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[Music]

Host: In this episode we speak with Anese Cavanaugh. She’s devoted to helping people show up and bring their best selves to the table in order to create significant positive impact in their lives. She’s the creator of the IEP Method — Intentional Energetic Presence. She’s an advisor and thinking partner to leaders and organizations around the world, and author of Contagious Culture: Show Up, Set the Tone, and Intentionally Create an Organization That Thrives. She’s actually written a new book called Contagious You, which dropped this month. We’re really pleased to have her on the show.

Anese: Thank you for having me on.

Host: Thank you. So, congratulations on your new book!

Anese: Thank you, very excited about it — it just came out, so it’s exciting to see what it’s doing as it makes its way into the world. And I feel really excited to get to see you like this after we had some time together at INBOUND in Boston a couple months ago, so it’s been really good.

Host: Yeah, I saw your talk and it made an impact on me, so I’d love to cover some of the things I heard in the talk, so our listeners get a chance to hear it too. Do you want to tell us a bit about the book?

Anese: Sure, sure. So the book is called Contagious You: Unlock Your Power to Influence, Lead, and Create the Impact You Want. It’s the follow-on to the book Contagious Culture that I wrote back in 2015. In Contagious Culture I really looked at organizational health — how do we create a positively contagious culture. The big surprise in that book was that all of us are the culture. Most people tend to think that culture is happening around them, imposed upon them, versus what I believe — and what I’ve seen in over 20 years of doing this work — is that we actually are the culture. How we show up in everything we do creates the culture in our organizations, our families, our teams. That was the focus of that book. After that, over the last four years, being in rooms with all different kinds of human beings, at different industries and all over the world, what I kept seeing was there’s a deeper level of conversation to be had around how contagious we are each personally, around our leadership. So Contagious You really goes deeper into what is your personal leadership style, how are you showing up, what is your Intentional Energetic Presence — which is the body of work, the methodology I created to help people have a better energetic presence and be even more effective in their leadership.

Host: As a human, how do you decide to write a book? Like, how did you decide one day to just write that book?

Anese: You know, I’ve always been writing, as long as I can remember. I thought I was just writing blog posts and articles — I write for a few different columns based on this work. What happened for me was, with Contagious Culture, the first big book I wrote, every time I’d come out of a session or get off stage, people would ask me how they could bring this work into their life. So I started to really get this call — not only did I want to write a book, which would be exciting and fun, and I was curious what that process would look like, but I also got this call of, well, if something ever happened to me, how would this work get carried forward in a way that people could do it without ever meeting me? So it became something I was really interested in — putting all of this methodology into an actual book, getting everything out of my brain and my heart and putting it on paper. That was how Contagious Culture started — me going, alright, I want to spread this message, I want to serve as many people as possible, touch as many human beings as possible on this planet. The most scalable way to do that is to write a book. So that was the decision behind Contagious Culture.

Host: Do you feel like you’re essentially channeling — that your knowledge is something that sort of landed in you, in a sense that you were able to be aware enough to accept it? It sounds like you’re channeling something from — I don’t know if it’s another dimension, or you tell us — and passing it on to humanity, in a way.

Anese: Yeah, I love that reflection. I believe that we all have our divine areas of expertise, our talents, our gifts, and part of the reason we’re on the planet is to pay those gifts forward. For me, I’ve been obsessed — as long as I can remember, but really since I was about 14 — with performance, with how people show up and how that affects the impact they have, with self-care and how taking care of ourselves impacts our ability to influence other people and to get done what we want to get done. Looking back at my life, every single thing I did — from school, to the jobs I took, to even the people I hung out with — lined up with that obsession, and I just kept getting deeper and deeper into it. As I practiced it more for myself, I started to get what I think of as the call — none of this work really comes from my head, it comes from my heart, because I feel this groundedness and presence around how important I believe it is for us to be intentional about our lives, to take good care of ourselves, and to be really present. The more balanced and grounded I got in the body of work I was building, the more compelled and called I felt to share it with as many people as possible. Once I surrendered to that and said, alright, I’m a channel, I’m just going to give everything I’ve got, the information came even more freely. Especially writing Contagious You — so much information showed up for me that I didn’t get from my head, I got it from my heart, from spirit, whatever you want to call it. Even now, when I go back and read certain parts of the book, I’ll think, “oh, I kind of forgot about that,” and I learn it again. I think we all have our callings, and it’s our job and our responsibility — and our opportunity — to really listen to that, honor the call, and see what shows up. Every time we honor it, it gets louder.

Host: But how did you figure out your methodology for this? I mean, you’re saying this has been since you were almost a child, but I’m guessing the younger you — the further back we look — there must have been more question marks and then answers. Was it because of feedback? Did you get a lot of feedback?

