Home · Evaluation · Mediation · Workshops · Podcast · Blog

Speaking and workshops that stick

Practical, research-grounded sessions on communicating across cultures, building belonging, and leading teams through conflict and change.

Workshops

Communicating across cultures: practical tools for teams working across languages and cultures: recognizing assumptions, adjusting communication styles, and building real shared understanding.
Building belonging on diverse teams: how people actually experience inclusion day to day, and what leaders can do to make belonging real rather than a slogan.
Leading through conflict and change: a leader’s toolkit for surfacing tension early, facilitating hard conversations, and keeping teams moving forward.

Sessions from his own training materials

What Fuels You? A reflective session where staff trace the lived experiences that drive their work: how fight-or-flight reactions differ from deliberate thinking, what actually sustains motivation once the early excitement fades, and how to turn that insight into a personal action plan each participant leaves with.

Building Bridges. Intercultural communication for teams serving diverse communities: how code-switching, translanguaging, and cultural dimensions shape everyday interactions, practiced through role-play built from the team’s real workplace scenarios.

Featured session: Resilience or Overload?

A working session, not a lecture. Teams learn the Strongest-Person Check to spot overload early, practice a five-word listening exercise, and leave with one concrete Monday move. Adapted from his CoMotion 2026 virtual conference session and shaped to your team’s real workload.

In the room

Leading his What FUELS You staff summit: a grounding exercise on its feet, one-on-one feedback, and journaling.

Keynotes and talks

Every talk is built with the host around the audience in the room: conferences, staff days, leadership retreats, and community events. Theodore speaks across leadership, communication, conflict, education, and wellbeing, and regularly develops new talks from his research and experience. Talk themes include:

Resilience or overload?: how to tell whether a team needs more resilience or a lighter system, and what leaders can change on Monday. (His CoMotion 2026 conference session.)
When “I don’t know” feels unsafe: why admitting uncertainty is hard at work, and how leaders build teams where honesty is safe.
Working through conflict: practical tools from a Florida Supreme Court Certified County Mediator for surfacing tension early and having the conversation instead of around it.
Can learning a language make you a better leader?: what working in a second language teaches about listening, humility, and leading people unlike yourself.
Leading on the floor: practical lessons from more than a decade running multi-unit retail operations, for leaders in any sector.
From the classroom: what years of teaching K-12 and training adults teach about helping people actually learn, for leaders who develop their own teams.
Sustaining the leader: everyday movement, energy, and nutrition habits for people who lead others, informed by his credentials as a NASM Certified Personal Trainer and Certified Sports Nutrition Coach.

Bring your own theme: if your team is wrestling with it, he will build a session around it. You bring the audience and the goal; he brings the research, the stories, and the practice.

Formats

Keynotes, half-day workshops, and team sessions: in person or virtual. Every session is shaped around your group’s context and goals.

Sessions are interactive and built around your group’s real scenarios, not lectures. Theodore’s approach draws on his years as a classroom teacher, graduate training in language education (MATL, Spanish), and current leadership research, so participants practice skills they use the next day.

Meet your facilitator

Theodore Swett, PhD, a lifelong educator and facilitator: K-12 French teacher, nonprofit leader, and host of the Curious About People podcast. His sessions connect research to the situations your team actually faces.

More about Theodore →

Bring this work to your team

Workshops are $375 per hour. Keynote talks start at $1,000.

Swett Consulting Solutions: program evaluation, mediation, and organizational development

Running or starting a nonprofit or small business? For development, establishment, and consulting support, visit ANSANBL at ansanbl.com.