Lodestar BRAVE™
Leadership Conference
April 29 - May 1 | San Diego, California
Join legal and healthcare professionals in for this three-day in-person leadership development event. Seats are filling fast!
Secure your spot now for this neuroscience-backed intensive that resets your nervous system and equips you to thrive in turbulent times.
What is BRAVE™?
Essential Leadership Skills for Turbulent Times
Deeply experiential, connecting, restorative, and powerful.
Today’s legal professionals & leaders face unprecedented toxic stress, trauma, criticism, and disruptions that drains emotional reserves and fuels burnout, moral injury, and retention crises. BRAVE™ Leadership is your nervous system reset: a deeply experiential, restorative program that equips you with neuroscience-backed skills to disrupt harm, rebuild trust, and lead with impact.
This isn't basic management training; it's advanced, transformative development for seasoned leaders ready to restore their own well-being while creating high-trust, psychologically safe teams that retain top talent and thrive amid chaos.
BRAVE™ gives you the skills needed for times such as these.
This intensive program delivers not just knowledge, but immediately actionable disruptors for toxic stress, empowering you to rebuild team cohesion and organizational resilience in ways that directly support your mission and bottom line.
You should be here.
Why BRAVE™ is your leadership edge.
In legal practice- where secondary trauma, crushing deadlines, ethical weight, and pressure hit hard- trauma-responsive leadership is your non-negotiable edge.
You’ll gain access to neuroscience-backed tools that:
Greatly reduce attorney burnout and turnover
Rebuild psychological safety and team trust
Restore your own resilience and sustain peak performance
This isn’t nice-to-have training. It’s the strategic move that protects your people, fortifies your firm, and future-proofs your leadership.
Less than 14 seats left;
Register now to secure your spot.
Trusted by Legal Leaders
“As a managing partner, I've seen every, “this will solve associate burnout” approach there is. Lodestar's BRAVE made a difference that others simply couldn't. They truly get the distinct challenges we endure because they've been through it, too. This surpasses standard efforts- it's a total transformation of how we guide teams now.”
“After two years of unprecedented challenges, we were struggling. Lodestar's program gave us practical tools to rebuild trust and connection.”
“When your culture is suffering, most consultants offer surface-level solutions. Lodestar helped us understand how trauma was affecting every level of our staff.”
“Lodestar’s experience meant they truly understood our constraints and challenges. Six months later, our employee satisfaction scores are the highest they've been in five years.”
"The 3 days in Washington, DC, really bonded us. Our whole team felt it. We haven't communicated this well in years, and the effect hasn't worn off yet."
“I had my doubts about leadership training initiatives. Yet seeing our lawyers grapple with the effects of vicarious trauma wore me down. Lodestar's approach to trauma-aware guidance delivered just what was missing; effective techniques that apply in everyday practice.”
What You Get with Brave™
Your Conference Registration Includes Intensive, Year-Long Training & Personalized Support
✓ 3-day, in-person intensive in 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.
✓ Continuing Education: 20 AMA PRA Category 1 CME Credits. Earn valuable continuing education while transforming your leadership.
Elite Faculty, Real Results
Why it works.
Highly-skilled instructors deliver actionable tools backed by neuroscience.
Our program 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- veterans with decades of experience- guide you through the physiology of threat activation, toxic stress, and trauma. You'll gain tools to mitigate organizational harm, foster connection, and build moral resilience, all while restoring your personal capacity.
No more reactive processes that fail to address root causes. Instead, create conditions where challenges don't escalate, retention soars, and your team operates with high autonomy, competence, and purpose.
Research from a Google study revealed a powerful insight: the highest-performing teams aren’t defined by credentials or experience, they’re defined by a shared foundation of connection, safety, and trust.
Autonomy, competence, and purpose matter, but they only take root when people feel safe to speak up, take risks, and show up honestly. These are the conditions that separate teams that thrive from those that stagnate. And yet, they're seldom taught.
Build the conditions, not just the processes that fail to address root causes. When connection, trust, and safety are treated as a strategic priority, challenges don’t escalate, retention soars, and your team operates with high autonomy, competence, and purpose.