Anese: There’s a couple of things that come up for me when you ask that. The first thing is, when I was 14 years old, I’d had this experience — my parents had gone through a really brutal divorce. Every divorce is brutal in its own way, but this one was rough — I was the oldest of four girls, and we couldn’t pay our bills. So I was 14 years old, and I went and started working — I got a job at Baskin-Robbins. It was funny, because when I went in to do the interview, you had to be 15 to work there, so I lied on my application about being 15. I went in excited for the job — I needed the job, and I was very mature, so I trusted I could do it. But at the end of the interview, the owner said, “Is there anything else you want me to know?” And I said, “Oh yeah — I lied. I’m sorry.” I can still remember sitting in that booth, the smell of the freezers, the ice cream — and I said, “I’m really sorry, but I really wanted this job, I need this job, and I thought if I could just get my foot in the door you’d give me a chance and we’d figure it out.” And he said, “Okay, well, thanks for your honesty, and we’ll let you know.” I left that interview thinking, oh, I’ve blown it, it’s over, my career is ruined before it started — very dramatic, at that age. And I got a call from them a couple of days later, and they said, “We’re going to hire you — we’ll work out a special permit.” And I said, “Oh my gosh, why?” And he said, “Because you have integrity — you told the truth. We’re hiring you because of your integrity.” I had to go look up what that word meant, because I’d never heard it before, but I knew I really liked having integrity, and I remember the feeling in my body of being afraid to tell the truth but knowing the right thing to do was to tell the truth. That was a major moment in my life — I got in touch with what integrity meant and how good that felt, and I wanted more of it.

Then, after starting that job, I was having a hard time with my family situation — I was irritated because I wasn’t playing sports like the other kids, wasn’t hanging out with friends after school, I was doing homework, babysitting my sisters, and then going to work at Baskin-Robbins. I was pretty pissed off. I remember one day — it was New Year’s Day, and I was mad because I was working while everyone else was out — I was scooping ice cream in the freezer, thinking about how terrible my life was and how terrible it was going to be. And all of a sudden I got this feeling, this message, this question that came to me: “What if your life doesn’t have to be terrible? What if what’s happening isn’t happening to you, it’s happening for you, and it’s giving you skills — you’re learning skills this young that will actually help you go on with your life?” In that moment, scooping that ice cream, I got in touch with the idea of making a decision — the idea of choice points, being able to choose: do I want to be miserable, or do I actually want to create something really great? Before I came out of that freezer, I’d made a decision that I was going to create a really awesome life. I came out of that freezer feeling super anchored into that — similar to the integrity moment — like, okay, I’m actually going to go create something really cool. I gave the ice cream — a double scoop of world-class chocolate, I’ll never forget it — to the guy, and he tipped me a five-dollar bill, and I totally took that as a sign, like, “see, I’m right on track.”

That moved me into really looking at how self-care, integrity, and choices all played into everything. I went to school and got my degree in kinesiology — the study of the body — I was super obsessed with movement and nutrition. I worked in clinical exercise, with people who’d had heart attacks or heart disease. Then I had my first child, and at that time I was still working for other companies, but when I had my baby I decided I never wanted to work again — I just wanted to be with him all the time. So I said, “I’m retired.” That lasted about a year, and then I decided I wanted to get back into it, but I didn’t want to work for anybody anymore. So — this is where the methodology comes in — I took every single thing I had ever done in my life: every job, my work with athletes, my work with doctors, my time in corporate America working in health and productivity — I took all of it and wrote out a job description on Post-its. My son was napping in the back seat of my car, and I didn’t want to wake him, so I sat there and thought about what I really missed about work, what I loved doing. What I ended up doing was creating a job description, and then going, “well, where’s that job?” Nobody had that job for me, so I said, “I’m going to create a company out of it.” I created my own job — did it very part-time for the first five years while I was raising my babies.

Host: Wait — what was the main job you were looking for? What was that description?

Anese: It was performance optimization, using a blend of everything I’d done in my life that I loved — physical training, leadership development, and life skills. That was back in 2002, when coaching was just getting started as a profession. So it started out as a coaching company — I was going to coach people. That coaching turned into attracting a lot of business leaders, who needed more support, so I got my leadership credential and just kept piling on these different pieces.

Host: Does that answer your question? I’m kind of curious about something — you made a job description and basically said, “let’s go make this company so I could work for it.” Do you think a lot of entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs because they want to make their own job?

Anese: I think so. My primary driver, honestly, was I was sitting in the front seat looking at my kid, asleep, and I really didn’t want to leave him. So one of my primary intentions, when I was looking at that job description, was: what activities, what job, would be meaningful enough to be worth leaving my little kid behind, and — oh, by the way — what could I do that would contribute to making a better world for him? Those were two of my criteria. I looked at what would make me happy — working around physical performance, mindset, all that stuff. What would make money — how would I get paid for that? What would have meaning — why would I be doing it? And what could I actually do — what was my skill set? It was a combination of all of that. The reason there wasn’t a job for it already is that when I looked at jobs in performance optimization, they were very corporate — they didn’t bring into account the “softer stuff,” and I put that in quotes because that soft stuff is actually the most important thing. I didn’t find anything that resonated, and I thought, if I do this I’m just going to get sucked into corporate America, and that’s going to exhaust me and I’m not going to be a good parent. So I decided to create a company that would let me do exactly what I wanted. That was 2002 — very part-time, feeling it out. By 2007 I kept getting feedback from clients that the way I worked with them was very different from any other coach or leadership advisor they’d worked with. So I started to really look at what I was doing differently. By 2009 I realized the work really had legs — we were getting really good results for companies and individuals — but I didn’t know exactly what I was doing; I was too close to it to see the magic sauce. So I hired people to follow me around — to sit in workshops, training sessions, one-on-one consults — and do what’s called modeling: watching what I kept doing over and over. That’s when I started to find the different components of the IEP method that I was doing over and over again with people, that were getting them results traditional leadership development wasn’t getting.

Host: And so what were those?

