Take a deep breath. Exhale.
We live in an unprecedented time in our world history and the constant uncertainty create high levels of stress. Stress has a strong impact on our brain. It fires up the amygdala, strengthens our primitive emotional responses (mostly derivatives of fight. flight, freeze), and simultaneously impairs the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex, which limits our ability to choose our response and think creatively.
Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl said: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Taking a deep breath is one simple thing you can always do to create or even expand that space. Breathing deeply into our belly with a straight spine has a soothing effect on our nervous system.
I believe we now have an unprecedented opportunity to redefine what growth and freedom for all could mean. It’s time to examine the water we swim in, question our individual and collective assumptions, behaviors, structures and systems and ask ourselves: Is this aligned with what we value, who we want to be and what we want to create? What else is possible? And what is mine to do?
What will you gain
from a new perspective?
Insight
I help you unpack your challenges and discover what you can influence. Together we translate insights into the concrete processes, practices and structures you need to move forward.
Depending on your goals, by working with me you will:
Develop skills to navigate uncertainty together
Be able to see the bigger picture, untangle and solve your most intractable problems or conflicts
Build trust and alignment in your team(s), organization and community
Learn effective collaboration and conflict transformation practices
Create powerful outcomes that are in service of the whole
How?
Working with me is a bespoke experience, as I tailor my approach to your unique context and needs. I understand that inviting someone to help you with some of your toughest challenges requires trust. Trust must be built. Here are some ways we can do that.
You can read here, what some of my past clients and collaborators say about working with me.
I offer a free 30 min listening session, where I help you identify your specific needs and find a path forward, whether that includes working with me or not.
After our listening session, if we decide to work together, let’s co-create how. Process design is my super power. I will tailor my support to your goals and budget.
Below I describe what I can offer.
What’s your inquiry?
Are you looking for support to have courageous conversations, co-create a vision of who you want to be and align your culture and practice with what you value?
Let’s talk!
Your impact depends on your transformation.
transformation requires taking risks.
I’m here to gently, yet fiercely, guide you to the other side.
A map for transformation
I design transformative processes that engage people to find solutions for their own challenges together. I help everyone take a step back, explore the individual and collective, internal and external dimensions of your specific context. We take an honest look at where you are. We listen to different perspectives, integrate insights and co-create solutions with all these dimensions in mind.
I go with you on an emergent yet guided journey through your transformational process, designed to specifically work best for you, your people and context.
Every process I design has three core elements:
Explore the issues in depth, understanding diverse perspectives to gain greater understanding.
Integrate insights, discover the deeper patterns, see the bigger picture.
Co-create an inspirational and actionable vision and solutions, organizational processes and structures that will help you be adaptive and move towards your vision.
More than anything, I build your capacity to create YOur own solutions from the inside-out, so you continue cultivating what we planted together
long after working with me.
This map is inspired by the Reinventing Organizations Map, rearranged in harmony with the moon cycle and infused with my three principles of iterative self organization, which are inspired by various practitioners of Action Research and Theory-U
Services
online and in person, when possible
Supporting Change
I Mentor Leaders in navigating
the complexity of Change Processes
Transformational work is complex and should never be done alone. Whether you are at the beginning of your journey and need a guide to nurture your spark and help you ground your work, or if you are further along and feel like you’ve started a fire that is getting out of control. Or maybe you feel a bit stuck.
I help you gain a new perspective on the situation and untangle the complexity of your challenges so you can begin to see what else is possible. Together we will create a map of the territory you are moving within, create a strategy that will help you take practical steps forward.
CONFLICT MEDIATION
Supporting two or more parties
in transforming a specific conflict
Conflict mediation is a powerful process to help conflicting parties make decisions and create solutions together, so both can heal and move on. My role as mediator is ensure every party in a dispute is being heard, solutions are being fairly negotiated, captured and followed up on.
I bring a trauma informed mediation toolkit, that is based in mindfulness and informed by neuroscience. After conducting an intake evaluation, I will adapt my approach to the unique context. Generally, I will first work one on one with all involved parties and then together.
Want to learn more?
Community Engagement
engaging Many People with diverse perspectives
in solving complex challenges Together
Community Engagement is about bringing diverse, often opposing views in the creative dialogue necessary to find workable solutions for complex issues. I work with your organization or network to develop integrate the various perspectives within your community and build holistic solutions.
Through a custom designed process, which may include one-on-one, small and large group conversations. I help you gain awareness of your current system, get clear on the future you wish to create, and develop the initiatives that will get you there.
