Fall 2007 Newsletter

Greeting

Dear clients and colleagues,

2007 continues to be a year of new beginnings for Personal Leadership Seminars LLC. You see this here, not least, in the launch of our newly-upgraded PLSeminars' eFlash. Those of you who have received our text-based email updates over these past years will, we hope, appreciate this new format.

With each issue, coming on average three times a year, we will offer some combination of:

We hope you will find value in the PLSeminars' eFlashes, ideas and opportunities that enrich your lives and the work that you do in the world.

Best wishes,

The Book is Here!

We are delighted to announce the publication of Making a World of Difference.
PERSONAL LEADERSHIP: A Methodology of
Two Principles and Six Practices.

As many of you know, we have been working on this book for five years, full throttle since March of this year. It's been an intense journey! We have known ourselves enormously supported in the process of writing, editing, and designing, and we are grateful to everyone who has helped us produce a book of which we are truly proud. We hope that it enriches your own practice of Personal Leadership, and that it serves your colleagues, neighbors, friends, and clients too. Indeed, we hope that it will 'make a world of difference.'

Be one of the first to own a copy - order now! To learn more, download our formal press release. Please feel free to distribute it to anyone — person, organization, or institution — you think might be interested.


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The Scholar Ship Brings Personal Leadership Onboard

Do you want to be inspired? We recommend you visit the website of The Scholar Ship, a study abroad program that takes the commitment to develop interculturally competent global leaders to a new level of excellence.

The Scholar Ship (TSS) is a recognized academic program aboard a transformed passenger ship hosting students on semester-long voyages around the world. It is currently three months into its inaugural voyage; it sailed from Greece on September 5, 2007 and will conclude in Hong Kong in mid December. PLSeminars, in the form of Barbara Schaetti and Gordon Watanabe, co-facilitated parts of the five-day staff orientation in Greece, helping to prepare onboard life, teaching, port program, and resource staff for the adventure ahead. With Sheila Ramsey's involvement, we also developed 5 modules for the onboard life staff to use when introducing Personal Leadership to TSS students.

What is most exciting to us at PLSeminars, is that TSS is not just another study and travel venture. It is an experiential-based program that emphasizes the integration of residential life and port visits into the classroom curriculum. Intercultural Residential Counselors (IRCs) help the students from more than 35 countries use their onboard life experience as a living laboratory — this is about walking the talk, about developing applied intercultural competence, not just an intellectual exercise. Port visits (typically seven days long) feature a combination of academic field study, community service, shore excursions, and independent travel. Comprehensive briefings and debriefings in both residential and classroom settings ensure that students do not simply live in the vicinity of experience but truly engage in transformative learning.

PLSeminars' relationship with TSS staff actually reaches back to long before Greece. Alfred Flores, Director of Transnational Onboard Life, and Vanessa Harris, Onboard Life Specialist, are both ongoing participants in our Training of Facilitators program. Moreover, all three of the IRC Coordinators for this first voyage, and three of the eleven IRCs themselves, have prior experience with Personal Leadership. Two of the teaching staff have also participated in the equivalent of a Foundations seminar.

Any venture like TSS presents enormous challenges as well as opportunities — everyone on board is living at the intersection of 1) his or her own cultural habits and cultural comfort zone, 2) multiple, simultaneous, and intense intercultural interactions, and 3) new and constantly changing environments. Alfred and Vanessa have committed so strongly to Personal Leadership because they know the methodology can help staff and students navigate this intersection: practicing Personal Leadership can help people take leadership of their own experience, learn from it, and so develop their intercultural competence through the living laboratory that TSS provides. And have lots of fun in the process!

If you go to the TSS website, you will find several short video clips from this first voyage. We suspect much of it will fill your heart with delight, not least the video documenting the first ever student-inspired Oxfam Hunger Banquet aboard TSS. You can also link from the home page to two blogs, one from IRC Yas Djadali and the second from graduate student Caitlin Bell. What you read there will give a taste of the kind of life-changing and competence-building experiences students (and staff) are having. If you are a member of the social networking site Facebook, you can track the discussions and blogs of other students (and of some of their parents) too.

As we mentioned, PLSeminars participated in the staff training prior to the ship's departure from Greece. We were honored to introduce the methodology of Personal Leadership to all of the staff, and to then work in more depth with the IRCs and other onboard life staff. We helped behind the scenes in other ways too, serving as general consultants to staff who wanted to talk through a broad range of issues - everything from the nuances of teaching in a multicultural classroom to strategies for building successful collegial partnerships. We're working with them on an ongoing basis to refine the ways in which they introduce Personal Leadership to the students throughout the voyage, and the ways in which TSS becomes for everyone an intentional 'community of practice.'

A core dimension of experience for TSS staff is the enormous amount of ambiguity they have to engage on a daily basis during this first voyage. That may well continue for the next few voyages, as systems continue to be refined and maximized. We are glad that they have their Personal Leadership practices to help sustain them, to help them in each moment create that open space from which discernment of their next step can come.


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Personal Leadership Seminars - Japan: An interview with Megumi Sugihara

Megumi Sugihara is an intercultural trainer and scholar dedicated to the full flowering of human potential. A native of Japan currently living in Tokyo, she has lived, worked, and studied in the U.S., Europe, and Africa.

Megumi began practicing Personal Leadership in 1998. She was among the first to become a Senior Facilitator with Personal Leadership Seminars, and is the executive director of Personal Leadership Seminars - Japan. Her professional interests are rooted in a whole person approach to intercultural communication.

