More Information About Our Plenary and Workshop Presenters
Stuart N. Simon, LICSW, PCC (Professional Certified Coach) is a graduate of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, and has been a Gestalt therapist, coach, consultant, and trainer for over 35 years, working in the USA, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He is a senior faculty member of GISC, teaching in programs with a particular focus on coaching and leadership, as well as in the Cape Cod Training Program. He is a partner at Management Support Services, Inc. (an international management training and consulting firm) and teaches in the Executive Education program of the School of Management at Boston University.
Mary Anne Walk, MS, MBA, MCC, is Chief Relations Officer at the Gestalt International Study Center. She was appointed Executive Director in June 2012 and during her tenure continued to support the mission of the Center by expanding GISC’s reach to even more organizations worldwide. Prior to this position, she was President of Walk & Associates, Inc. (a management consulting and coaching group), and Executive Vice President of a software company (which she joined shortly after retiring from AT&T as Vice President of Human Resources). She is certified as a Master Coach (MCC) from the International Coach Federation.
Awilda Borres, MS, is a proven organization effectiveness executive with over 15 years of experience helping organizations and leaders to accelerate the rate and success of business transformations globally. She has served as change lead for large-scale organization realignments, and launch of new business models, processes, and systems in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Her clients have included Aramark, Hershey, Nabisco, Tyco Intl, Linde, Merck, J&J, state and federal agencies. She is a Professional Certified Coach and currently working on a MBA.
Gwynne Guzzeau, MS, JD, is Executive Director of the Gestalt International Study Center. Coach, consultant, and counselor-at law, her extensive training at GISC informs her work with executives, educators, and legal professionals. As a counselor-at-law and a Gestalt practitioner, work with clients extends beyond traditional estate planning to coaching leaders of family systems on communication strategies.
Sharona Halpern, MA, LMHC, is a Gestalt practitioner with over thirty years of experience as a psychotherapist, coach, consultant, and trainer. She is a member of the core faculty of GIS C's Cape Cod Training Program. She maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Newton, MA, where she specializes in working with couples and adult families.
Joseph (Joe) Melnick, PHD, is Chair of the Cape Cod Training Program and serves on the Board of GISC. He is a couple’s and family therapist, an organizational consultant, and a teacher worldwide. The founding editor of Gestalt Review, he has published extensively and co-edited (with Edwin C. Nevis) Mending the World: Social Healing Interventions by Gestalt Practitioners Worldwide. He is about to publish a book written with Sonia Nevis, entitled The Cape Cod Model of Change.
Spencer Melnick, LCSW, is an organizational consultant, coach, and psychotherapist who workswith individuals, couples, teams, and organizations. His focus is on personal and professional development through greater self-awareness and improved communication abilities. His highly interactive and hands-on approach leads to enhanced interpersonal skills, greater self-confidence, and an increase in performance, productivity, and leadership.
Sophie Parker, principal of Sophie Parker & Associates LLC, is an executive coach and organization development consultant whose leadership training is grounded in experiential learning. She runs the Boston Facilitators Roundtable Experiential Lab, which uses simulations to teach leadership and team-building skills. She is certified by the International Coach Federation (ICF).
Patricia D. Perry, PSYD, is an independent coach and facilitator, who has over 25 years of experience working with individuals and groups, primarily in educational and non-profit settings. Her emphasis is on creating an opportunity for people to learn about themselves, their existing competencies and their growing edges, in order to move forward in ways that meet their deepest values and highest hopes.
Elizabeth Reuthe, MSBA, MA, has over thirty years of leadership and organizational transformation experience in Fortune 500 companies, high tech start-ups, governments, universities, and healthcare systems. She most recently completed her Masters in Conflict Facilitation and Organizational Change which brought her to Israel several times to facilitate conversations between Israelis and Palestinians. She continues to study Deep Democracy and Evocative Leadership. She is a Professional Certified Coach, coaching clients globally. Her current practice areas include: Executive Development and Coaching, Optimizing Performance by Transforming Conflict, Building Trust, and Creating High Performing Teams. Her clients have included Intel, Siemens, Honeywell, University of Michigan Health, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, The Governments of Maine, as well as several family-owned businesses.