Facilitation Training
Building personal and organizational capacity
to lead transformation
Participants of my facilitation training will come away with knowledge, skills and an embodied sense of what it takes to facilitate meaningful and challenging conversations. During a training we will practice and explore: Facilitating conversations as a core leadership practice and skill set for leading change in complex systems. Developing competence in interactive processes, frameworks and design tools that support facilitative leadership like: Theory U, Adaptive Leadership and Action Learning.
I use the cohort teaching model where the learning grows out of everyone’s contributions and mutual support. We will learn by observation, through stories, through reflecting on our own experience and practice, using interactive processes to build a safe and inspiring learning environment.
Want to explore working with me?
ABOUT SIMONE
MY VISION
A world where people and systems evolve in Harmony with nature and each other.
MY MISSION
I stand for belonging and bring love, truth and healing to all my interactions.
MY STORY
I love supporting people, organizations and communities finding their way through the fog of complex transitions and conflicts. What has brought me to supporting such deep and vulnerable work?
I am deeply committed to breaking the cycles of trauma and violence, which is rooted in my early life experiences. I’m a survivor of early childhood abuse. After many years of ongoing conscious healing work I moved from a state of victim to creator of my own life. This shift in perspective helped me unearth the gifts in my trauma, and my calling to help others transform conflicts into powerful, generative new patterns, processes and ways of relating.
Both thanks to my privilege and the choices I have made, I got to travel and live in different parts of the world. Over the past 24 years I have lived in Italy, Belgium, the UK and Egypt, and have traveled all over Europe, Africa, North and South America. I speak 3 languages fluently and 2 reasonably well. I have worked and played with people from all walks of life. I can relate to pretty much all people and quickly adapt to a new context. I am also a mother of a young child, who among many things is teaching me to embrace emergence and constant change.
I am on a lifelong journey of undoing white body supremacy within myself and actively practicing anti-racism. I came to this work through traveling and experiencing both a deep sense of love and unity, as well as separation and otherness. Although the latter always felt artificial to me - man made.
In 2002, on my first trip to Mama Africa, I was part of a youth delegation to the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. I ended up on the Soweto Mountain of Hope, at a gathering between international delegates to the Summit and children from the surrounding community. We spent a few hours skillfully guided by facilitators from a network called Pioneers of Change simply connecting in our shared humanity. By the end of our encounter everyone was lit up and the love in the room was palpable. In that moment, I decided to dedicate my life to this work of creating spaces where we can experience our shared humanity beyond boundaries. And so I did.
I am a respectful outsider, a calming force, who can shine a bright light, weave connections and build bridges. I am the person you want by your side when you have some tough challenges ahead.
OFFICIAL BIO
Simone Torrey is a certified conflict mediator and integral facilitator. She supports people, organizations and communities through complex conflicts and transitions, in order to heal and build life-affirming cultures. Her approach is experiential and embodied, trauma and resilience informed, deeply rooted in compassion, transformative justice and emergence.
She has 15+ years of experience in designing and facilitating transformative change processes, learning programs, developing and leading teams; 5+ years of conflict coaching and mediation experience, domestically and abroad.
Simone is both an entrepreneurial and servant leader used to working with very diverse clients and creating high-impact processes to support organizations and individuals transform, learn and evolve.
She holds an MA in Leadership, Peace Building and Conflict Transformation from Saint Mary’s College of California and an MA in International Communication from the International University of Perugia in Italy.
Simone’s facilitation is strongly influenced by her broad worldview, acquired through 22 years living and working all over the world. She is also a long time meditator and mindfulness practitioner which helps her stay centered in the midst of conflict and chaos.
Born in Germany, she lived half of her life abroad - in Italy, Belgium, the UK, Egypt and now the US.
Simone moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2013, where she lives with her partner and son, loves the outdoors, and is an active part of the Burning Man community of cultural creatives and makers.
TESTIMONIALS
Project: Co-creation of a National Skills Development Strategy for Tanzania
I had the privilege of working in a team that was led by Simone. The assignment, which was sponsored by the World Bank, was to help the government of Tanzania develop a National Skills Development Strategy to as a response to the country’s fast-growing economy. I observed Simone, in a very short period of time, build capacities of individuals and groups from various sectors who played crucial roles at the different stages of the assignment. I attribute the phenomenal success of the assignment to Simone’s great skills in bringing people of diverse backgrounds together and helping them to become high performing teams. Simone is a deep listener who treats the differences in cultures (beliefs, values and practices) as the raw material from which to craft creativity and innovation. Simone is a talented systems-thinker who has made working in the present moment her second nature. This combination of system-thinking and working in the moment, gives Simone the rare capacity to fluidly and seamlessly lead both from the front and the collective, depending on need.
