This work is for you when you're serious about your growth and clarity.

Hello! Thanks for checking out the work I offer. I’m Anne O’Connor and I partner with people in a few key ways so that they can keep becoming who they want to be in their relationships, their work, and in their bodies, minds, and hearts.

Group work is my primary way of helping people make real change. Groups—well designed and facilitated—have the essential elements to help us do better as we walk through our lives, contributing what we’re here for. 

Over many years and experiences, with the help of practiced teachers, I have become skillful and effective in supporting people in groups.

I design each experience to reflect the needs of the group I’m working with. My expertise is in creating experiences that:

1. Call to the heart of what it means to be human and
2. Ask us to keep working to rise, to grow, and do better.
3. Give us the skills, practices, mindsets, community, and time to make lasting change. 

With clients who want to move mountains, we create experiences of lasting beauty, transformation, and mindfulness that engage people in their own lives, in their most creative work, in their most inspiring relationships, and their most outstanding communication. We all get better by doing this work together.

After doing this many ways, my work now is long-term work—we plan for months together, not an afternoon or four. I expect my clients to work hard and to put in the resources required to make significant and lasting changes. I expect my clients to take on this work like their lives depend on it.

And what they get back from this level of investment will change their lives forever. They learn to become who they want to be--their most true selves. This isn't some fantasy or fancy idea. It's the result of commitment, practice, and acceptance of every part of oneself. Only then can we choose to navigate with our most mature, skillful selves. Only then are we able to give our very best without it costing us our health or our relationships.

That’s the key element of this work: we get better to make the world better. Which is why supportive community is an important part of my groups. Plus, this work is designed for humans—it is creative and experiential and fun. We laugh a lot and chocolate and popcorn tend to play a role. We were designed to learn with creativity and through story and experience.

To that end, this work will change the way you see your own role in trust, navigation, creating vibrancy, conflict, negotiation, persuasion, relationship-building, asking for what you need, power and privilege, motivation, engagement, listening, and transparency. These changes will affect every aspect of your being—and you’ll be grateful for the work and want to do more. I can say this confidently because this is consistently what my clients tell me.

There are three primary ways to focus on relationships and work with me and you can find out more about them here on the site. 

The Outstanding Communicator.  This is highly-tailored, long-term leadership-development course in how to build a vital, successful, and productive team through outstanding communication practices.

Stop F’ing Around: Finding Your Best Way to Be Human. This deep-dive course helps people dismantle old habits that no longer serve them and build the practices to become who they want to be. This year-long course forms a supportive community in which to learn, develop ourselves, and experience life anew. Stop F’ing Around gives people their best shot at becoming who they want to be: confident, clear, and courageous in creating the life they want.  

The Inspired Relationships Challenge. We are fully alive when we have connective, trust-building, life-giving, creative, and passionate relationships. This community helps us build our skills toward that end. This is a weekly, online drop-in course—the only drop-in course I offer. In this virtual, live session we take up a different key concept each week that will support the best relationships of our lives. I teach the concept, we practice the concept in the session, and we find the ways to bring the work into our everyday lives—and bolster our relationships. This course started as a fantastic art project that I did with my family during the beginning of the pandemic. Check it out. 

Background: I’ve got a lifetime of experiences and training that has prepared me to support you in this work. I, too, stretch and learn and work and develop new ways to meet the demands of contributing my best and building true relationships. 

I’ve been in communications and self-development for more than 20 years. I earned my Master of Social Work with a focus on clinical therapy and group work. I am a Licensed Graduate Social Worker with the State of Minnesota and a practicing psychotherapist. I’ve led communications and led teams as a director at the billion-dollar cooperative, Organic Valley and as part of the management team of nonprofits. I’ve been a communications coach to leaders at various levels. I’ve been a daily newspaper reporter, a national magazine contributing writer, a published author, and a radio-show co-host. These opportunities have allowed me to interview thousands of people from heads of state, to family members in crisis, to the random stranger on the street. Every person teaches me something.

Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve sought out opportunities to scrutinize and change inequities in systems and opportunities to demonstrate allyship with historically marginalized communities. If you want to read (way!) more about my philosophy of work, you can check out my foundational values here.

I’ve designed and facilitated hundreds of groups for more than a decade. This work continues to evolve and deepen for me and for my clients.  

I've also spent decades practicing these concepts in my own relationships as a mother, a stepmother, a partner, a friend, a daughter, a sister, a neighbor, and community member. I am both a cat and a dog person, although I prefer people.

If you're interested in working together, click here to hop on my calendar and let's talk.