Anese: Okay, so the IEP method is three components. The first is your ability to reboot your presence in the moment — which, Noa, you experienced with me at INBOUND. The second part of the methodology is the ability—

Host: I’ve got to stop you — I was there, but I’m not sure it’s clear to anyone listening. Maybe give us an example of rebooting presence?

Anese: Great, okay. So, before I get on a call with you — let’s just say there’s a ton going on, and maybe I just had another call, and it was a really rough call, or my kids need me right now, or something, and I’m not fully present, or I’m bringing frantic or negative energy. Let’s say I had a really bad morning, and now we’re going to be together. Well, I have a couple of choices: I can bring all that negative energy to the call. I can cancel — which I’m not going to do. I can pretend to be fine, fake it — which you guys are going to pick up on, even people just listening, they’ll pick up that there’s an inauthenticity in my presence. Or, I can reboot. The reboot is simply taking a breath, noticing — alright, what is my energy right now, how present am I, what am I going to bring into this next thing — and I take a breath, get present, set an intention for how I want to show up, and then I take care of it. Usually taking care of it means I might need to go use the bathroom, heat up a cup of coffee, just get present to what’s happening now. What I find is about 90% of the time it’s just about noticing I wasn’t totally present and wanting to shift my state — that’s it — and then stepping into it. That’s the reboot: notice, envision, intend, take care of yourself, step into it, and then rinse and repeat.

Host: I love that, because the key thing, in my opinion, is that you’re thinking about how you want the conversation to become, who you are in the conversation. In that moment you’re just thinking about what you’re going to bring in, and that naturally reboots it. I love that — it’s natural.

Anese: And the thing is, this work — to me, 70% of it is just about awareness, because without awareness I struggle, I survive my life. If I have awareness, I’m now at choice for how I want to shift, and now I have power. The minute I’m aware that I’m not showing up the way I want to show up, I’m in a position of power, because it’s a choice to shift that and bring a different energy in.

Host: I think the awareness is key to the ability to shift, because most of the time people are aware they’re in a certain state and maybe even a little frustrated about it, but I think what you’re bringing to the table is the awareness that it’s possible — that it’s actually a choice which state I want to show up in, or whether I want to become something else.

Anese: Oh my gosh, for sure. And what I love about that choice is that our brain — in Contagious You we spent an entire chapter on the science of showing up, and I worked with a neuroscientist for that chapter — what we found is that at every moment we’re making a choice. Whatever choice I make is called a choice point, and whatever choice I make, I’m building my neural pathways to repeat that choice over and over again.

Host: But it’s easier to be aware and make those choices when you’re okay. If you’re in a very bad mood, or something dramatic has happened, or you’re just super upset, then it sounds almost theoretical — like, “yeah, she might be right, but I can’t even pay attention to that right now, I’m too upset, too hysterical, this isn’t the time for that.”

Anese: No — yeah, I totally agree with you, and the other really important part you’re bringing up is that none of this is about doing a spiritual bypass or being a robot. So another part of the methodology is emotional authenticity. If I’m in a state where I’m super angry and not able to reboot, part of the leadership skill is being aware that I’m super flooded right now and I actually need support — I need to go talk to someone, I need to cry my eyes out, I need to be pissed off for a few days, whatever it is. Part of the leadership is being aware of that, honoring that need, and giving myself full permission to process through it so I can clear it authentically and come to the table. When I talk about the presence reboot — there’s a couple of things. One, if I’m going into a call like this, I could have had a bad morning, and as a leader we often don’t have the opportunity to cancel, we have to show up, so the reboot becomes important. But the other side is: whatever it was that got me upset before the call, I have to promise myself that after the call I’m going to go call my sister, or my therapist, or somebody, to talk about what just happened — give it full permission to be healed and addressed. Otherwise I’m doing what’s sometimes called a spiritual bypass, which means I’m just faking it, and that doesn’t work either — it’s inauthentic, and it leads to burnout.

Host: Although I have to share — from my own experience — that sometimes just being absolutely present in a moment is enough, because at the end of the day, whatever issue you’re dealing with, most of the time it’s not happening as we speak, it’s not a matter of fight or flight. So it’s not necessarily unhealthy to postpone dealing with it, to focus and be completely absorbed in something else and revisit it later — sometimes that pause, or “rebooting” as you’d call it, is itself progress toward actually resolving that other mental state.

Anese: Oh, for sure. I mean, one thing — if we really allow ourselves to have our authentic emotion, an emotion lasts 60 to 90 seconds. If I really allow myself to feel it — “wow, I’m really sad right now about whatever just happened” — and I allow myself the emotion, it’s 60 to 90 seconds. Where we mess ourselves up is where we go, “not gonna feel it, not gonna feel it,” or we keep telling the story over and over — like, “oh, Noa was really mean to me this morning, can you believe it” — and every time I tell that story without giving myself full permission to actually feel it, process it, and be done with it, I’m repeating it, extending the emotion. Denying the emotion or extending the emotion is what actually keeps us in that state for longer — and it’s also about what we think about. If I think what happened this morning was so terrible and let my mind make up stories, I’m going to prolong a negative state. But if I go, “wow, that happened, that kind of sucked” — and get present to what’s actually happening right now, when I’m with you guys — there’s nothing going on that’s stressful, I’m just here with two lovely human beings I get to talk with — that’s a different perspective.

Host: If I go back and look at that — right, what you’ve said is right on, I have a different perspective now on how I want to deal with that. Now, the other thing you’re speaking to — in the book you talk about the energetic xylophone.