Martin Kalungu-Banda – Founder www.BBSConsulting.org, Faculty Member at the Presencing Institute
Project: Cultural Direction Setting for Residential Black Rock City (Burning Man)
Simone has been a transformative designer, leader, and facilitator of our multi-year visioning and change process. She's brought her expertise, theory, empathy, and intelligence whole-heartedly to dozens of meetings. She is able to thoughtfully craft and facilitate a process that unlocks the group's ability to meet our goals. She's also notices what's needed and is flexible in shifting gears to ensure we get the best possible work done. She's an insightful and generous collaborator and I can't imagine leading this complex, uncertain, very important process without her.
Victoria Mitchell, Director, Burning Man Project
Multi-Year Collaboration
Simone is a wonderful team player, with a keen sense of group dynamics. She is curious about people's interests, needs and wishes, a keen listener and kind facilitator. She has a broad knowledge of facilitation techniques that she gladly shares with her collaborators. She worked with us to design an emergent governance structure, as well as design our future program using Lego Serious Play. She co-facilitated several workshops with us, all of which greatly benefited from her expertise and presence. Working with Simone on designing these workshops was a smooth and co-creative endeavor, from with we both learned a lot.
Finally, as a board member of The (Impact) Hub Brussels, I had a chance to experience Simone as an initiator and leader, who brought together and hosted a diverse group of people in a beautiful space for a couple of years, before deciding to become a journeyer and develop her skills in different cultures and contexts.
Maja Kuzmanovic, Principal Invigorator, FoAM
Project: Diversity and Inclusion at a large Public High School in the Bay Area
I've worked with Simone in the context of a public-school system mired in racial and socio-economic division. What I appreciate about Simone's skill in these contexts is that she can honor multiple perspectives in the room and attendants. She sees the partial truth in all the points of view, allowing her to give the participants a deep experience of being seen while also weaving a more complex picture for all. Her empathy and flexibility of mind simply can't be taught! She's a natural.
Gabriel Wilson, leadership coach, organizational change consultant, and peace-builder with a specialty in diversity and inclusion and co-author of Compassionate Conversations
Project: Strategic Planning with OUSD Restorative Justice Team
I was looking for someone who could facilitate a strategic planning session with my team. I needed it to be interactive, engaging, fun, and cover a lot of material. In the first prep session with Simone I could tell that she had the experience and the skill-set to meet all of these needs. Simone helped me hone in on my priorities and develop a series of group and individual sessions that allowed my team to flow through a process that was natural and energizing. I have since referred Simone to other clients that have indicated their happiness working with her. Simone is professional, caring, empathic, intuitive, skilled, and easy to relate to. I would hire her again in an instant.
David Yusem, Coordinator | Restorative Justice, Oakland Unified School District, www.ousd.org
Project: Co-creation of Culture and Office Space Design
As head of Siemens Energy Belgium, my challenge was to move my 100 person team from an "one employee - one desk" landscape to an open office concept where desks were shared among the employees based on projects and presence. There was a lot of resistance to change in my team. I saw this spatial redesign as a chance for us to become more functional, more flexible, more like what we aspired to be as a team. I knew I needed help and that a combination of different qualities was required to come up with a concept that would be perceived as an improvement: Respect for the people and what had been their environment for many years. Fresh thinking, a good methodology and courage.
From our first contacts, I felt that Simone and her colleague were the people with whom I could team up and dare to try something new. So we did.
In record time, we embarked on a human centered design journey. The results were amazing and the effect on the team very positive. The motivation and cohesion of the group increased as the colleagues felt genuinely involved in the decision making process. The success can be explained in many ways. From my perspective, three main aspects emerge: trust, the right people, the right questions.
Alain De Cat, CEO, Powerdale
BLOG
Featured
TAKE THE STEP
CONTACT
If you liked what you felt and want to connect, please feel free get in touch with me.
Please feel free to pick a time to chat or shoot me an email. I love hearing from people.
Studying and practicing mediation led me to understand the crucial role of emotions during conflicts. It is very clear that emotions have to be dealt with first before any solution can be found.