E21 - Anese Cavanaugh (Award-winning leadership advisor, strategist and author)

In this episode we speak with Anese Cavanaugh. Anese 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 appears on stages around the world, guest lectures at universities, and writes (a lot). She is the creator of the IEP Method® (Intentional Energetic Presence®). Listen on RealLifeSuperPowers website: https://reallifesuperpowers.com/podcast/anese-cavanaugh-award-winning-leadership-advisor-strategist-and-aurhor/ 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 and CONTAGIOUS YOU: Unlock Your Power to Influence Lead and Create the Impact you Want (which was released a few weeks ago). Her areas of expertise are on topics we’re passionate about and try to uncover in this podcast. She’s a leading voice on intention, energy, and presence, she helps people unlock greater leadership potential, collaborate more inspiringly, create more openly, intuit more bravely, and lead more joyfully and effectively. She believes that we all have our divine areas of expertise and talents and gifts, and that part of the reason why we’re on the planet is to pay those gifts forward. At 14 years old, she desperately needed a job so as to be able to help out with bills at home, following her parents’ messy divorce. This lead her to lie on her application and say she was actually 15. By the end of the interview, she admitted that she had lied. They surprised her by hiring her anyway based on her integrity and the fact that she came forward with the truth. “I remember the feeling in my body of being afraid to tell the truth but knowing it was the right thing to do. That was a major moment, where I got in touch with what integrity meant and how good that felt and that I wanted more of it”. Later on, after starting that job, she was having a hard time with her family’s situation and the things she had to give up in order to support the family. She was feeling sorry for herself and thinking how terrible her life was going to be. She then suddenly thought “what if your life doesn’t have to be terrible? What if what’s happening isn’t happening to you but for you? And it’s giving you skills that you can learn?” In that moment she got in touch with the concept of choice. Right then and there she made a decision to live a really awesome life. As you’ll hear, Anese is very visceral and connected to her feelings. As such, she was able to achieve a very high level of flow in her work and pay forward her insights in a way that’s very intuitive to relate to and learn from. We cover a lot of ground: - The impact of how the way we show up to situations has on everything that we do - How the way we take care of ourselves influences our ability to influence other people - How post-it notes and vision lead her to her dream occupation doing what she loves and fulfilling herself - How the choices we make become choice points affecting our future choices and forming new neural-pathways in our brains - The importance of emotional authenticity - How holding accountability is essential for organisational success - How true leadership isn’t possible without self-care ...& much more About half way through our video call, Ronen had to step out of shot several times in order to go blow his nose. Naturally he didn’t want to interrupt the recording and the flow of the conversation but it was becoming odd not to explain to Anese what was going on. This became a real life lesson in what Anese is preaching - the environmental energy was shifting around those circumstances and by addressing it we were able to put Anese at ease and confirm this had nothing to do with our conversation. Had we not done that, this would be hanging over our heads, unspoken of, and we wouldn’t have had her full emotional bandwidth.