Interactive activities and facilitated discussion scenarios for each of the six ANCHOR pillars — designed for use in Trauma-Informed Teams sessions, A Foot Wide policy workshops, and organizational leadership offsites.
A
Awareness
N
Narrative
C
Collaboration
H
Honesty
O
Ownership
R
Resilience
A — Awareness
N — Narrative
C — Collaboration
H — Honesty
O — Ownership
R — Resilience
✦ Free Preview — Awareness Pillar
A
Pillar One · Awareness
Know your own nervous system state before you lead others.
You cannot co-regulate someone else while you are dysregulated. Awareness is the prerequisite for every other pillar — a leader who cannot read their own internal state will misread everyone else's.
Activity 01 · Individual · Reflective
10 minutes · Silent · Private
The 90-Second State Inventory
Participants map their nervous system state before a high-stakes situation. Creates somatic self-awareness through structured body scanning.
Close your eyes. Notice your breath — is it full or shallow? Held or flowing?
Scan your body from feet to shoulders. Where is tension? Where is ease?
Name the emotion present. Not "stressed" — be specific. Anxious? Irritated? Resigned?
Ask: What triggered this state? What does this state make me want to do?
Write one sentence: "Right now I am _____, and that means I need _____ before I lead."
Facilitator note: Hold a genuine 90 seconds of silence. Leaders are rarely given permission to stop and feel. That permission is the activity.
Activity 02 · Pairs · Kinesthetic
15 minutes · Pairs → Debrief
The Leadership State Mirror
Partners observe and reflect each other's somatic state — developing the awareness skill that underlies every trauma-informed interaction.
Person A speaks for 90 seconds about a current leadership challenge — no editing, no solutions.
Person B listens without speaking. They notice body language, pace, tone, word choices.
Person B reflects back: "What I noticed in your body and voice was..." (not interpretation — observation).
Person A responds: "What you named is accurate / here's what it actually is."
Switch. Debrief: What did it feel like to be accurately seen? What do you carry into meetings without knowing it?
Facilitator note: The debrief question — "What do you carry into meetings without knowing it?" — is where the most important insight lives. Hold space for it.
Activity 03 · Full Group · Visual
12 minutes · Group Mapping
The Team State Map
The group collectively maps where they are on the Safety–Stress–Crisis spectrum, revealing the aggregate nervous system state of the leadership team.
Draw a horizontal line on the whiteboard: Safety on the left, Stress in the middle, Crisis on the right.
Each participant places a dot where they are right now — anonymously on sticky notes, or openly by placing a mark.
Step back and look at the distribution together. What does this team's collective state tell us?
Discuss: What is creating the stress states in this room? What would shift them toward safety?
Facilitator note: When most dots cluster in Stress or Crisis, that is not a personal failure — it is organizational data. Frame it that way explicitly.
Activity 04 · Individual → Group · Analytical
15 minutes
The Trigger Inventory
Leaders identify and map their personal organizational triggers — the specific situations that reliably dysregulate their nervous system and compromise their leadership quality.
Individually: List 5 situations at work that reliably trigger a stress or threat response in you.
For each: Rate the intensity (1–10). Name the behavior it produces in you. Name what it costs your team.
Identify your #1 trigger. Write: "When [situation], I tend to [behavior], which affects my team by [impact]."
In pairs: Share your #1 trigger and one thing you could do differently when it fires next time.
🔒
Unlock the Full Guide
All 24 activities, discussion scenarios, facilitator notes, and timing guides for all 6 ANCHOR pillars — plus the PDF for printing and sharing.
Instant PDF download via Gumroad · Secure checkout
Discussion Scenarios — Awareness
You are about to deliver difficult feedback to a team member who has a history of responding defensively. You notice you're dreading the conversation and have been postponing it for two weeks.
This is a common leadership pattern — avoidance masquerading as "finding the right time."
Scenario A1
Discussion Questions
What is the nervous system state driving your avoidance — and what is it trying to protect you from?
How does your avoidance affect your team member's ability to grow and the team's sense of accountability?
What would you need to feel regulated enough to have this conversation well?
What is the cost — to them, to you, to the team — of postponing it another week?
Your organization just announced a major restructuring. As a middle manager, you have more anxiety about the changes than you have answers. Your team is looking to you for reassurance you don't have.
The tension between authentic leadership and expected certainty is one of the most common trauma-informed leadership challenges.
Scenario A2
Discussion Questions
What does your team actually need from you right now — certainty, or regulated presence?
What's the difference between acknowledging your own uncertainty and undermining your team's confidence in leadership?
How do you regulate yourself before each interaction so that your anxiety doesn't become your team's anxiety?
What is one honest, grounded thing you could say to your team today — without pretending to know what you don't?
Facilitator Guide · Awareness Pillar
The Most Common Resistance — and How to Meet It
Leaders often resist body-based activities because they feel "soft" or "unprofessional." Reframe explicitly: "What we're doing is building the one skill that determines the quality of every conversation you'll have today. Pilots use simulators. Surgeons practice technique. Leaders practice regulation. This is that practice." The resistance to this work is itself data about the organization's relationship with emotional experience — name it, don't fight it.
In the absence of a clear organizational narrative, people write their own — and it is almost always darker than reality. Narrative leadership is not spin. It is the honest, consistent, human story of where your organization is, where it's going, and why it matters.
🔒
Purchase to Unlock All 6 Pillars
Get 24 ready-to-run activities, discussion scenarios with facilitator-reveal questions, timing guides, and debrief scripts for every ANCHOR pillar.
Collaboration is not consensus. It is the intentional structure of participation — ensuring that the people most affected by a decision have meaningful input into it before it closes. When people shape what they live inside, they invest in it differently.
🔒
Purchase to Unlock All 6 Pillars
Get 24 ready-to-run activities, discussion scenarios with facilitator-reveal questions, timing guides, and debrief scripts for every ANCHOR pillar.
Say what you know. Say what you don't know. Never pretend.
Organizational honesty is not about radical transparency — it is about the consistent alignment between what leaders say and what is actually true. False certainty destroys trust faster than bad news. Honest uncertainty, consistently expressed, builds it.
🔒
Purchase to Unlock All 6 Pillars
Get 24 ready-to-run activities, discussion scenarios with facilitator-reveal questions, timing guides, and debrief scripts for every ANCHOR pillar.
Name the human cost before you name the strategic plan.
Ownership in the ANCHOR framework means taking explicit responsibility for the impact your decisions have on people — not just the outcomes you intend. Leaders who acknowledge impact before strategy earn the trust that makes strategy possible.
🔒
Purchase to Unlock All 6 Pillars
Get 24 ready-to-run activities, discussion scenarios with facilitator-reveal questions, timing guides, and debrief scripts for every ANCHOR pillar.
Build structures for recovery, not just performance.
Organizational resilience is not the absence of disruption — it is the capacity to metabolize it without losing function, culture, or people. Resilience is built through predictability, ritual, and the explicit permission to recover before performing.
🔒
Purchase to Unlock All 6 Pillars
Get 24 ready-to-run activities, discussion scenarios with facilitator-reveal questions, timing guides, and debrief scripts for every ANCHOR pillar.