Leadership since 2005 in corporate, nonprofit and higher-education contexts, and was instrumental in introducing PL to Europe and Canada.
Rita has facilitated Personal Leadership for language consultants at the World Bank, pharmaceutical sales executives, and scientists working in drug safety and clinical development. She has co-facilitated PL Foundations seminars in France and Germany, and has co-presented on PL-related topics at conferences in France, Estonia and Germany. She conducts Personal Leadership foundations courses at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on a regular basis. In Atlanta, Rita teaches Personal Leadership to new homeowners funded by Habitat for Humanity and to corporate clients.
Rita is the founder and president of INTERGLOBE Cross-Cultural Business Services, Inc., an Atlanta-based international consulting firm. The company offers facilitation and executive coaching in the areas of cultural competence-building, diversity and inclusion, mindfulness and effective team communication.
A native German, Rita spent the first two and a half decades of her life in Europe before moving to Atlanta, which she now calls home.
She recently spent almost four years living and working in Canada, getting to know a new culture from scratch and practicing Personal Leadership on a daily basis.
Job Titles:
- Artist
- Founder of the Crestone Institute
Sheila Ramsey, PhD, is one of the three Founding Partners of the Personal Leadership practice and of the Personal Leadership Seminars organization. She is acutely aware that global leaders who are skilled in leading themselves while leading others are those who can create life-affirming paradigms for us all.
Motivated by over 20 years of an ever-deepening PL practice, Sheila teaches and speaks about Personal Leadership all over the world. She has offered PL at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, New York, and at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. She has trained faculty and staff of the Jakarta International School in Indonesia, and directors in the UN Secretariat Leadership Development Programs in Europe, North America and Africa. She has given public PL seminars in Tokyo, Japan, and currently teaches PL at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication in Portland, Oregon.
Sheila lives in Crestone, Colorado, which is the inspirational home of PL. She has been hosting a variety of PL seminars there since 2001: the PL Foundations training, the Training of Facilitators seminars, Global Gatherings, and specialized PL seminars. She is one of the three authors of Making a World of Difference: Personal Leadership.
Sheila is founder of The Crestone Institute, a Colorado-based consulting firm known internationally for a focus on integrating creativity with global and personal leadership.
Sheila is a "domestic nomad," having been born in Texas, then shuttling between Texas and Illinois in the younger part of her life. She lived in Japan three different times for a total of six years, which was the beginning of a 20-year professional relationship with Japan. She has taught intercultural communication at two universities in Japan and, in the early 1980s, co-developed one of the first series of seminars on "Working and Living in Japan" for non-Japanese global executives in Tokyo.
Sheila is a visual artist, worked for several years as a professional photographer, and studied as a potter's apprentice in Mashiko, Japan. She loves hiking in the glow of mountain sunsets on the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that are just outside her front door.
Jacquelyn works in a variety of areas: teambuilding; cultural awareness; unconscious bias; international presentation skills; international negotiation skills; women and negotiation skills; Personal Leadership practice; and specialty workshops on U.S. and German work cultures. Her goal is always to facilitate international understanding, and to manage the stress that is often a byproduct of working and living internationally.
She has certification from the Intercultural Communication Institute with instructors Stella Ting-Toomey and Leeva Chung). She is also certified to administer the International Profiler, an assessment tool used to coach and develop leaders and staff working in foreign environments.
Jacquelyn's facilitatation style capitalizes on a combination of life experience, training, her background as an actor, and the belief that learning can be fun. With that dynamic combination, she supports group ownership and the development of the solutions specific to the particular groups and individuals.
In 2016, Jacquelyn presented in Valencia, Spain, on the friction between the U.S.A. and Germany regarding privacy values and data protection. In response to the strong interest in this topic, she is currently developing this field for training and consulting purposes, and presents and publishes regularly on this topic.
An active member of SIETAR Deutschland (Europe), she has worked in Germany, Switzerland, France, Britain, Sweden, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Spain and the U.S.A.
Jacquelyn works in English and German.
Job Titles:
- Founder of True North Intercultural
Tara Harvey, PhD, is passionate about helping people learn and grow through international and intercultural experiences. She has been involved with Personal Leadership since 2008, and uses PL in her work with educators and students around the world. Through her educational consulting/training company, True North Intercultural, LLC, Tara offers an eight-week online professional development program, called "Foundations of Intercultural Learning & Teaching," that incorporates the Personal Leadership framework.
Tara created the curriculum for CIEE: Council on International Educational Exchange's signature course, Intercultural Communication and Leadership. It is now used by more than 20 study centers around the world, teaching study abroad participants how to use Personal Leadership as a process for understanding and learning from their experiences.
Tara is the Founder of True North Intercultural, LLC, an educational training/consulting company that helps educators foster intercultural learning. She has been in the field of international and intercultural education for more than 15 years: teaching English abroad, advising international students, conducting research, facilitating intercultural training, teaching intercultural courses, designing curriculum, and training fellow educators.
Born and raised in Minnesota, Tara studied abroad and later worked for several years in Spain. She has also lived in multiple places in the Midwest, South, and East Coast of the U.S. She has traveled extensively and worked with students and educators from around the world. Her partner was born and raised in southern Spain. Tara is fluent in English and Spanish, and she and her partner are raising their two children bilingually.
Tara holds a Bachelors in Communication Studies and Hispanic Studies from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; a Masters in International Relations from the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset in Madrid, Spain; a Masters in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and a PhD in Comparative and International Development Education from the University of Minnesota.
In what little free time she can muster, Tara enjoys playing fútbol with her kids, getting out into nature, exercise of any kind, and reading.
Tina Kirk, MBA, first encountered Personal Leadership in 2004 through graduate-level study at the Intercultural Communication Institute (ICI) in Portland, Oregon. Her experience since then has taught her that PL offers a transformative reflective process to anyone willing to practice, and in 2010 Tina became a recognized Senior PL Facilitator.
As an educator at Randolph College and PL Facilitator in Virginia, Tina has introduced the practice of PL to study-abroad participants, college residence-life staff, intern teachers, K-12 educators, and healthcare professionals.
In 2015, she offered an introductory PL workshop with colleague Heather Robinson at the annual conference of the Council for International Educational Exchange (CIEE) in Berlin. In 2016, Tina is co-facilitating Personal Leadership: A Year of Living the Practices. It is an eight-month virtual course designed for individuals who have taken either a PL Foundations or a Training of Facilitators program, to help them deepen their own experience and understanding of the two principles and six practices of PL.
Viviane Ephraimson-Abt, MS, MEd, has been practicing Personal Leadership since 1998. She has found it to be so transformative in her own life that she feels motivated to share it with others at every opportunity.
Since 2004, she has enjoyed offering PL trainings and coaching for culturally diverse staff and students in higher education at Colorado State University and University of Colorado Boulder. She has also presented PL trainings at international conferences for NAFSA: Association of International Educators, and for SIETAR (the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research).