Robert (Bob) Ross, ED.D, is principal at RRoss Coaching Counseling and Consulting Services. As a licensed Psychologist and ICF GISC Certified Coach, he supports and develops leaders, teams, and organizations through transition renewal and growth. From his extensive executive experience in education and on non-profit boards, he offers a seasoned and down to earth approach to life and business.
Marianne Roy, M.ED, is co-founder of the Healthcare Initiative. A graduate of the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland’s Organization and Systems Development program, she is currently a faculty member at the Gestalt International Study Center. As an organizational consultant in the healthcare industry, she uses the power of relationships to integrate the core mission of caring with the business of delivering it. Healthcare clients include: Austin Heart, C.R. Bard, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Covenant Medical Group, Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates and UMass Memorial Health Care.
Michael Shipman, MSC, is a GISC Professional Associate and the Vice President, Director of Talent Development for Rockland Trust, a top rated, full-service, community bank in Massachusetts. He focuses on the progressive people strategies that contribute to Rockland Trust being recognized on the Boston Globe’s Top 100 Best Places to Work list since 2009. He holds the Master Human Capital Strategist designation from the Human Capital Institute and is a Certified Integral Coach.
Zeynep (“Z”) Tozum, MA, PCC, has worked since 2001 as an OD consultant and executive performance coach with executives and teams around the world. People, results, impact, learning, curiosity, and action are central to her life. An OD consultant and a Professional Certified Coach accredited by the International Coach Federation, Z is also a GISC faculty member and Professional Associate.
Robert (Bob) Wright, MS, has professional ground shaped by anthropology, intercultural communication, and organization behavior. For thirty years, he has worked globally in, and consulted to, public and private sector organizations, in roles promoting organization effectiveness and development, leadership development, change management, and executive coaching. Clients include Bose Corporation, the Economic Commission for Africa, numerous UN agencies and Peacekeeping missions, The International Fund for Agricultural Development, the Smithsonian Institution, various state and federal agencies, and small non-profit organizations. He is an ICF Professional Certified Coach and a graduate of the GISC Coaching Program.
The annual Community Gathering brings the GISC community together to learn what’s new at the Center, enjoy workshops and social events, and introduce newcomers to what we do. This is a free event open to those both new to and familiar with GISC. Please register early to select the workshops of your choice and to guarantee your place in our offerings. Seats are limited: workshop offerings will close when filled to capacity. Visit the program webpage for a complete schedule of events:
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Descriptions of our 2016 offerings: Plenaries: Coaching I, II The practice of professional coaching has grown dramatically over the past 15-20 years. In keeping with this trend, more and more Gestalt practitioners are interested in, and looking to apply, Gestalt theory to coaching, which allows practitioners to distinguish themselves in the marketplace. Accordingly, at GISC, we are applying core Gestalt concepts and behaviors to the practice of coaching. Additionally, we utilize our own distinct approach to contemporary Gestalt theory, e.g., The Cape Cod Model© (CCM). In the course of two plenary sessions, we will explore:
Stuart Simon and Mary Anne Walk ___________________________________________________________________ Workshops—Round 1: Saturday, 19 June 2016, 11:00-1:00 (1.1) Gestalt 101 Some core concepts of the Gestalt model will be presented for “newcomers” to the process. Gestalt comes from the German word meaning “essence or shape of an entity’s form.” Gestalt has become a well-developed theory of how people take in and organize information, and how they use it relating to each other. Some of the core concepts that may be surveyed include: awareness, contact, cycle of experience, figure/ground, multiple realities, optimistic stance, polarities. The workshop is also useful for more experienced practitioners who wish to think about how to present some of these core concepts in their practice, teaching and/or training. Led by Spencer Melnick & Zeynep Tozum. (1.2) Strategic and Intimate Behaviors Strategy/intimacy, an important GISC concept, provides a useful frame for viewing relationships. We will first talk about the notion of polarities and how the concept was developed. We will then focus on understanding ourselves in relationship to the dynamic of outcome (strategy) and connection (intimacy). Lastly, if time, we will practice working with client/coaching situations. Led by Joseph (Joe) Melnick. (1.3) Teacher as Coach One of Gestalt therapy’s cofounders, Paul Goodman, wrote of the power of “incidental learning”— teaching and learning