Whole-Life Success Principles Podcast

Show Notes and Links

Susan Howard
It's my pleasure to introduce the fabulous Anese Cavanaugh. We're going to be talking with Anese about creating intentional impact through what she calls your "intentional energetic presence" (the IEP method), which is a methodology that helps people create positive results while feeling good doing so. Anese has worked with business leaders and organizations in a variety of industries for over 20 years to optimize leadership and performance and organizational and cultural health. She is the creator of the IEP method. She's a speaker, a leadership advisor, and an author. Her books include, "Contagious Culture: Show Up, Set the Tone, and Intentionally Create an Organization That Thrives." Her most recent release, " Contagious You: Unlock Your Power to Influence, Lead, and Create the Impact You Want." Also, "The Leader You Will Be--An invitation." All of these books are devoted to up-leveling consciousness, intention, accountability, well-being, and performance in our personal leadership and in the culture that we create together. Having known Anese the last five years, she is a living testament to what she teaches and to living an intentional life. So welcome Anese.

Anese Cavanaugh
Thank you, Susan. Thank you so much for having me.

Susan Howard
Okay, so let's begin with what is IEP.

Anese Cavanaugh
IEP stands for Intentional Energetic Presence, and I look at it in two ways. One being intentional about the energetic presence you bring to everything you do, whether that's meeting with your board or meeting with a client or speaking on stage or doing your dishes. It's being intentional about the energetic presence you bring. And then the second part of it is being very conscious about the intentions you have, the energy and stamina you have to do the things that you want to make those intentions so, and your presence and doing it. So your intentions, your energy, and your presence.

Susan Howard
All right, and then what are the three parts of the IEP it method?

Anese Cavanaugh
The first part is the ability to reboot your presence in the moment. The second part is the ability to build a very strong energetic field and foundation. And the third part is the ability to actually create intentional impact.

Susan Howard
And why is this important?

Anese Cavanaugh
What I found in doing this work for over 20 years is that it's so easy to get caught up in the business of life. And it's so easy to get caught up in all the demands that are happening outside of ourselves. The clearer we are about our intentions, and the better we take care of our energy and the more present we are, then it's easier to be more in command of the cause of your life versus constantly being (at the mercy) of the effect of it. So to me, this is a core leadership skill, which is not about the doing, but it's more about the being that enables all of us to be better in our leadership. So we can actually do things better. But it has to start with intention.

Susan Howard
When I was re-reading your book, "Contagious You," I just loved one question you asked, which is, Are you having the impact you want? And I think there is are similar questions that people don't necessarily stop and ask themselves in every part of their lives: Are you having the impact you want in your business? Are you having the impact you want in your relationship? Are you having the impact you want in your sense of your joy in life? What I love about the method is that it really is just about designing not just your outer game but also your inner game in order to to really bring that forward. Can you say a little bit about the two different sides of that?

Anese Cavanaugh
Yes, absolutely. Thank you for bringing that up. I noticed years ago, when I was doing general leadership coaching and consulting, that often people would come to this work with the goal of enhancing their culture, becoming better leaders, or having more impact. They were so focused on the outer game. They were focused on their strategy, the way they communicated, and their feedback, and all these technical skills that people tend to think of the most important part of leadership. However, what I found was that nine times out of 10 it wasn't the skills that were missing; it was the inner game. It was the way that they were showing up and doing those skills. They were either running around so busy doing the skills those skills couldn't possibly have the impact that they wanted them to have, or they just weren't conscious about their intention of why they were doing them, or they weren't conscious about the regard they had for people when they were doing them. So for example, a really brilliant leader at a high level organization goes to give feedback to their employee, or to their colleague, and they've got this gorgeous feedback. And maybe the skill of the feedback and the way they're going to frame it is so perfect. However, that leader walks in and he or she is not present. They're not clear on their intention for the person, the human being they're about to give it to, and they're not paying attention to their energy. So they're coming in tired or scattered. What I found is that no matter how great that leadership model is, or that feedback model is, if they bring IEP (intentional, energetic presence) into that conversation that is not serving the human being they're with, the person will not be able to receive it. So what I found was there's an outer game, which is all these skills that are super important, and then there's also that inner game. To me, the inner game is food-coloring in water--you can't take it out. It's always present. And it's the only thing that we actually have any control over--our inner game.

