Ray Delagrave

I first became acquainted with the Person Centered Approach as a student in the MBA department at UCLA in the early 1960's. When taking courses in Organizational Behavior I was exposed to Sensitivity Training (T-groups) and Humanistic Psychology, courses that changed my life. I changed my major to Behavioral Science, in a department that was chaired by Dr. Robert Tannenbaum, with other great professors in Fred Massarik and James Clark. I can still remember the impact of my first exposure to On Becoming A Person, as well as the writings of Abraham Maslow and other Humanistic and Existential Psychologists. The Training Group experience took my understanding of human behavior to an experiential, gut level, which stayed with me the rest of my life.

After getting my degree and passing through OCS and three years in the Army, I joined the Coca-Cola Company, where I spent a twenty year career in marketing and management, most of which were spent in Latin America. My exposure to Rogers and encounter groups as a graduate student provided a consistent focus to my work as an executive, building and leading high performing teams.

After leaving Coca-Cola, I moved with my family to San Diego, where I spent the next 10 years developing my own consulting practice, which focused on helping U.S. companies do business in Latin America.

Feeling time was ripe for a change, I enrolled in a Doctoral Program in Transpersonal and Tibetan Buddhist Psychology at the San Diego University for Integrative Studies (SDUIS). My first course was attendance at the La Jolla Program, where I met Will Stillwell, bringing my life full-circle to where I had been 35 years earlier at UCLA!

After devoting three years full-time to my graduate studies, I left the program to concentrate on bringing PCA to the Latino Community, which I have been doing over the past three years under the Institute for Transformational Communication (www.itranscomm.com) . I am fortunate to have my program - the Community Leadership Development Program for Transformational Leadership and Communication - being granted project status by CSP. I am also a member of the Pajaro Group, which brings together PCA practitioners who are interested in its impact on organization.

I also have a private consulting practice which focuses on applying PCA to human relations issues in organization, under De Lagrave Associates, Inc. (www.delagrave.com). In addition to working directly with organizations we do a lot of executive coaching, where we find that PCA is an extremely effective tool for improving human performance.

In addition to English, I speak Spanish, Portuguese and French. I enjoy my family which consists of my wife, Carolyn, of 40 years, four grown children, all of whom are in the San Diego area, and four beautiful grandchildren who live nearby. Bicycling, skiing and kayaking are exercise activities. I also enjoy taking my my black lab, Boo, for walks by the beach.

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