that is informal and unplanned—as the dominant, effective means of transmission of skills and knowledge. What happens in incidental learning that does, or does not, happen in our formalized educational experiences? How can a coaching stance, grounded in Gestalt principles, help us to be more effective teachers and trainers? In this workshop, we invite the GISC community to engage in a process of raising our awareness of how we teach and learn through the use of Gestalt concepts. Led by Robert Ross & Patricia Perry. (1.4) Leader as Coach Building on the success of our workshop last year (which explored a few core leadership competencies as they relate to an individual’s leadership style and to the power of teaming to achieve greater impact), we will explore Gestalt concepts that support a leader’s use of a coaching stance to achieve optimal impact with their teams. Be prepared for fun as we guide you through experiential exercises that offer a chance to experiment with Gestalt concepts key to success in your use of coaching as a leadership competency. Led by Gwynne Guzzeau & Michael Shipman. (1.5) Coaching in Areas of Cultural Conflict – Working with Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) Situations VUCA has gained some momentum as a framework to assess the challenges that we as nations, communities, organizations, leaders and individuals are facing today. At its heart is the assumption that things are changing so fast and furiously, coming from so many different and unpredictable places, that traditional ways of managing these situations no longer seem up to the task. As facilitators, consultants, coaches or leaders how can we support ourselves and our constituencies to cope with these turbulent situations? Using a mixture of didactic and experiential exercises, we will explore the Field and how our interactions with it help to create our reality. How we can become lightning rods and have surprising interactions with the field? How can we recognize what wants to emerge from the field that will help the situation? Led by Elizabeth Reuthe. ___________________________________________________________________ Workshops—Round 2: Saturday, 19 June 2016, 2:45-4:45 (2.1) Body Process: Creating an Embodied Field The Gestalt approach to raising awareness physically and energetically is our way in to help clients and working groups. Sonia Nevis always said, “Don’t get seduced by the content”; she asks us to focus on the patterns. Our physical communication patterns are more telling about our state of being; making interventions in this way increases impact. We invite you to explore with us a little bit of the mind-body connection creating an embodied field. One individual summed it up when he said, “I realize, I don’t just have a body, I am a body.” Led by Sophie Parker. (2.2) Presence In every role you have as a consultant, coach, leader, manager, therapist or teacher, you want to have an impact. Your ability to have an impact includes the knowledge and ideas you are presenting, as well as the tools and approaches you use. All of those rest on your individual presence. It is your most important tool. In this workshop, you will learn the Gestalt definition of presence, where it comes from, and why it matters. You will also learn to appreciate aspects of your own individual presence that are already "well developed" and identify some aspects which you might want to develop further. Led by Sharona Halpern. (2.3) Applying Polarities to Coaching As leaders, coaches, clinicians, consultants, parents our role is to support the growth and development of others – whether the other be an individual, team or organization. The approach you take can make the all the difference in your effectiveness. In this workshop you will first learn to distinguish between “Problems to be Solved” and “Dilemma’s to be Managed” and the associated type of thinking for each. Then you will learn to manage these dilemmas by leveraging polarities. You will leave this workshop with an understanding of the transformative 5 Step “SMALL” Polarity Approach developed by Barry Johnson. Led by Marianne Roy. (2.4) Learnings From the Front: Living the Gestalt Path in Large Organizational Systems The presenters invite you into a conversation exploring their key learnings in the art of applying Gestalt theory and practice in large organizational systems. Framed by their professional fields and roles in organization effectiveness, change management, leadership development, and executive coaching, they will ask themselves and others present such questions as: How can an impatient system be taught to stay in awareness? How can the paradoxical theory of change and polarity management work for us in our roles? How can you help a whole system shift from deficit-based problem solving to an appreciation of less developed/more developed? In what ways can the optimistic stance have traction in an environment of extreme change fatigue? What attracts us to this work? We will bring forth successes and frustrations, suggesting and developing useful practices. Led by Awilda Borres & Robert Wright. ___________________________________________________________________
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