Lodestar BRAVE™
Leadership Conference
San Diego, California | April 29 - May 1, 2026
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.
Don't wait- seats are filling fast. Secure your spot today.
You should be here.
In the demanding world of legal practice- where secondary trauma, crushing deadlines, ethical weight, and courtroom pressure hit hard- trauma-responsive leadership is your non-negotiable edge.
At the Lodestar BRAVE™ Leadership Conference, equip yourself with battle-tested, neuroscience-backed tools that:
Greatly reduce attorney burnout and turnover
Rebuild psychological safety and team trust
Restore your own resilience and sustain peak performance
98% of senior leaders who’ve done BRAVE™ integrate the strategies immediately—delivering stronger morale, lower attrition, deeper trust, and unshakable advocacy capacity.
This isn’t nice-to-have training. It’s the strategic move that protects your people, fortifies your firm, and future-proofs your leadership in an era of relentless demands.
Claim your spot before it’s gone.
This is just the beginning.
Your Conference Registration Includes Intensive, Year-Long Training with 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.
✓ 20 AMA PRA Category 1 CME Credits: earn valuable continuing education while transforming your leadership.
Highly-Experienced Faculty.
Proven Outcomes.
Elite 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.
Who This Program Is For
BRAVE™ Leadership is designed for senior leaders navigating complexity and crisis, like:
Healthcare: Physicians, nurses, PAs/NPs stepping into leadership roles, and more.
Public Health: State and city-level directors and their management teams.
Education: Superintendents, principals, higher education counselors and administration teams.
Law: Partners, judges, prosecutors, family court advocates, and more.
Government & Military: Federal/state LEO senior leaders, military leaders.
Social Services: Leaders in crisis centers, victim advocacy, and more.
Any Organization: Executive teams, boards, C-suite, HR and DEI leaders facing retention/recruitment challenges.
If you're successful but stalled- overwhelmed by spiraling demands, neglecting self-care, or watching talent flee- this is for you. It's ideal if you recognize the relational side of leadership has slipped, and you're ready to build measurable trust, safety, and connection without "squishy" concepts.
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.