OUR FACILITATORS

Tatyana Fertelmeyster, MA, Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

• Spontaneous facilitation
• Interculturally mindful leadership
• Effectiveness and resilience for diversity professionals
• Training and coaching for facilitators

PL work
Tatyana Fertelmeyster, MA, LCPC, is founder and principal of Connecting Differences, LLC. She works as a consultant, trainer, and coach with organizations, teams, and individuals. For Tatyana, Connecting Differences is her passion and not just the name of her consulting company.

Tatyana is fascinated with process rather than content. She sees tolerance as one’s ability to tolerate oneself while engaging with others across differences and from that perspective Personal Leadership becomes her main approach.

She uses PL to help develop the effectiveness and resilience of professionals working with diversity and intercultural relations. She uses it to teach leaders to effectively engage challenging situations. And she teaches PL at the Qatar Institute for Intercultural Communication, as well as incorporating it into all her classes at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication, which is a birthplace of PL. Her favorite PL-based project so far has been the Intentional Couples Retreat that she co-designed and co-facilitates with Rita Wuebbeler.

Other work
Tatyana is a nationally and internationally recognized expert in intercultural communication, diversity and inclusion. Her unique technique of Spontaneous Facilitation allows her to work with individuals and groups with maximum concentration on the reality of the present moment. Using this technique, Tatyana facilitates group processes in a way that engages participants in discovery and self-discovery, challenges them to go deeper, and incorporates every teachable moment. She leads her clients in arriving at deeper levels of insight that facilitate the development of practical and sustainable skills.

Tatyana is a co-author of the Russian version of the Cultural Detective™, and she is a Master Trainer of Facilitators for the Cultural Detective™ model. She is a past president of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research (SIETAR-USA).
During her tenure with the Jewish Child and Family Services of Chicago (1989-2011), Tatyana worked as a family worker in refugee resettlement, as a mental health counselor, as a project coordinator, and as a Director of Cultural Competency Programs. In that leadership position, she was responsible for overseeing a number of projects that served refugees from over 30 different countries in various life skills education programs.

Personal background
Born and raised in Moscow, Russia, Tatyana came to the United States in 1989 as a refugee from the Soviet Union. A native speaker of Russian, she passionately resisted learning English as a school-child, but to no avail: Tatyana is fluent in English and considers it her main professional language.

Academic
Tatyana received an MA in Journalism from Moscow State University in Moscow, Russia, and an MA in Guidance and Counseling from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, Illinois. She is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor.

Other interests
Tatyana and her husband love traveling, taking pictures, and dancing a night away. Tatyana is a mother of two and a step-mother of two, and her three grandchildren are her most favorite people.