Susan Howard
I think it can be surprising to people to find out that they can actually design their inner game, because there is so much focus on how do I design the outer game (what specifically am I going to say or do?). But the idea of designing your inner game. Can you say a little bit more about how you come into that? How did you develop this method?

Anese Cavanaugh
Thanks for the question. I just went back to the last 20 years of my life in two seconds. I think that I created this methodology for myself. I can remember being four 14 years old and having my first interaction with what I now know was the power of intention and the power of deciding. And I can remember in that moment of getting clear about something that I wanted--in a way that I wanted to feel--putting my intention on it and then deciding, even as a 14 year old, that I was going to make that happen. I remember that the energy of that was so clear in my body, and it started to inform all these other decisions that I started to make in my life in terms of how I took care of myself, how I thought about things, and really what my inner game was going to be. That started way back then, and it came up again professionally in the last 20 years. I just started noticing that no matter how many brilliant business leaders I worked with, it didn't matter if they had their PhDs and were making a ton of money for their companies, if they weren't clear about their intention for why they were doing what they were doing they were missing a huge piece of the puzzle in terms of creating positive impact. And then the second piece was that in my background in kinesiology I used to work with athletes, their nutrition, and setting the body. So I brought this energetic component and the self-care component into my work. And what I realized was that we'd have these great people that were working these organizations (not just organizational leadership but also human beings who were trying to have really great impact), but they were so exhausted because they weren't taking care of themselves or managing their energy. So then I started to realize that self-care is a huge component of leadership. It's actually our most important leadership asset. And then the third part was just presence. You could bring all these things and even take care yourself and be intentional, but if you weren't present with people (with the human being you're in front of) or present in your own life or to what you want or how you feel, then you're missing a huge piece of the puzzle. So I started years ago doing leadership consulting and just kept finding these pieces needed to be integrated. Then finally pulled it all together and made a methodology out of it.

Susan Howard
That's great. You know it's interesting, because I know you've worked a lot with leaders (as have I). Important leaders are always very busy people. Oftentimes, when you want to introduce something to people, they're too busy. People hear about a method but feel they are too busy making an impact to design one or think about it an intentional way. But what I love about your method is that people can use it for situational things (like a meeting, a conversation, a project) and also use it more broadly (like for setting the tone the day or for something longer-term they're doing). I think that's one of the things that makes it so accessible. You can do this method by taking 20 minutes to really think it through, which is not very long to think about what impact you want to have and how you're going to do it. We use it in our in our mastermind program and have introduced it to our entire community. What I love is that you can go through the steps more quickly. You can get this done in a couple minutes, right?

Anese Cavanaugh
Yeah, I'm to the point where I really believe we don't have time not to do it. Because what I found is that one ounce of proactiveness (proactiveness and prevention around negative impact) and really getting clear about your intentions, your energy, and your presence saves so much time. The other piece is that the busiest of busy leaders out there are human beings, period. You think about running around and being so overwhelmed and busy with your life. If you take a moment, take a step back, take a nice big breath, and really start to look at what your intentions are, it's very likely you're going to realize that a lot of the stuff you're so busy with is not lining up with your intentions. So it can be a very cool tool and methodology to help start saying "no" to the wrong things and "yes" to things really line up with your intentions. So it saves time.

Susan Howard
That's great! So what do you think is the greatest asset of a leader in terms of creating positive results, living lives that we love, and creating a healthy culture.

