ANCHOR: A Human-Centered
Professional Development Program
We built ANCHOR for exactly this moment.
Not only is the world changing, but the tools most of us were given for navigating it were never designed with our full humanity in mind. They were designed to make us productive, compliant and useful to systems that demand urgency and efficiency in ways that often come at our expense.
Does it have to be this way?
ANCHOR is our salve and antidote. It’s a space to come back to yourself, your values, and your value, and to do that work alongside people who are asking the same questions you are.
What is ANCHOR?
ANCHOR is a four-session professional development program grounded in Human-Centered Practices, a framework we’ve spent fifteen years researching, developing, piloting and refining with leaders across over twenty industries.
Each session builds on the last, taking you from a deeper understanding of who you are and what you value, through the dynamics of power and relationships, into your emotional life as a source of information and strength, and finally into the practice of inner agility: the ability to navigate complexity, change, and uncertainty with clarity and purpose.
This is not a program about optimizing yourself for the systems you’re in. It’s about understanding those systems, and your place within them, so you can make choices that are genuinely yours.
ANCHOR is the foundation of the Leadership Journey and a foundation you’ll return to. The practices you build here deepen each time you come back to them, because you bring more to them: more experience, more complexity, more capacity to see what you couldn’t see before. For many of our participants, that’s one of the most meaningful discoveries. Not that they’ve mastered something, but that the work keeps growing with them.
“I used to believe that you couldn’t do much about conflicts at work, but my belief system has changed. I believe now that we can absolutely make things work together, even when we don’t see eye to eye.”
Ready to invest in yourself?
The Arc of Learning
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Currently Enrolling: Thursday, June 11, 2026 11am PT/2pm ET – 12:30pm PT/3:30pm ET
Upcoming: Thursday, September 24, 2026 11am PT/2pm ET – 12:30pm PT/3:30pm ET
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Session 1: Identity & Deep ListeningWho are you, and how does that shape the way you work, lead, and relate with others? This session begins with your identity story, the experiences, values, and strengths that make you who you are, and asks you to examine how that shapes what you see, what you assume, and how you move through professional relationships. From there, you’ll build the Tools for Deep Listening: a set of intrapersonal and interpersonal practices for truly hearing others, especially when the conversation is hard or the stakes feel high. Deep listening is a leadership practice, not simply a soft skill. It’s what allows you to stay present in disagreement, hold your own perspective without clinging to it, and create the conditions for genuine connection across difference. In this session you’ll:
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Currently Enrolling: Thursday, June 25, 2026 11am PT/2pm ET – 12:30pm PT/3:30pm ET
Upcoming: Thursday, October 8, 2026 11am PT/2pm ET – 12:30pm PT/3:30pm ET
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Session 2: Power Dynamics & RelationshipsPower shapes every relationship you’re in, whether you can see it or not. This session examines how power is conferred through identity, role, and privilege, and how the systems we’re socialized within teach us to use power in ways that often work against our own values. You’ll explore the difference between “power over” and agency, what it means to hold power responsibly, and how to show up in relationships in ways that reflect who you actually want to be. If you don’t understand the story you’re telling yourself about your own power, it’s very challenging to hold it responsibly. In this session you’ll:
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Currently Enrolling: Thursday, July 9, 2026 11am PT/2pm ET – 12:30pm PT/3:30pm ET
Upcoming: Thursday, October 22, 2026 11am PT/2pm ET – 12:30pm PT/3:30pm ET
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Session 3: Exploring EmotionsWe’re told to leave our emotions at the door. But they come with us anyway, and when we don’t know how to work with them, they drive our decisions without our permission. This session reframes emotion as data. You’ll learn to recognize the signals that an emotional response is happening, understand the cycle of an emotion and where awareness can interrupt it, and interrogate the stories underneath your feelings, including where those stories come from and whether they belong to you. Self-compassion isn’t optional here; it’s the practice that makes all the rest possible. Because our emotions make the invisible visible. They’re how we come to understand what we need, what we’re absorbing from the systems around us, and what matters enough to act on. In this session you’ll:
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Upcoming: Thursday, July 23, 2026 11am PT/2pm ET – 12:30pm PT/3:30pm ET
Upcoming: Thursday, November 5, 2026 11am PT/2pm ET – 12:30pm PT/3:30pm ET
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Session 4: Inner AgilityThis is where it all comes together. Inner agility is the ability to navigate complex, changing situations by managing your inner thoughts and emotions in a flexible, values-driven way. It needs resilience, and it builds it. In this final session, you’ll move from awareness to action: learning to expand the story, hold your own value as the foundation for agency, and make decisions that are genuinely yours rather than defaults shaped by your socialization or the system’s expectations. You’ll leave with a repeatable framework for values-aligned decision-making that becomes more useful, and more practiced, every time you return to it. In this session you’ll:
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“As a Black woman leader, I’ve been socialized to make others comfortable, but my team is actually trying to make me comfortable too. But I want to live in my own integrity, not be made comfortable. I learned to be very conscious of the space I created for disagreement, and for myself to do an internal check. I needed to ask myself, Am I doing this as a leader now? Am I listening or not listening because I’m feeling uncomfortable? Is someone afraid to make me uncomfortable? Am I not giving honest feedback because I’m afraid of discomfort?
Is ANCHOR for you?
ANCHOR tends to find the people who need it.
They’re not always in crisis, though some are navigating real transitions: a role that no longer fits, a workplace that’s asking too much, a version of leadership they’ve outgrown. Others are simply paying attention to a feeling they’ve been pushing aside.
What they share is this: they want their work to mean something. They want to be in relationships that are reciprocal and balanced. They want tools that actually help, built on something more honest than hustle culture or corporate wellness. And they want to do that work with other people who are asking the same questions.
If that’s you, we’d love to have you.
Program Details
Format: Four 90-minute interactive, facilitated virtual sessions
Cohort: Small group: you’ll know the people you’re learning with
Materials: Workbook, handouts, and tangible takeaways from every session
Summer Dates: June 11, June 25, July 9, July 23
Fall Dates: September 24, October 8, October 22, November 5, 2026
Time: 11am–12:30pm PT / 2–3:30pm ET
One-on-One Coaching Add-on*
- 4 virtual 60-minute strategy sessions, scheduled after each group session
- Individualized goal-setting and progress-monitoring (ex: develop your career narrative, hone your leadership vision, plan for an upcoming important conversation, strategize your next career move, etc.)
- Additional “Reach Out” coaching calls for in-the-moment questions or advice to keep you moving toward your goals
*Email MJ@leverage2lead.com for more information
“I loved one-on-one processing sessions with MJ. We started every conversation acknowledging that this is long-term work and that we wouldn’t solve everything in one session. But by the end of the hour, she had taken some very complex issues and helped me move forward. She challenged me to see where I did and didn’t have the power to make a change, and to be vulnerable in expressing what I need. Going forward, I plan to be an example of what I’ve learned, to be the change myself, and to share with others that if you see the human side first, we can do great work together.
Why ANCHOR? Why now?
We are living and working inside systems that were not designed to hold our full humanity. Most of us know this. We feel it in our bodies, in our relationships, in the gap between the leaders we want to be and the ones we manage to be on most days.
ANCHOR doesn’t pretend those systems don’t exist. It helps you see them more clearly and from that clarity, decide how you want to operate within them.
This is research-based work. It’s been piloted and developed over fifteen years, across twenty industries, in organizations that were trying to do something better than what they inherited. The practices you’ll build here don’t expire when the program ends. They compound.
Whatever is bringing you to this page right now, we think it’s worth paying attention to. And we hope you join us.