1. What is the vision, purpose, or 'raison d'ętre' of Personal Leadership Seminars - Japan (PLS-J)?
As more people in Japan come to know Personal Leadership — having participated in seminars at Crestone, through the MAIR (Master of Arts in Intercultural Relations) program, at SIIC (Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication), etc.— I wanted to establish a formal presence that reflects the spirit of the Personal Leadership community at large.

I've seen some other practices of foreign origin become popular in Japan and eventually represented by multiple people/groups... well perhaps one of the older examples might be Buddhism, and there are many contemporary examples I can think of. Sometimes these groups are divided and competing for "authority" or "authenticity." I would like something different for Personal Leadership in Japan. I have been blessed with "inspiring interaction" within the global Personal Leadership community, especially through my experiences meeting with other practitioners from around the world in Crestone. People participating in the community are diverse in their national backgrounds and areas of professional application, and they are autonomous, yet together we engage in an interwoven dynamism of co-creation of meanings. What I hope for PLS-J is to offer a forum for such interaction among practitioners in Japan, and that in return represents one inclusive voice of PLS-J back out to the world.

Jin Abe, another PLS-Global senior facilitator in Japan, has talked about PLS-J being a portal for Personal Leadership into Asia Pacific. We're beginning to have focused conversations about what this might mean, part of a process towards clarifying and re-articulating the PLS-J organizational vision.

2. What kinds of things has PLS-J been doing?
PLS-J offered a first set of introductory seminars last year, one in Tokyo and another in Kyoto. Sheila Ramsey flew in for both, and Gordon Watanabe for the one in Kyoto. With Jin's help, the three of us worked with more than 20 participants from across Japan and from other parts of Asia too.

After the seminars last year, a follow up group was formed under the name of PLS-J Circle. The Circle is a gathering of PL practitioners and friends who get together for informal group discussion on Personal Leadership related issues. Because Personal Leadership seminars so far have been conducted in English, the Circle also provides opportunities for Japanese language speakers to discuss Personal Leadership concepts and core dimensions of the practice in Japanese. The gatherings are called on ad-hoc basis...sometimes motivated by out of town visitors, like Hirai-san from Kyushu and Alex Yu from Korea. In the future we hope to hold PLS-J Circles somewhere outside of Tokyo too.

As my own experience with Personal Leadership was that of personal growth as much as my development of intercultural competency, I am interested in offering Personal Leadership to a broader audience — in other words, not necessarily interculturalists.

For that reason, Jin, Adair Lynn Nagata (a PLS-Global facilitator-in-training) and I presented a 2-hour information session on Personal Leadership called "Forum on Personal Leadership and Human Development" in late August. We invited people who are engaged in "education" in some way and are committed to helping others grow. We had coaches, human resource professionals, educators, counselor, etc. as our participants. I hope Personal Leadership will reach a broader audience through this kind of interaction.

3. What about you, as a PLS-Global senior facilitator in Japan?
As a PLS-Global senior facilitator, I had the honor to introduce Personal Leadership to a corporate client. This came to me through Rita Wuebbeler, another PLS-Global senior facilitator.

The context of the program was leadership training for the company's management team. I invited Dr. Muneo Yoshikawa, who has known of Personal Leadership for a long time through his work at SIIC, and who also attended our Tokyo seminar in 2006, to collaborate on this project. Muneo presented one day on leading others, and I did 2 days of Personal Leadership. Our programs complemented each other well, meeting the needs of the client.

Although PLS-Global facilitators have integrated aspects of Personal Leadership into their work with corporate clients before this, our program in Japan was the first time the full methodology of Personal Leadership was presented in a corporate setting. I've now conducted a second seminar for this same client, this time for all the employees of the company. It is exciting to take Personal Leadership into the corporate environment and to see it so well accepted.

4. What else do you foresee PLS-J doing in the future?
The next Personal Leadership seminars open to public in Japan are scheduled to start later this month. November 28-30 is the Foundation seminar for those who are new to Personal Leadership. December 2-3 is a "refresher'" seminar for those who have had some prior Personal Leadership experience upon which they would like to build. Sheila Ramsey, one of the founding partners of PLS-Global, will join Jin and me to co-facilitate these seminars in Kyoto. We are designing these seminars so that both Japanese and English speakers are fully accommodated. That's a new challenge we are taking on this year!

We're getting ready to offer a Personal Leadership seminar conducted totally in Japanese. With my seminar for the corporate client here in Tokyo, I am starting to present more and more of Personal Leadership in Japanese. I see it much more than translation of terms and handouts; the concepts have to be fully integrated and communicated through another culture as well as language. When we look back at how long it has taken for the English-language terminologies to stabilize, it's clear that the "translation" of Personal Leadership into Japanese will be an evolving process over some time.

Sheila has been saying for years, "Once the Personal Leadership book is out in English, the first translation has to be in Japanese." Well, now the book is out — which is great motivation for learning how to discuss Personal Leadership in Japanese! I am counting on the wisdom of Japanese speaking Personal Leadership practitioners to accomplish this task together!

5. Who are the people involved in PLS-J?
At the core right now it is me, Jin Abe, Adair Nagata, and a handful of other people who generously help us whenever we need it. In the broadest sense, however, the community includes anyone who has participated in any PLS-J event or anyone living in Japan who has participated in any PLS-Global event.

PLS-J is still in an early stage of emergence. It is exciting!


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