Tina Gattermann
Tina hails from Hamburg, Germany. At the age of 14, Tina discovered her first super power - pattern making, when she had her first encounter with a sewing machine. From that time forward, wherever she went, whatever else was on the calendar, a sewing machine was always in tow. Upon high school graduation in 1990, Tina went on to attend Jak Akademie für Modedesign, a fashion design school. While working her way through school, she was employed by a fabric house as an administrator, where she learned the business of textiles; and, within the world of high fashion, became a hair and make-up artist for fashion shows and photographers.
A rebel and radical individualist, while still in school her entrepreneurial ambitions revealed themselves early in the designing and creation of her first fashion line, with development of corporate fashion for hotels and industry
While pursuing her design degree and businesses, Tina pursued a two year course of study in economics at Hamburg University in parallel, feeling the need for a professional exposure to the STEM world. Although harboring a true passion to pursue interests in alternative medicine and ancient healing arts, her manifest superpowers in fashion design and pattern making took top priority.
By 1995 Tina had opened her first Atelier, specializing in high-end luxury custom dresses, evening and bridal gowns; ultimately becoming one of the top luxury evening wear designer in Hamburg, training apprentices, diversifying into fragrances, and ultimately being contracted to design for Davidoff, then a Hamburg-based chain ultimately purchased by a global UK concern. This led to designing for a series of global brands, and multiple experiences working within large corporations, and experiencing their organizational structures, management and operations.
Starting in 2000, Tina began to pursue her interest in Yoga. As a synthesis of those pursuits and her professional life, in 2005 she authored her first paper, Business Organization, seen as a living organism, which examined business organizations through an embodied lens, looking at organizations as a collective mind, soul and body. This “living” frame and embodied take on organizational structure and operation was a prescient indicator of what was to come; and led to speaking engagements and presentations before entrepreneurial and corporate audiences.
Tina had started studying Yoga in 2008, and travelled from 2009 on to India in pursuit of her interest in the Himalyan Tradition of Yoga. This was also where she met Swami Nityamuktananda Saraswati, who was to become her spiritual teacher and inspiration.
By 2010, having become a single mother, and tiring of serving as the public face of her own business, and as a then prominent organizational consultant, Tina decided to turn attention to her true passion\- Yoga; and began assisting Swami Nitya with bringing the Swami’s wisdom of the Himalyan Traditions to retreats in Italy, as well as translating articles, workshops and books. She closed her Atelier, withdrew from the industry, established a sales consultancy for Skandinavian Textile Companies, and focused her energies on parenting, and assisting Swami Nitya.
It was at this time that Tina came into contact with George Por’s Enlivening Edge, Frederick LaLoux’s Reinventing Organizations, and the Teal movement of organizational transformation. She began to connect the dots between her own previous organizational work, the Teal movement, Holacracy and self-governance movements; and the significant added richness and depth to all of the above that the wisdom of the Elements that lives in many traditions and is taught in the Himalayan Tradition of Yoga could provide.
This was the catalyst for Tina’s adaptation and application of the Five Elements body of wisdom to organizational practices, structures, and human collaborative experience and dynamics.
This was the genesis of 2BElemental, a new paradigm meta-framework designed to enable the healing of organizational malaise or dysfunction, balancing the experiential and generative flows by and between the individuals, teams, and silos or divisions comprising the organization.
The transformation is of the organization from a hierarchical authority-centric machine to be managed, to a vital, living organism within which every individual contributor knows and owns their unique, critical, and central value and contribution to the survival and thrive-ability, in service to themselves, each other, and the whole.
Tina became a certified Coach in Systemic Psychology and Psychology coaching. In 2018 Tina turned attention to her original passion and interest in alternative medicine and healing practices, and began her formal training to become a Naturopath. As a convergence of her spiritual practice, development of her Elemental approach to organizational transformation, her experience in the world of business, and her original body, mind and spirit orientation to business health and practice, Tina became a co-founder and Principal of Being in Systems in 2020.
Her interests are gardening, herbology, Yoga, skiing, nature, painting, and sewing.