Today’s interview is with Anese Cavanaugh, creator of the IEP Method® (Intentional Energetic Presence®), an advisor and thinking partner to leaders and organizations around the world, a keynote speaker, and author of the books Contagious Culture and Contagious You. She joins me today to talk about showing up, leadership, the IEP Method, what we can learn from it and how it can help us deliver better service and experience outcomes.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Why we are building the Women In CX community – Interview with Clare Muscutt – and is number 359 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Pegasystems for sponsoring my podcast for the coming month.

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Here’s the highlights of my chat with Anese:

• The IEP methodology is all about helping people show up really well for themselves in terms of their presence as a leader and their self care and how that helps the people that they’re leading and their organizations.
• What I’ve found over twenty years of doing this work is that our leadership impact is really about how we show up and who we are. It’s how we make people feel. It’s the energy that we put out there. It’s our ability to lead in a way that inspires people to follow us and be with us versus work with us because they have to, because we’re giving them a pay-check.
• This applies to leaders no matter what position they’re in the company, whether they are the CEO or a front-line administrator.
• Culture is a result of every single one of us and how we show up.
• Contagious Culture is for organizations, team building and culture while Contagious You is for digging into your deeper leadership style and owning that you’re contagious.
• IEP stands for the Intentional Energetic Presence method and is about being intentional about the energy that you bring to everything that you do.
• Self care is a really big part of IEP.
• The methodology is basically broken into three parts. The first part is your ability to reboot your presence in the moment. The second is the ability to build a strong, energetic field and foundation and that includes the food that I eat, the thoughts that I think etc and the third is about building potential impact.
• Leadership starts with yourself and not the skills that you have developed. That’s how you build better relationships with your team members.
• Being intentional in your leadership and really showing up will give you more freedom. But, it will also give the people around you more freedom to show up as themselves.
• And, that is contagious.
• The method contains twenty one practices around how to build that the sort of energetic, contagious presence and in the interview Anese goes onto a few of them to provide some insight on what they are and how and when they can be used.
• My favourite: When furious, Get curious.
• I hold every single human being as a leader because if you are not leading your life then who’s leading it.
• The best, first step for people wanting to more intentional, to develop their own intentional energetic presence and become more contagious: Stop and take a pause. Create some space for you in your life where you can actually get to be present with yourself to see how you’re feeling, to give yourself an honest assessment of where you’re at, what you want, what’s really important to you and to have an honest conversation with yourself around what your level of self care is.
• Anese’s Punk CX word(s): Positively Usefully Contagious (P.U.C).
• Anese’s Punk CX brand: Zingerman’s

About Anese

Anese Cavanaugh is 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 is the creator of the IEP Method® (Intentional Energetic Presence®), an advisor and thinking partner to leaders and organizations around the world, a keynote speaker, and author of CONTAGIOUS CULTURE: Show Up, Set the Tone, and Intentionally Create an Organization That Thrives (McGraw-Hill, 2015), CONTAGIOUS YOU: Unlock Your Power to Influence, Lead, and Create the Impact You Want (McGraw-Hill, 2019), and THE LEADER YOU WILL BE: An Invitation (a leadership storybook).

As a leading voice on intention, energy, and presence in leadership and culture, she helps people unlock greater leadership potential, collaborate more inspiringly, create more openly, intuit more bravely, and lead more joyfully and effectively. Top innovators and executives in companies like IDEO, Zingerman’s, Cooper, GM Financial, Vistaprint, 15Five, Fitbit, Vivayic, Kaiser Permanente, and others have engaged with Anese to strengthen team health, maximize leadership impact, and optimize company culture. In addition to appearing in publications like Harvard Business Review, The Huffington Post, CEO.com, Forbes, the NY Times, and others, Anese has a column, “Showing Up” on Inc.com and writes regularly for subscribers of AneseCavanaugh.com.

Check out Anese’s books, take a look at her website , feel free to say Hi to her on Twitter and Instagram @AneseCavanaugh and @anesecavanaugh respectively and don’t forget to connect with her on LinkedIn.

Image by John Hain from Pixabay