Anese Cavanaugh
I always come back to your greatest asset is the ability to take care of yourself. I think that self-care is thought of as something that we can put on the back burner (for example, the saying, "I'll sleep when I'm dead"). I hear that all the time from people, and it makes me a little bit crazy. If we're not taking care of ourselves, and we don't have the energy and stamina to actually do what we want to do, then we can't lead at our best. So self-care is one of our assets that we actually have to really nourish and cultivate. The other is the ability to intend something and then to make a decision to actually make it happen. And then I would add would be presence, your ability to get present. Notice that all of these are free. They're all within our control. They're all inner game things. The self-care requires some external stuff, but really that's more of an internal game thing. So our greatest assets are actually internal.

Susan Howard
So what would be three simple things that we could do now to start integrating that?

Anese Cavanaugh
The first thing is this. Throughout your day just check in and notice if you are present or not. It's just as simple as that. If I'm not present--if I'm talking to my child or my colleague, or I'm even writing an email--noticing where my attention is and if I am present is the key. If I'm not present, I'm just going to bring myself back into the moment. The quickest way to access prresence is through our breath. I've had people put alarms on their phone that just pop up every 20 minutes to remind them to ask themselves, Am I present? That would be one, just noticing presence. And with that, noticing how you're showing up. So if I'm in conversation with someone, asking, How am I showing up right now? Or if I don't like the way a conversation is going, getting curious and exploring how the way I'm showing up might be contributing to the negative situation. Is there some small thing I could do to make this conversation go differently? The next piece I'm going to give you is intention. Before you go into anything, any conversation, any email, you need to get clear on your intention. Spend a couple seconds, or a couple minutes, thinking about what your intention is for doing this. What is the impact you want to have? Finally, get your self-care in. Don't make up a story about what self-care is. So many people think of self-care as needing to eat perfectly clean, and no gluten and no sugar, and working out 10 days a week. It becomes so overwhelming that they end up doing nothing. My invitation is always to look at what are the little things you can do around your self-care that will support you and that self-care is not always what our culture tends to think it is. Self-care can be something as simple as taking a five minute break in between meetings, just to breathe and catch up with yourself. It can be noticing the way we talk to ourselves. If we're not being kind, just noticing our own internal dialogue and switching it to be kind. That can be a form of self-care. Using the bathroom between meetings instead of holding it is a form of self-care. Just notice the little things you can do to start to up-level your self-care, and I promise that that will be contagious. It will create more areas of opportunity.

Susan Howard
Okay, great.. I think you were going to take us through an exercise.

Anese Cavanaugh
Yes. So one of the components of the IEP method is the ability to create intentional impact. And there's a five-step framework that I talked about a lot in my books, because I think it's super important. Basically, for those of you listening, take take any meeting or conversation you've got coming up today that you care about. You begin by taking a moment to just connect with this meeting and your intention for it. And then you're simply going to look at the first step of these five steps: What are the outcomes I want to create today? What is it I want to have happen because of this meeting? I like to always list one to three really tangible outcomes that, when I walk out of the meeting, are done and are clear. So the first step is to write down the outcomes you want. The second step is to look at what impact you want to have. And when I talk about impact here, I'm looking at what is the emotional impact you want to have on the people you're in the meeting with? What is the experience you want to create in terms of how people feel? And also what is experience you want to create in terms of how you feel? So it's worth spending a moment to really breathe into how do I want people to feel and what is experience I want to create in this particular meeting (so you can write down a couple things there). The third step you would take is to look at how you would need to show up in order to create the outcomes and impact you desire. I think of showing up in terms of what's my energetic presence going to be. This might have to do with something as simple as what I'm going to wear. If I'm trying to create a specific impact with a specific group or audience, am I going to show up as sharing? You know, what is it that they're going to feel for me? Am I going to show up as present? For example, if I'm in a feedback conversation and I really want the person to feel safe and to get the feedback that I'm going share, I want to really show up as present, caring, and tuned in with that human being. And then the fourth step is to look at what I have to believe to show up that way. I need my beliefs to be support my congruency in the way I show up. For example, I might have to believe that this meeting is going to be productive, or that the people that are in this room want to be in this room, or that I'm going to have to believe in the product that we're talking about. If I'm giving feedback, I'm going to want to believe in the person I'm giving the feedback to. So you want to look at what is the honest belief that you need to hold in order to support yourself and having congruent presence. If I'm in a sales conversation, for example, I need to believe in the product, I need to believe that I can deliver what I'm selling, I need to believe that I'm the perfect person to be delivering the product. So it's just really getting curious about your beliefs in that fourth step. And I find that that fourth step is the one that people tend to override the most; they try to skip it. The fifth step is just what action will you take now that you've got your outcomes clear, your impact, the the way you're going to show up, and what you're going to believe, what actions will you take to make those things happen. This is usually where people like to start when they're thinking about impacts. They just think about actions, actions, actions. You still get to your actions, but you just want to get really clear with them now that you've gone through those first four steps. This is because it's very likely that those actions are going to change. So you list the actions you will take before your meeting, during your meeting, and after your meeting. After that I like to go back through everything and make sure it really, really resonates in my body. Once I feel connected to it, I go to my meeting.