Tackle Turnover by Ending the Trauma Doom Spiral
If you're a successful partner or senior leader experiencing stalled recruitment/retention, seeing spiraling demands, and neglecting your own health, then this conference is for you.
Associate burnout & retention issues hinder revenue and momentum:
Turnover & Talent Drain: Replacing one associate costs $200K–$500K+ in lost billables, recruiting, onboarding, and training, often escalating to $800K–$1.6M when factoring lost client relationships, institutional knowledge, and partner time diverted from billing. Aggregate losses across firms routinely hit millions annually.
Ineffective Band-Aids: Rushing to reporting tools or compliance fixes without building foundational safety triggers weaponized complaints, eroded trust, and zero lasting change, wasting resources while the exodus continues.
Crushing Overload: Endless fire-fighting, crushing deadlines, and ethical weight leave zero bandwidth for strategy, self-care, boundaries, or genuine team connection, fueling burnout (reported by 50–80% of lawyers), poor sleep, and a vicious "doom spiral."
Trauma's Hidden Toll: Chronic exposure to vicarious/secondary trauma, moral injury, client horrors, threats, and high-stakes adversity depletes reserves, fractures trust, and quietly undermines performance and well-being across the firm.
BRAVE™ breaks this cycle.
Grounded in neuroscience, it equips you to spot threat responses early, prevent problems before they erupt, and forge environments where talent stays, teams thrive, and your firm protects its bottom line.
Meticulously designed over thousands of hours of research, content, and cross-industry delivery (law, healthcare, government, business), Lodestar's BRAVE™ features seasoned senior faculty with decades of real-world experience. You get intensive, real-time engagement that ensures deep mastery, seamless integration, and hands-on skills practice that delivers measurable impact fast.
If you’re ready to safeguard your firm against spiraling associate retention, burnout and vicarious trauma, BRAVE™ is the edge you need.
Meet Your BRAVE™ Experts
Luis Rodriguez, JD, LLM, TIPC, MS; COL
(US Army Retired)
Luis is a seasoned attorney and former judge with nearly 45 years’ leadership experience in the Army, first as a non-commissioned officer and then as a Judge Advocate, culminating as a deputy General Counsel for the Army Secretariat on international, administrative, and labor and employment law.
Kemia M. Sarraf, MD, MPH, CCC, TIPC
The arc of Dr. K's 25+ year career includes patient care, medical education, public health programming, nonprofit & leadership development, and executive coaching. Dr. K founded Lodestar in 2016, responding to a growing need for advanced leadership development and subspecialty coaching for professionals who were reporting high levels of severe burnout, vicarious trauma and moral injury.
Kiana S. Joersz, J.D., SHRM-SCP, TIPC
Kiana is an Attorney specializing in Employment Law and Administrative Policy and specializes in business development and consulting. During her 20 year career, Kiana has served as a Vice President of Employee Relations at a Fortune 50 investment bank in New York, and as an advisor and manager at a private law firm.
Conference Agenda
Day 1
Keynote: Running the River
Creating the Conditions
Lodestar Learning U
Lodestar Container
Lodestar 5Ns
Leadership Trust
Lodestar Resiliency Reservoir
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 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 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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No. One of the key differences of BRAVE™ versus other training in the market is Lodestar strategically brings multiple industries together that have proven synergies in these environments. We have found that healthcare, legal professionals as well as government leaders particularly benefit from learning BRAVE™ methodologies together.
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You’ll get the foundation and methodologies to begin implementing needed change immediately. You’ll receive custom support for 12 full months after the conference to ensure your practice and personal processes are taking hold.
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98% of attendees report immediate integration of BRAVE™ strategies, leading to stronger morale, reduced attrition, enhanced trust, and greater capacity to deliver exceptional advocacy. The results are clear and lasting.
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Have questions before you register? We have very few seats remaining: Book a call to ask your questions or email us at admin@lodestarpc.com.
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The conference is located at:
Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) - San Diego Campus
3377 N Torrey Pines Ct #300
La Jolla, CA 92037
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.
Bringing a Group?
Seats extremely limited. Register today.