Anese: Right — sometimes it might not be authentic, so let’s say, if we look at a xylophone, do-re-mi — we all have our own energetic xylophones, and different emotional states live on that xylophone. At the top, where it’s most clean and clear and lovely, might be emotions like love, amusement, gratitude, contribution — it’s different for everybody, but the top is usually more expansive emotions. At the bottom are the darker, heavier, more contracted emotions — blame, judgment, anger, “CYA” (cover your rear), that kind of thing. There are hundreds of different emotions on the spectrum. So let’s say I come into a call in a state of blame, which is lower on my xylophone — my energy is contracted, nobody’s winning, I’m not fun to be around even if I say “hey, what’s up” and act like everything’s great — you’d still feel that energetically. Let’s say I’m at a three on that xylophone and I want to get to a ten — well, going from a three to a ten might be really inauthentic. Instead, what I want to do is find the next highest state I can authentically reach, to reboot into. We all have our “get out of jail free” cards — states that are easy for us to get to. For me, if I can get to gratitude — “oh my gosh, I’m so grateful we get to have this conversation” — or curiosity, or contribution — if I can get to any of those, I can genuinely and authentically come up to a higher level. It might only be a seven, but that seven is way better than bringing a three, and it becomes a little guardrail, a breadcrumb, to get me to an even clearer state.

Host: Would you say that classifies under rebooting?

Anese: Yeah, definitely — there are different levels. The basic reboot is just being aware of your presence and bringing the presence you want to bring. When it gets more challenging, like what we’re talking about here, you can bring in other tools — there’s something like 70 tools in the methodology at this point, different ways to address the reboot. I think the better you are at building your energetic state — which is the second part of the methodology — proactively, the more resourceful you are and the easier it is to shift. Sometimes the reboot might be, “hey, I just had a death in the family, I actually need to cancel and go take care of myself” — everybody has to listen for themselves what’s true and authentic. I’m not telling anyone to override that — it’s just awareness, and sometimes the most responsible thing a leader can do is cancel something because they need to tend to their well-being.

Host: But how do you implement that in a business? There are a lot of leaders out there dealing with politics — even a high executive dealing with inner politics — it’s really hard to implement as a business.

Anese: That’s why I wrote Contagious You — Contagious Culture was about the organization, but Contagious You is even more about us individually. This isn’t about me looking at the leaders of my company going, “oh, they don’t do that, so it’s going to be hard.” It’s about what I can do, because I’m the only person I have any control over. What I’ve learned is that if a person becomes aware of this — even just aware that their presence has impact — and does their work, they’re more likely to help things go right in the organization, and even inspire a leader who might not have time for this kind of thing. The more present I am, and the more I model that, the more contagious it becomes, and the more likely that person is to meet me there. There’s a modeling of it — I’m going to take care of myself, hold my space, not get sucked into the negativity, you know, Ronen — and there’s an invitation that comes with that modeling, because presence begets more presence. Let’s say the three of us are in a conversation and you’re both on your phones, not totally tuned in — the more present I am and the more I hold that space, it’s contagious, so you’re more likely to step into that. But if I decide not to hold my state and match your negativity instead, now we have a negative contagious spiral and the three of us go down together. So there’s the personal accountability of every person taking responsibility for how they show up — to me that’s the biggest thing. But there’s also a broader piece: you can talk to your team, your boss, whoever, about how you feel about the energetic dynamics in the organization, and what you’d love to see different — that can open up a new conversation about how present you actually are with each other, whether you allow space for emotion, whether you bypass the hard stuff instead of bringing the real stuff to the table.

Host: What would you say is one of your favorite examples of how you’ve implemented this successfully?

Anese: We had a company we worked with that had done a ton of leadership development, Six Sigma, all these different pieces, and they still weren’t getting the impact they wanted. What they found was people were doing the training but the organization’s energy wasn’t actually shifting. So we brought in the IEP methodology and put about 200 people through a two-day intensive. Everybody in that group of 200 started to really get that they were the only person they had control over — there was no point blaming anybody, no looking for someone else to do something differently. It was, “okay, I set the tone.” So they got people practicing being really conscious about their intentions, their energy, what they were bringing into their presence. Once they were aware of that, they started to show up in a way that created more space to look at what they wanted to create as an organization. So they created agreements — things that were most important to them, like time integrity, showing up with clean energy. They agreed that before a meeting they’d set their intentions, be clear about what the meeting was about, and take care of themselves. So then they asked, how do we take care of ourselves better when our meetings run 9 to 10, 10 to 11, 11 to 12? They agreed to make meetings 50 minutes, so they’d have 10 minutes between each one to go be responsible for the bathroom, getting water, rebooting, whatever they needed, so they could come into the next meeting more intentional and productive. That created a ripple — because they were more present, they were able to look at what other agreements they needed around accountability. This particular company — I talk about them in the book — found they were having a hard time holding accountability because they were all so nice to each other, and not holding accountability is, in my mind, an act of leadership cruelty, because it creates ambiguity around expectations, things don’t get done, it gets muddy, and it’s easy to slide into blame. So they created agreements around what accountability meant and how to get clear with each other about expectations. It was a ripple effect — ultimately, that company found that by people simply being aware their presence has impact, and taking ownership for what they brought into the room, all the training they’d done before started to unlock a new level of return on investment, because they realized they’d been doing the training but weren’t actually clean on their intentions, energy, and presence when they were applying the skills. That’s one of my favorites — I’ve got a ton, but that’s the most recent one that stands out.

Host: It sounds like something any company could learn an example from.

Anese: It’s interesting — we purposely put 13 different organizations, of all different sizes and industries, in the book, because to me the most important thing in all of it is that we set the tone, that we take total ownership for how we’re showing up. That ownership might mean I need to take a day off, get therapy, start exercising, start being on time and holding people accountable — whatever it is. If we take that on, it’s contagious, because presence begets more presence, accountability inspires more accountability, kindness is contagious — all of these things. Leadership is contagious when it’s done with good intentions and good energy, just like blame is contagious, being late is contagious, lack of accountability is contagious — it’s all contagious. We get to choose, but we have no control over anybody around us, so if we want to see the change, it’s like Gandhi — you’ve got to be the change you want to see.

[There’s a brief, good-natured aside where one host explains he’s been turning away from the camera because he’s about to blow his nose, and apologizes; Anese and the other host reassure him and turn it into a live example of the IEP concept they’d just been discussing.]

Anese: It’s actually an interesting thing, though — you just addressed the environmental energy happening here, because you named something that was happening in the room, which I was starting to feel — I was starting to think I needed to speed this up and get through this content faster because I thought I was losing you. That was an assumption I was making, and that’s what we do in business — you named what was actually happening, so now we can all just let it be, no big deal. But that right there is IEP.

Host: It’s just a very good example, because the example is on my own expense, which is amazing.

Anese: Well, and here’s the other thing — you should leave this in — you’re blowing your nose, you’re taking care of yourself. You could have called in sick for this, you didn’t have to come, you wanted to be here, you wanted to bring yourself to this call, so you’re fully here, and you’re going to take care of yourself, which is great IEP. And there’s also responsibility happening — we’re naming what’s going on so we eliminate wasted bandwidth, because what was happening for me was I kept seeing you turn away, and I started making up stories about what could be happening, which means you guys weren’t getting a hundred percent of me — maybe five percent. This happens in daily life, every day, and this is one of those things where, if we just did that one little tweak — “hey guys, just so you know, I’m going to blow my nose a couple times today, so when I turn away or leave the room, that’s why” — naming what’s happening releases the energy that would otherwise go into people speeding up or getting anxious.

Host: That’s magic — that’s leadership, and that’s part of the IEP work. I love that, but here’s what’s scary on the other side — using imagination and empathy to think about the other side of that: if I’m working for someone and my leader hasn’t read your book and hasn’t tried to apply that transparency and vulnerability, the employee has to strategize how to work the politics, how to get up the hierarchy. It’s scary and fearful for an employee to show that kind of vulnerability — say a deadline is coming and they’re just not in the state of mind to work that day. They may not be able to say that, even if it takes a leap of faith. Whereas when a leader shows vulnerability, it builds likability, because people understand you’re human too — but sometimes an employee doesn’t even have that choice. From a leadership point of view I really understand that — do you believe that applies on the other side, to an employee who isn’t a leader?

Anese: Well, I think every single person is a leader — I think leadership is a choice. Whether you’re an employee, the CEO, the janitor, or a stay-at-home parent, I hold that leadership is something we choose, because if we’re not leading our own lives, who is? What you’re talking about is hierarchy — that employee has someone they report to. For that employee, if they want to be a leader in their life, the leadership act might be: “I really don’t feel like working today, but we have this deadline” — well, the leadership in that is doing whatever energetic hygiene I need to do to take care of myself so I can get in and get the job done. It’s not just, “I don’t feel like doing this today so I won’t” — the leadership is, “I don’t feel like it, but we’ve got this thing to do, so I’m going to reboot, take a break, go for a quick walk,” whatever that is. The other leadership act might be being really honest with the team — “I’m really glad we have this opportunity, I am feeling low motivation today, and I’m also going to take care of myself so I can get back in here and get this done — here’s some support I need, could somebody talk to me for five minutes and remind me why we’re doing this work?” That’s a leadership act, too. Authenticity and telling the truth creates more authenticity and telling the truth — it creates permission for other people, and there’s a way that when somebody tells the truth about what’s going on for them, it releases the energy of trying to do it “right.” Even that employee saying, “I’m really having a rough day today, but I know we’re on this deadline, I’m struggling with X, Y, and Z, but I’m here, I’m going to do it, here’s some support I need” — asking for support is a leadership act. If the leader in the company can be open to that, going, “great, how can I support you?” — that’s something we see happen all the time. We’ll do an energy check where everyone says where they’re at from zero to ten, and if someone’s at a two, the leader can ask, “what do you need to shift your state?” The minute you insert curiosity and care, that person is often at a six or seven — it’s that simple.

Host: You mentioned before having people observe your own meetings and give you feedback — how did that affect you?

Anese: I often find — I don’t know if you feel this too — that if a colleague I really like is in the room, I’m more nervous speaking to a room of ten people who are my closest colleagues, whom I love and respect, than speaking to a room of 5,000 people I don’t know well. There’s a vulnerability there. What I’ve found in my life — and I don’t think I’m alone in this — is that when I became more committed to impact and doing my craft really well, when I let being of service to people and doing my best work be more important than my discomfort, my ego, or my need to do things “right,” that allowed me to be more open to feedback — to have people come sit and observe me and give me honest feedback about what worked and what didn’t. For anyone getting coaching or performance feedback, wanting to increase their superpowers — we’re too close to ourselves to see our blind spots and our edges, and that’s just life. The fact that you want to improve means you already have a major superpower, because some people just don’t care. So, one, recognize you’re too close to it, and be willing to ask for help — and if that’s scary and daunting, let that be okay too, because our egos are alive and well and we care about what we’re doing. If I can focus on my intention — in my case, anytime I get feedback, or build a new part of the methodology, my intention is to be as useful and helpful as possible, so I’m going to do the very best I can with the knowledge and skill set I have right now, put it out there, and ask for support to make it even better — if my intention is truly of service rather than about me looking good, it becomes a lot easier, because the minute I make it about me, my ego confines how far I can go, and I go into a state of fear. If I stay in service, I’ve been doing my best, I can trust that, and I get expansion — I can handle feedback and actually convert it into something useful, because I’m tuned into the greater cause, which also makes it easier to notice which feedback is useful and which isn’t. All of what we’re talking about becomes easier the more we take care of ourselves — and that’s the second part of the methodology: building a strong energetic foundation. That’s where our nutrition, sleep, self-care, exercise, and self-talk come in — every single thing we do is either building our energetic field, making it stronger and more conscious, or depleting it, making us more exhausted and less grounded. I want to pay attention to everything I do proactively to set myself up, because if I’m exhausted I’m going to be more in a state of ego, more in a state of protection, not in my best resourced state — but if I take care of myself and come from my best resourced state, everything we’ve talked about becomes so much easier.

Host: I think we skipped a step — we started talking about showing up and rebooting, and then what are the next ones?

Anese: The next one is building a strong energetic field and foundation — that’s the self-care piece, everything we just talked about, paying attention to how things make you feel and how you set yourself up for success. That’s happening in every single moment — right now, this call, beyond the topic we’re discussing, is either adding to my field or depleting it. This adds to my field, and part of the reason is I took really good care of myself this morning — I’m hydrated and present, and the only thing on my mind for this entire interview is you two and your audience, that’s it. The other reason it’s additive is because it’s in service — I’m here to serve your audience, and that serves my bigger purpose of creating positive impact in the world. Also, you two are lovely to hang out with. If instead you two didn’t want me on your show and were negative the whole time, that would deplete my energy — it would become my job, as a leader, to learn how to be with you even though you’re being negative, and not let that deplete my energy. It’s totally doable if I took care of myself before the call and I’m present and working my IEP — you guys can throw anything at me, it’s not going to feel good, I’m not going to love it, but I’ll be better able to hold my state, do my very best, and not be totally wiped out afterward. If you were super negative with me, when I left the call I’d want to do a quick reboot, bubble up, take care of myself to clear that energy. The point is, the stronger I am in setting myself up on that foundation ahead of time and throughout my life, the more resilient and calm I am, and the better able to reboot and do whatever I need to have the best impact possible.

Host: I believe in that 100%. I’d like to take it to a different world — every athlete or performer does exactly that: they take care of everything so they get to that point perfectly focused and energetic. There’s no reason someone who’s a leader in any organization, or a leader in life, shouldn’t do the same.

Anese: Yeah — it’s our responsibility to take exquisite care of ourselves so we can lead well in our worlds. I think of not taking care of ourselves and then leading other people, projecting our exhaustion or bad attitude or negative energy onto them, as a kind of violence.

Host: There’s a sense — tell me if I’m wrong — of responsibility for a leader: if you’re performing, say you’re a great singer, you have a whole team that’s worked all year for that performance, and if you’re not in the right state of mind, you’re being irresponsible to everyone else.

Anese: Yeah, and even simpler — let’s say I’m the leader on the team and I’m going to give you feedback on your performance. If I don’t manage myself, don’t manage my energy, I’m not being intentional or present with you, and I’m projecting all my stuff from this morning onto our conversation about your leadership and your career, that’s a form of violence, to me. These are strong words, but I feel strongly about it. People want to write off self-care — “I don’t have time for self-care, I’m a leader, this is soft stuff, I don’t want it” — and I really get that, but I also see how important it is for helping the people around us grow and for getting our best results. It’s important that we take care of ourselves so we can serve and lead to our best capacity — not just for other people, but for ourselves, because if I’m wiped out when I leave my job and go home to my partner and kids and project more stuff onto them, I’m creating more negative impact — it comes back around. I always come back to: how are you taking care of yourself, how are you setting yourself up from an intentional energetic presence standpoint, so you can do your very best — and when your very best doesn’t happen, so you can recover quickly, learn from it, and get back out there.

I don’t know if I mentioned, when we were at INBOUND, the leadership trifecta — what I’ve found over the years of doing this work is there are three things we have to have intact, or something’s depleted. I noticed three kinds of leaders coming to me. The first had great impact — got the job done, made good money for the company, had all the credentials — but they were super burnt out, not taking care of themselves, their marriages were falling apart, their health wasn’t great — not sustainable. They had the impact piece but not the self-care piece. The second kind of leader had self-care down — worked 9 to 5, had perfect balance, ate whole foods, exercised every day — but wasn’t effective, wasn’t having impact, wasn’t paying attention to that. So you’ve got self-care without impact — also not sustainable, because I’m not interested in a world where we all take great care of ourselves but don’t care about impact, about actually getting things done. The third piece is the people component — a third kind of leader has impact down and self-care down, gets great results, takes great care of themselves, but leaves dead bodies everywhere they go — the people who work for them do it because they have to, not because they want to; they’re exhausted, and the leader is getting results at the expense of the human beings around them. So you need all three — the ability to create impact, take care of yourself, and meet people where they’re at in a way that actually inspires them to work with you. If you get that trifecta going, you have a chance at more sustainable, unflagging leadership.

Host: That makes perfect sense — I want to close the previous circle: you show up, you reboot, you take care of yourself, and the last one—

Anese: Oh, thank you for bringing back the last one — you create intentional impact. So: reboot your presence, build a strong energetic field — that’s number two — create intentional impact is number three. There’s actually a five-step framework for creating intentional impact that I take people through in the books. If I want to create an outcome for a conversation I’m having — maybe with my child about something tender, or a board meeting I’m running, or a project we’re starting — if I apply these five steps and work myself through them, I’m more likely to create the intentional impact I want.

Host: Do you want to give us the five steps?

Anese: Sure. The first step is: for this meeting, this conversation, whatever it is — even for my own day, I have these IEP sheets I do every morning, or on my best mornings — you look at what outcomes you want to create. An outcome is what you want to have happened by the end that wouldn’t have happened had you not had this meeting — so, very clear outcomes. The next thing you look at is the emotional impact you want to create — how do you want people to feel in the conversation, and how do you want to feel? You can’t control how someone feels, but you can set an intention for it, and you’re more likely to create that if you’re intentional about it. The third thing is how you’ll have to show up in order to create those outcomes and that impact — your presence, your tone of voice, maybe even what you’re wearing — coming from a state of curiosity or service, whatever it is. The fourth step is what you’ll have to believe in order to show up that way congruently — this is a big one; I’ve been teaching this work for twenty years and I still do this for myself every day. For example, if I want to show up feeling really happy to be here, I have to believe you guys want me here, that this content is meaningful and useful, that I’m the right person for it, that I believe in the product I’m selling, or that I believe in the person I’m giving feedback to — or, if I can’t quite believe that, I can at least believe they’re a human being, and that I’m going to give it my best and give them space to step in. So it’s about getting really clear on what you actually have to believe. And the fifth step is what you actually have to do — that’s where you show up on time, prepare for your meeting, do a follow-up. Ironically, the fifth step is the easiest, if you’ve done the first four.

Host: If you don’t believe in your — that could be the root of insecurities. You could believe in your message and everything you’ve detailed for this interview, but maybe you’re insecure and feel like you’re not the right person, not good enough.

Anese: Right — I’ve walked into rooms before where I haven’t been able to align with what everybody wants to hear, because I know they don’t. So for me to say, “I believe everybody wants to be here, this is going to be a great, easy session” — that would be an inauthentic belief if I’m just hooking onto it. There’s a whole “fake it till you make it” approach I can play into a little, but if I want to go in congruently, I have to check myself and be honest — if I don’t actually believe this is going to be the easiest day, I can look for the smallest thing I can believe that helps me show up authentically. So the belief might be, “I believe there is something in this content for every human being, even if they don’t realize it right now, or won’t for five years” — that gives me a little more strength going in. Or, “I believe I’ve done my best to prepare for this, I’m going to give it a hundred percent” — I’m congruent there.

Host: So it’s not necessarily what you have to believe in order for it to succeed, but the minimal amount of belief you need in order to make it a success?

Anese: Yeah, and I think it could be both — I’ve done it both ways. Sometimes I go through it and name what I have to believe, and if I find I can’t actually believe it, I might ask, do I want to adopt that belief and kind of fake it till I make it — that can work well too. I might adopt a belief like, “everyone wants me here,” even if I’m totally wrong, and that belief might give me enough energy and strength to actually change people’s minds — it’ll help me be more resilient if they don’t want me there. You could argue it the other way too — if you don’t have that belief, you have basically no chance of succeeding; at least with the belief you have a minimum chance. So I’d offer: name what you have to believe, and if you really can’t believe that, ask what’s the smallest thing you could believe. Number four is really about getting clear on what you actually believe.

I’ll give you an example — I had a group I was working with that kept hitting a snag. When I took them through the five-step intentional impact framework, they were going in to meet a client to sell the final stage of a project, and they weren’t in alignment as a team. I sat down with them and said, “let’s look at what’s going on with your five-step impact for this meeting.” Outcomes — good, that was clear. Emotional impact — good. How do you need to show up? As a team, aligned — okay, great. What do you have to believe in order to show up aligned? That’s where it fell apart — we found there were team dynamics where they didn’t necessarily believe in the team’s ability to do the work, and one person didn’t believe in the product they were representing. They were close to not believing in their own capacity, or in the product — they weren’t going to have a good meeting going in like that. Once we named it, we ended up taking more time, but it was worth it — we asked, what would need to be present for you to believe in the product? That opened up an interesting conversation, and it turned out they needed to change some of the messaging, because they didn’t believe the product could do all the things they were claiming. Once they said, “actually, if we just said it can do three of these things instead of five, that feels more congruent, and if the other two happen, great, bonus” — they could believe in the three. And naming the dynamics of not believing in each other opened up new agreements around who needed help and how. Every piece of it is just another opportunity for the next level of communication, so anything can be figured out. But if they’d gone in with that energy, not in alignment, not believing it, no matter how great their content was, the client would have felt that, and they’d probably have been more exhausted. Once they did that work, they went in cleaner, with better agreements, more congruent, and got the deal — client happy.