Susan Howard
This is great. As I'm going through these steps with you, what I'm realizing is that, I think what most people do is go from step one directly to step five. (These are the outcomes I want, so what do I need to do to get them?) And where the action is, where the where the meat of this is, is in the three steps in the middle. I don't think people ever think about how they want to emotionally impact other people, as well as themselves, in the process. And they forget to ask how they need to show up or what they need to beleive. I think you're right, that's probably the most overlooked question that people don't relate to at all. And yet from your point, it really is at the heart of creating this congruence between my inner world and who I am and the way I'm now going to show up and relate to situations and people in the world.

Anese Cavanaugh
Those middle steps--steps two through four--really set the energetic presence part. If I'm doing this and I go from steps one to five (skipping steps two to four), I'm still going to have outcomes. I'm still going to do some good action. However, what I've learned for myself is that if I really give myself a few minutes (I can spend an hour on this, or I can do it on a Post-it note), as long as I give myself that space and consciousness to really sink into steps two, three, and four, then the way that I am able to show up and really be more in command of my space, and the way that I'm interacting with human beings, is much more powerful. And I'm much clearer. In fact, a lot of times I find that the things I thought I needed to do once I've gone through steps two, three, and four, they've actually changed my step five. So, you know, I really invite people to play with this. I personally will fill this out every morning; it's part of my morning ritual, I get up and I fill it up for the entire day. There's a thing called the IEP sheet, which everyone can have. I will fill that IEP sheet out at the very beginning of the day, just to generally ground my day. And then if there are important meetings or discussions (it could even with my teenage kids) and I really want to make sure that I show up well and have the best impact possible, then I will spend the time to go through these five steps for each meeting. I've found that to be really helpful personally.

Susan Howard
When you mentioned doing the five steps on a Post-it note, it brought to mind a story you told about a client who surprised you mid-meeting by wanting to change your contract in a significant way. During a break in the discussion, I remember that you quickly worked through the five steps on a Post-it. By the time the meeting resumed, you were able to have a conversation that generated an even better result.

Anese Cavanaugh
The short of it is that we had a really lovely engagement in place, but the client was going through some things and wanted to change my contract halfway through it. I could see the changes they proposed were not going to serve them well or provide the impact that they wanted to have in terms of our work together. And I could also see that it wasn't going to work for me energetically, because it wasn't how I wanted to be working with people. They gave me the information regarding what they were dealing with and then left the room to go do something different. So I pulled out a Post-it and thought, How do I want to manage this? So I used the methodology to figure that out. I rebooted my presence, because I wasn't expecting that conversation and was a little overwhelmed. I took a deep breath, got into my body, and asked myself, Okay, what's here right now? The second thing I did was consider my energetic field. I was already in a good energetic state that allowed me to reboot and recover more quickly. If I had been exhausted, if I had a bunch of donuts for breakfast, or if I had not been taking care of myself, it would have been harder for me to have re-booted and become present to what was in the room. The third part was intentional impact. So I pulled out that Post-it and quickly jotted down the outcomes I wanted out of the meeting. I wanted the client to feel cared about and partnered with. I didn't want them to feel like I was going to go away just because they were having difficulties or because it wasn't feeling good to me energetically. My intended emotional impact in any meeting or interaction is always to feel that I'm being "in service of" and that I'm being useful. Next, I went through how I wanted to show up at that moment, which was just to be really present and "in service of." Then I thought about what would I have to believe. I need to believe that this is a partnership. I also need to believe that my proposed version of a revised agreement would be more helpful to them than the original contract or their new version. When I looked at my proposal, I believed that the new arrangement would be more impactful for them. I also believed that this was something we could work through. I believed that I could be better used in this way. And so when they came back into the meeting, it all became really easy. I was able to say, here's what I recommend so that we can really help you guys get through this period in your organization. And it worked out beautifully.

