With Twenty-Four Years in Business, Leading Leaders, and Building Healthy Organizations, We’ve Had a Few Chapters.

Hi! I’m Anese Cavanaugh. I started Active Choices, Inc. (ACI) in 2002. Very few people know I actually started it the first time in 1999. I built the company, the website, the business cards (back when we still used those), set up my office… and then waited for the phone to ring.

I built it. No one came.

Over the next six months, I slowly realized I had zero idea what I was doing, and I shut it down the moment a cushy job with a steady salary came my way. Phew. Little did I know that years later, after my first child turned one, I’d be inspired to try again — this time with education, training, and a lot more grace and grit.

ACI was born again in 2002, and I started slow. A hobby business, really. I had a little one and a husband, and my devotion was there. But I loved what I was quietly building. I came from a background in kinesiology, fitness, health, and productivity — human performance was my jam. I was obsessed with how health and vitality shaped leadership and one’s capacity to actually show up. I got certifications and credentials in coaching and leadership. I started weaving those pieces together, and steadily (not without many bumps) built what’s now the IEP Method® (Intentional Energetic Presence®).

Every year, I grew the work, and it grew me. By 2007, with two littles now, I realized I had a real business on my hands. I grew that too. The methodology took shape — it had three different names before I finally landed on Intentional Energetic Presence in 2013. I took a step back and, with the help of many looking at the patterns and themes for how I worked with people, we distilled it down into a core methodology. Once it had a name and solid frameworks behind it, the work took off a bit more. Many still laughed at it, after all, “What is this woo-woo energy in business thing anyway?” (That never felt awesome, but I felt more devoted to the work than approval, so I kept going.) I wrote, consulted, coached, and taught thousands of people and hundreds of companies, across almost every industry you can name. Every advisor, coach, mentor, and agent pushed me to niche down, brand up, get bigger, be fancier. (One agent wanted me to brand myself as “Just ANESE”. All caps, ANESE. Oy.) I just wanted to do good work, be human, and serve. There are plenty of stories about the hard and very humbling lessons I learned whenever I overrode my own knowing and skipped listening to God to chase advice that didn’t actually fit me.

Somewhere in there, I realized I was learning — painfully, in real time — the very thing I was here to teach: that listening to yourself (and to God), taking care of yourself, and practicing present, aligned, congruent, in-service-of leadership, is EVERYTHING. Without it, we’re toast. I got a lot of fieldwork in proving that one. I still learn it every day.

During the pandemic, after I released CONTAGIOUS YOU—a book that called people contagious in a different kind of way—my company went off a cliff. Eighty percent of my bookings (and book sales) were canceled. My team and I got to work. We tried 18 experiments to “meet the moment” and make the work easier for people to adopt with different kinds of training. We learned every single time that we could best serve by holding strong and steady with the basics of IEP; we did. In the longer term, we learned that the IEP work made all the other programs and initiatives companies were doing more effective, increased their ROI, and also left their employees and leaders feeling more present, energized, and resilient for work and the rest of their lives.

Along the way (with much of this coming after the pandemic), I built a program called Stewardship to train others — mostly educators — to teach this work and pay it forward. I worked with law enforcement and the Navy. I went to South Africa. I worked with inner-city programs to help them scale (and to help their leaders manage their own well-being and vitality), and with companies of every size and industry to help them build healthy leadership, innovation, and collaboration. I wrote 7 books (and counting), did podcasts and interviews galore, gave hundreds of talks, and built the IEP Method training library out to over 70 frameworks and labs — complete with an app and a full LMS. I created the Presence Protocol Program and the 7 Levels of Presence and The Confidence Equation. I also launched the Positive Energy Workplace Initiative® and its Organizational Certification Program — which I shut down four years later, once I realized it was just a Band-Aid if the core work wasn’t staying in alignment.

I scaled from just me, to two part-time assistants and me, to a full team of 16 employees and contractors. And then back down — to me and a small, devoted team whose focus and energy are clearer than ever.

Every single step of the way, every “win” and every “failure” has shown one core theme—our IEP and how we show up, take care of ourselves, serve, stay present, and stay connected, is again, everything…

JENNY WILEY

Membership & Community Specialist