Registration Open NOW:
SEATS EXTREMELY LIMITED
Lodestar BRAVE™ Leadership Conference
April 29 - May 1, 2026 | San Diego, California
Essential Leadership Skills for Turbulent Times
Deeply experiential, connecting, restorative, and powerful.
Today’s leaders face unprecedented toxic stress, traumatic stress exposure, criticism, and disruption. This drains psychological and emotional reserves, and fuels burnout, moral injury, and accelerates retention crises.
BRAVE™ Leadership is your nervous system reset. Based in the latest neuroscience, this deeply experiential, restorative program that equips you with immediately applicable, practical skills to disrupt harm, rebuild trust, and lead with impact.
This isn't your standard leadership training; it's a highly advanced, transformative experience for seasoned leaders ready to increase their capacity, restore well-being, and create high-trust teams and organizations that retain top talent and thrive amid chaos.
BRAVE Leadership provides the skills needed for times such as these.
Don't wait- seats are filling fast. Secure your spot today.
Intensive, Year-Long Training with Personalized Support
✓ Three-day, in-person intensive in beautiful San Diego: immersive, hands-on learning in a deliberately restorative environment.
✓ 6:1 participant-to-faculty ratio: for real-time feedback, skill practice, and profound integration.
✓ 12 months of ongoing, live, online professional development: structured sessions to embed skills and sustain growth.
✓ 20 AMA PRA Category 1 CME Credits: earn valuable continuing education while transforming your leadership.
Lodestar BRAVE™ Leadership - San Diego
BRAVE Leadership Conferences are deeply experiential, professional development immersive focused the development of advanced leadership skills needed to navigate through and beyond the stress, burnout, and traumatic stress exposure of these times.
The bonus? Even as participants learn HOW to build this in and for their organizations, they simultaneously EXPERIENCE a restoration of their own capacity and well-being.
Day 1
Keynote: Running the River
Creating the Conditions
Lodestar Learning U
Lodestar Container
Lodestar 5Ns
Leadership Trust
Lodestar Resiliency Reservoir
BRAVE Leadership is expertly crafted from thousands of hours of research, neuroscience, and real-world application across healthcare, education, public health, government, law, business, and more.
Our seasoned faculty - professionals with decades of leadership experience - guide you through the physiology of threat activation and traumatic stress exposure. You'll gain and practice the skills and tools to mitigate organizational harm, foster genuine connection, and build moral resilience - all while restoring your personal capacity.
Learn to recognize and immediately disrupt the reactive interactions that routinely spiral into inter-professional breakdown and team dysfunction. Accurately diagnose and address root causes, and learn to reliably and sustainably create conditions where challenge is met with capacity, retention soars, and your team operates with high autonomy, competence, connection, safety, and purpose.
Day 2
Creating the Conditions for Teams
Secondary & Vicarious Trauma
Moral Distress & Injury
Navigating Uncertainty
BRAVE Leadership & Polarities
The Danger of a Single Story
Lodestar R2R
Day 3
Engagement at the Intersections
Decentered Leadership
Cuing Safety in Teams
Getting in the Reps…
BRAVE Leadership Path
Concepts Into Action
Running the River
BRAVE Leadership is for:
Experienced leaders in high-stakes environments who recognize that additional skills are urgently needed to navigate the realities of today.
Healthcare: Physicians, Nurses, APPs, and C-Suite leaders
Public Health & Public Service: State and city-level directors, executives and their management teams.
Education: Superintendents, principals, higher education counselors and administrative teams.
Law: Partners, judges, prosecutors, family court advocates, and more.
Government & Military: Federal | state & military leaders.
Social Services: Crisis management, advocacy, and more.
Any Organization: Executive teams, boards, C-suite, HR and leaders facing retention/recruitment challenges.
If you're successful AND overwhelmed by spiraling demands — neglecting self-care, watching talent flee, and wondering if the abilities and skills that got you here will be enough for the road ahead, we promise you’re not alone.
BRAVE Leadership was designed BY professionals FOR professionals — we’ve been where you are, we know the stressors and pain-points you’re living, and we know why all our previous experience and training is falling short right now…
This isn’t leadership failure. Its neuroscience. And BRAVE Leadership will both restore and skill you up for what lies ahead — whatever that may be.
This is the work that keeps us in the work.
Limited seats: Join leaders like you who are transforming their organizations. Register today.
Address Your Biggest Challenges
Leaders today grapple with:
Retention & Recruitment Crises: Replacing talent costs $800K–$1.6M per role (exacerbated by shortages in nursing, physicians, and legal pros).
Ineffective Fixes: Skipping foundational safety stages and jumping to reporting tools leads to weaponized complaints, lost millions, and no real change.
Spiraling Overload: Constant fire-fighting leaves no time for strategy, self-care, or team connection, fueling a "doom spiral" of poor sleep, neglected well-being, and lost boundaries.
Trauma's Toll: Chronic exposure to secondary/vicarious trauma, moral injury, threats, and disruptions depletes reserves and erodes trust.
BRAVE™ disrupts this cycle by teaching you to recognize neuroscience-driven threat responses and create environments where problems don't arise in the first place.
Expert-Led, Industry-Tested, Transformative Training
Lodestar's BRAVE™ Leadership program is meticulously designed, representing thousands of hours of research, content creation, and delivery across multiple industries including healthcare, education, public health, government, law, and business.
Lodestar senior faculty are seasoned professionals with decades of experience, and the program provides significant, real-time faculty engagement to ensure proficiency with materials, integration of new learning, and ample skills practice.
Meet Our Lodestar Instructors
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Kemia M. Sarraf, MD, MPH, CCC, TIPC
Course Director
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Ann V. Deaton, PhD, PCC, CTPC, TIPC
Course Co-Director
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Antoinette DuBois Ayers RCC, CPCC, TIPC
Course Co-Director
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Kate Deaton, MS, PCC, TIPC, CPCC
Course Co-Director
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Dianne Rizzo, RN, PCC, TIPC
Course Co-Director
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Michael Forlenza, PhD, MPH, PCC, TIPC
Course Co-Director
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Ken Jenkins, MA.S, ACC, TIPC
Course Co-Director
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Wendi Wills El-Amin, MD, RCC, TIPC
Course Co-Director
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![Lynn Black, MD, MPH, TIPC]()
Lynn Black, MD, MPH, TIPC
Course Co-Director
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Steve Wendell, PhD, ACC, TIPC
Course Co-Director
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Liz Peintner, MSW, PCC, CPCC, TIPC
Course Co-Director
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Kerri Lockhart, MD, FAAP, CPC, TIPC
Course Co-Director
Lead with Impact: Build Trust & Safety Through Neuroscience
The mitigation of individual and organizational harm begins with leaders who recognize and understand the neuroscience and physiology underpinning threat activation, and the impact of toxic stress and trauma on the workforce. Lodestar faculty are expert adult educators who facilitate the development of skills needed to disrupt harm and engage in the essential work of rebuilding connection, trust, and psychological safety.
The program launches with 3 days of intensive, in-person training, followed by ongoing, structured programming.
This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of Prairie/HSHS and Lodestar CEC. Prairie/HSHS is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians. Prairie/HSHS designates this educational activity for a maximum of 20.0 AMA PRA Category I Credits ™. Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.