Host: So tell me, what would you say your superpower is?

Anese: My superpower is devotion. There are 21 superpowers I talk about in the book, plus others outside the book, but I love superpowers. I have an ability to see any side of anything — I can very quickly see where people are coming from and why, and the impact that has when there are differences in the room, so that’s a superpower. I also have the ability to love people really quickly — I can love any human being fast, no matter where they’re coming from, and see their heart and what they’re wanting to create. But my superpower is devotion — to me, devotion means a level of presence and care about doing whatever needs to be done to create the impact you want. I actually have it tattooed on my wrist.

Host: I’m loving your superpowers — we ask this question every time, because we also believe, like you do, that everybody has unique special abilities, at least one superpower, even if they don’t see it in themselves. I love your first one, by the way — seeing the room quickly, understanding dynamics — I call it empathy, being in everybody’s shoes, and it has to do with charisma too. And I love devotion as a superpower — even if it’s not something someone else would name for you, if you believe that’s your superpower, it’s still your superpower.

Anese: I love that. And my kryptonite — my kryptonite is flexibility, which I really have to work on managing.

Host: You’re not — you are flexible?

Anese: I really am, and I really work on managing this one. Here’s the thing — any superpower, done unconsciously or overdone, becomes kryptonite. With devotion, if I’m not paying attention, I can get swallowed up in it — I might work too much to make something happen. With flexibility, which is also one of my superpowers — flexibility is great, but the kryptonite side is I can be so flexible that I try to make everybody happy, try to make something work for everyone, and that creates more confusion and doesn’t hold a strong leadership container for people.

Host: It’s actually — it means your energy becomes the construct of what everything is standing on, and then it’s not a real environment, it’s just the one you made.

Anese: Yeah, I totally get that. I worked on this for a long time, because originally I wanted to be flexible — flexibility ties into my ability to see all sides of things, and my ability to love people quickly — but that can also be kryptonite, because I can see the good so quickly that I sometimes don’t see the bad, and don’t hold accountability to it as quickly. So every one of these superpowers is something you have to stay conscious with and continue to use intentionally, otherwise they can flip into kryptonite.

Host: I understand that completely, and I love it, because it’s very true — the best sentence was: a superpower, if you use it too much, can be kryptonite. That’s really smart — it’s like a lens for the way we look at superpowers in general. I think it’s a really interesting exercise, when you ask people about their superpowers, to follow it through and see how it can become their kryptonite.

Anese: Definitely — in the book I talk about thirty-one forms of kryptonite that often come off of our superpowers. It could be an interesting thing for you guys to ask people on the show — how does your superpower eventually transfer over to kryptonite?

Host: I’m actually asking myself that question right now.

Anese: I love that. Well, I have no answer, because I’m applying your first lesson of actually being present.

Host: Let’s play that one through — how does authenticity turn into kryptonite if it’s used unintentionally or overdone?

Anese: Oh, I have an easy answer to that — it’s when you become too transparent about your weaknesses in circumstances where there’s no need for it. Or you vomit your stuff all over your team and say, “well, I’m just being real” — I’ve had people say to me, “I’m an authentic jerk, what do I do with that?” And I say, “well, does that really serve what you’re trying to do in the world?” Time integrity is an interesting one too — I know people who have a real superpower around being on time, they really want to honor time, which is lovely, but overdone it makes them very rigid, inflexible, and intolerant of any kind of humanness around time integrity. Any single superpower, overdone or used unconsciously, becomes kryptonite.

Host: Amazing. Before we finish, the most beautiful thing I got from this conversation is that story you told — because at the end of the day, everything you’re doing in life traces back to that same 14-year-old girl in Baskin-Robbins: you took a breath, got present, and decided what you wanted the outcome to be, and from that moment you put yourself in that state of mind — which is basically what you’ve been doing your whole life. It’s amazing that you found that, and it’s really inspiring.

Anese: That’s true — I am still that little fourteen-year-old girl, getting it forward and eating as much world-class chocolate as I possibly can. I don’t tell that story very often — only when it comes up organically — and I appreciate that reflection. I think every moment of our lives is a choice point — every moment we’re given the choice of do I want to go this way or that way, and whatever we choose is what we make stronger. So deciding is a superpower — I write about that in the book — the superpower of deciding. As soon as you have awareness, you’re at choice, and you get to decide what you want to do. As soon as I decide something — the Latin root of “decide” means to cut off — when I decide to do something, I’m eliminating the option not to do it. If I decide to be happy, that doesn’t mean I don’t have authentically hard days — it’s hard sometimes, in life, at all — but it means I have to make sure I get support so I can fully have that hard time, learn from it, feel it, integrate it, and keep going forward.

Host: Something to always remind ourselves of.

Anese: That’s it, real quick, because I promised you guys a link — people can go to ieptoio.com [exact URL uncertain from audio] — that’s where a secret page has the IEP sheet and other downloads, it’s free, we just want people to have it and use it. They can also find me on Twitter and at AneseCavanaugh.com, and of course they can go buy a copy of the new book, or the previous one.

Host: Yes, please do — I want that book in as many hearts, heads, and hands as possible.

Anese: I want us all to work on being more contagious together and really enjoying our lives — it doesn’t have to be hard and stressful. Hard and stressful stuff happens, and we can still do really great things alongside it.

Host: So thank you so much for doing this.

Anese: Thank you so much — we have so much food for thought right now.

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We have the technology. Real Life Superpowers.

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