Susan Howard
I remember it actually turned out to be a more lucrative contract for you and a better solution for them.

Anese Cavanaugh
In the long run it definitely did. It leveraged the way that we were working together much more effectively, and it netted a couple more years of really powerful work together. I can promise though that had I not been able to reboot in that moment and get present, it would have been a very, very different outcome. They wouldn't have won, and I wouldn't have won. We wouldn't have had the impact we wanted. So again, can you just take a breath? If all of this feels like a lot to do in that moment, can you just breathe and come back to your intention? What is your intention for what you're doing and who you're doing it with? And if you can get that, then I feel like you're 70% there.

Dori Etter
That's such a wonderful story to highlight the power of the work that you do. I was going to also add how much step four, and what you beleive is our ability to bring that word congruence, is really the key to showing up and having our actions match our intentions; having our actions match our energy. Going through these five steps was so awesome to show how easily and quickly it can be done. And it is one piece of the intentional energetic presence method. I know that you you have this IEP sheet, which I use regularly. Most of us in the mastermind do use it regularly, both as a daily tool and specific tool. But everyone listening can get that at iep.io. There's a whole bunch of other free tools there. Again, that's iep.io.

Anese, you do such an amazing job of empowering everyone to access this information through your free tools and social media. You can find Anese on social media at @anesecavanaugh. She's on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter. I know lately, you have been teasing something new that is coming...and it's working.

Anese Cavanaugh
I'm having my intentional impact! Thank you for that.

Dori Etter
As Susan mentioned in the beginning, you have two books that have been published by McGraw-Hill, and you now have a third book. What I love to note is that "Contageous Culture" was your first book, and that's really about this intentional energetic presence inside an organization. What's so wonderful about "Contageous Culture" is its acknowledgement that an organization's culture is the sum total of each individual's experience and their energy that creates a culture, and "Contageous You" is about how to bring this in for myself. And both of these books are available in regular format on Amazon and other places and also as audio books. If you loved this interview and you would like to hear more of Anese, you can also find that at anesecavanaugh.com. Also follow her on social media. I do find every single time that I listened to Anese, I get another important piece. And today what I am taking away, uniquely, is that "useful." I like to say that I'd like to make a difference, but I really like that simple word of useful, because there are a lot of ways that I can be useful and it really appreciate that.

Anese Cavanaugh
Thank you for reflecting that back. I don't know if you've noticed, but "Contagious You" was devoted to all of us being positively contagious, doing the best we could to be positively contagious. And at the last minute, the very last edit I did on the book, I changed it to being positively and usefully contagious.

Dori Etter
Yeah, I love it. And I love having worked with you and spoken to you quite a bit. I love the way that has shown up. We are so grateful that you're here. Susan, I don't know if you have anything else to add before we say thank you to Anese for joining us today.

Susan Howard
Thank you, Anese. It was wonderful to talk with you again about your work and your books. Everyone in our community has read all of Anese's books and have found them to be really valuable to the work that we're all doing in the world.

Anese Cavanaugh
Thank you.

Dori Etter
Thank you very much. Bye, ladies.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai