FACILITATION & DIALOGUE
Productive communication can take some help. Contact Deidre to facilitate strategic conversations between stakeholders, mediate interpersonal conflicts or foster productive dialogue around challenging topics.
Deidre began mediating in 1995 and was contracted for over a dozen years by US Postal Service to formally mediate EEO claims. Trained in the Transformative Mediation method, Combs parlayed this discipline and experience into professional facilitation and moderating dialogue. Some of the highlights of this work have included training a team of eighteen dialogue moderators who then conducted weekly dialogue circles with over 125 individuals over five weeks to tackle a tough topic within their community while Combs’ facilitated and monitored the overall process. Honored to support the International Institute of Sustained Dialogue, Combs has worked with university students in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Montana training them in dialogue techniques and facilitating powerful conversations around creating safe and welcoming communities.
“The time I spent under the guiding hand of Dr. Deidre Combs during the four months of my Community Solutions Program in USA was the most life-changing moment of my life and career. The single greatest lesson that she ever taught me- which I always refer to as her legacy in me- was the idea of “selfish selflessness” embodied in her analogy of the marndola. For me, this is not just an acknowledgement of the natural fact that human thought and behaviour is and will always be in a state of divergence but, most importantly, a vastly powerful and totally unique approach of cultivating human co-existence for positive results and progress in spite of divergence. This could be in any area of human interaction- be it in terms of overcoming intrapersonal and interpersonal challenges, moulding ethical leadership, facilitating organizational strategic planning or modeling motivational leadership. That is the mark she left me with - a new mindset that is more humane than before. Patient and accommodative is what her teaching style is like. She is not quick to judge; in fact, she does not judge. Rather, she embraces. She comes to the classroom not only as the “teacher” but as a student too. If I would use Christian semantics as analogy, I would say that, after my encounter with Deidre, I was “born again”!"
