This workshop gives healthcare leaders and their teams a concrete, practice-based framework for having difficult conversations across difference — without retreating into debate, avoidance, or forced politeness that solves nothing.
Dr. Bunin developed this curriculum from direct experience — as a physician, as an Army Colonel, and as an associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion who confronted a real and serious breakdown in communication at a medical institution. She didn’t find a program that solved it. So she built one.
The workshop is not a lecture about being nicer. It is a structured process — with real frameworks, real practice, and real tools — for teams that have real dysfunction and need a real path forward.
This workshop gives healthcare leaders and their teams a concrete, practice-based framework for having difficult conversations across difference — without retreating into debate, avoidance, or forced politeness that solves nothing.
The workshop is not a lecture about being nicer. It is a structured process — with real frameworks, real practice, and real tools — for teams that have real dysfunction and need a real path forward.
Healthcare professionals are trained to be certain. From the first day of clinical training, the message is clear: know the right answer and defend it. That is exactly the right instinct at the bedside. And it is exactly the wrong instinct in a room full of colleagues who don’t share your worldview.
The result is teams where people have quietly agreed to avoid the conversations that matter most. Where hierarchy shuts down honesty. Where political and social divisions that started outside the building have followed people in — into break rooms, committee meetings, and leadership conversations. Where two groups simply won’t speak to each other, and everyone pretends this is fine because nobody knows what else to do.
Surface-level harmony is not the same as a functioning team. Underneath it, problems compound. Trust erodes. And the people who most need to collaborate — for the sake of their patients — are operating with a wall between them.
Healthcare professionals are particularly vulnerable to the three barriers that make productive disagreement so difficult: unexamined assumptions, unchecked biases, and the professional certainty that comes from years of training in a field that rewards being right. This workshop names those barriers clearly, which is the first step to getting past them.
The workshop walks teams through five concrete, learnable skills: building psychological safety (which is not the same as comfort), practicing genuine active listening, finding and starting from common ground, developing the capacity to rethink what you were certain about, and using specific conversational tools that call people in rather than shut them down.
This is the through-line of the workshop — a practical, step-by-step process for approaching a difficult conversation from beginning to end. It starts with positive intent and takes you through setting the stage, active listening, finding common ground, moving forward with empathy, rethinking your own certainty, and assessing what’s actually happening emotionally in the room. Most teams have never had a shared framework for this. SAFE TALK gives them one.
The workshop reframes the three forces that block civil discourse. Assumptions become questions. Bias becomes balance — building a more balanced worldview by genuinely engaging with people who think differently. Certainty becomes curiosity. These aren’t just principles; they’re habits the workshop builds through practice.
When someone says or does something damaging to the team, most leaders either ignore it or confront it in a way that creates defensiveness. This workshop teaches a third option: the kind of direct, respectful engagement that actually changes behavior and preserves the relationship.
There is no sales pitch here. Just a conversation with people who have been where you are and know how to help.
