Beyond Careers: Well-Being at Work

Workshops for universities, graduate programs, startups, and organisations

I created this website because I felt that cross-cultural careers needed more visibility, but cross-cultural careers is only part of what I do. My work on career topics grew out of my background in diversity and intercultural communication as well as a strong belief in the importance of well-being in the workplace. So much of our lives is spent at work, and when we're not working, we're often worried about the work that we're not doing, or the tasks that we feel we could have been better at. At WITOS Berlin, where I'm a managing partner, we focus on using evidence-based methods to increase well-being at work. Fostering well-being at work and supporting mental health are the unifying themes in my workshops across all topics - diversity, intercultural communication, cross-cultural careers, and personal organisation. In my workshops, my goal is to meet participants where they are and help them to develop work habits and workplaces that reduce stress and conflicts and make space for the things that truly matter to you - whether that's research innovation, coding apps at a startup, reaching your clients, or inventing something you haven't thought of yet. Each workshop I offer on these topics is designed specifically for your university or organization. For more information about our other offers, take a look below, visit the WITOS Berlin website, or get in touch!

Why these topics?

In the field of training and coaching, it can sometimes feel like trainers work with such a broad range of "soft-skill" topics that it's difficult to see how they're connected. Over the course of my career, I've built my work around several core ideas that I believe are deeply connected to both my experience and to each other, and I want to share a little of that here.

Diversity and Intercultural Communication

As an anthropologist, diversity and intercultural communication is at the core of my career path. My first job after graduating from university was as a refugee resettlement aide in Charlotte, NC, supporting refugee families from around the world in re-starting their lives in the US. Navigating the challenges of resettlement with my clients was essential to my next position as a K-12 teacher for English language learners, where I worked primarily with refugee families as well as the children of migrant families from Spanish-speaking countries. During my time with the public schools, I also wrote curricula for students with interrupted formal education and worked as a coach and consultant for other teachers to help them develop approaches that would support language-learners in their classrooms as well as in developing strategies to manage difficult behavior in the classroom. My experiences here were essential in developing a hands-on understanding of how one size - or one system - doesn't fit everyone, and of the enormous effects of making small changes and adaptations in how we work to make learning - and workplaces - accessible. My own international transition as well as personal and family experiences have placed diversity and intercultural communication at a central place for me in my work and it remains a topic that I'm passionate about.

Personal Organisation

I often start workshops on organisational skills by sharing that my fifth grade teacher would likely be very, very surprised to learn that I'm teaching workshops on this topic today. That's part of the reason that I'm deeply motivated to continue working with this topic. Well-being at work can be approached from many angles, and I've found that organisational skills can be an effective approach for many people, including high-achieving academics and creative thinkers in the highly-competitive context of academia and/or startups, who've often spent a lot of time feeling like they're simply not doing enough. Through my own personal experience and my work with others, I know that organizational skills can be learned, and more importantly, that we can learn to feel like we're organized and effective - that we're doing a great job. In my workshops, I often talk about achieving a "true Feierabend". My focus is on being realistic about what we're able to do, and about finding tools and methods that actually work for us. It's also about not feeling like we should be doing so much more just because we think that's what's expected of us. After being in Germany for a few years, I took a small career detour and worked briefly in IT as a project manager and product manager for a SME, and I'm able to draw on both my success at managing software rollouts for D&B International as well as the many, many challenges I faced in managing my time and managing projects with very limited resources. My goal in these workshops is to help participants feel confident about their organizational skills and to develop resources and resilience for their future work.

Digital Work

When I was in third grade, I took an elective on programming in BASIC and learned to write a program that covered my computer screen with an animation of shooting stars.
My dad started off repairing machines for IBM and frequently brought home broken machines that he'd fix and let us play with. I've always loved computers and technology, but what I'm most interested in is how we use them - as an anthropologist, as an educator, and as an IT consultant, I've spent time thinking about how to connect and make our work easier with digital tools. One of my favorite parts of my work as a product manager was getting together with the developers to think about how to solve a problem presented by a client using the tools we had at hand, and this is the approach I take with digital tools in my work, both in designing online learning experiences and supporting organizations with online events. My focus in working with technology is on the problem at hand - that is, asking ourselves what we want to achieve instead of what might be possible. One problem that digital tools can help us solve - with the right support and approach - is building a more inclusive work environment. From small things like subtitling PowerPoint presentations live to structural changes like shifting to collaboration platforms that make it possible for "introverts" or quieter colleagues, colleagues with limited language skills, and colleagues with care responsibilities to participate at the same volume, much of my enthusiasm for digital tools is about supporting well-being at work for everyone.