About Active Choices, Inc.

Our clients say we build creative leaders, make people better,
and get people having honest conversations.

We are driven by helping people and organizations show up in a way that helps them create alignment and ease with themselves, solid resilient leadership with those they love and lead, a healthy productively contagious culture, and ultimately positive impact in the world.

Active Choices, Inc. is a strategic advisory and training firm that specializes in creating authentic Positive Energy Workplaces and leadership through its proprietary methodology and proven impact model, the IEP Method®. We’ve been building psychological safety and security; honest conversations, connection, and collaboration; and positive energy workplaces and leadership since 2002. We partner with our clients to create real and sustainable change through strategic discovery, training and workshops, executive retreats, keynotes, and enterprise-wide integrations. Learn more about our methodology here.

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ACI was founded in 2002 by Anese Cavanaugh who saw the essentialness of Showing Up, self-awareness, honest reflection, being present and intentional, and taking care of ourselves in relationship to healthy leadership and creating a positive impact in the world. Over the last twenty years in working with organizations big and small and business leaders of all kinds, Anese created the IEP Method® (Intentional Energetic Presence®) to support clients in integrating some of the most essential components of leadership, well-being, accountability, integrity, and energy management into one model.

In 2021, after working with organizations in both cultural “triage” and “optimization” modes, she created the Positive Energy Workplace Initiative™ to give companies a framework for creating not only solid business results, but more importantly, authentic (not toxic) positive energy and well-being in the company and people. Seeing the effects of this work on others, and experiencing it for themselves, she and her team have an insatiable hunger and drive for paying this work forward.

Common Times to Start Working With Us.

You have infighting or accountability and communication issues between leaders that are threatening a client project or team health and you need to get them realigned and focused on the right things.

You’ve just lost a major client or had a critical project stall — due to a lack of productive communication, honest feedback, or clarity in collaboration needs — and you need to get it back on track immediately.

stress and overwhelm

You have a high-stakes upcoming executive meeting or conference scheduled, or you are about to launch a new training initiative, and you want to make sure that people show up well, are clear, present, and intentional, and create the best experience and results possible.

You’re doing a lot of training or cultural change initiatives, but they’re not working (or perhaps need some optimization). They maybe feeling more like a “flavor-of-the-month,” or you’re not getting your optimal ROI on them, and/or (even worse) people are doing the skills learned, but they’re still not showing up well doing them — costing you more time, energy, money, and credibility — and you’ve had enough.

You’ve completed your Employee Engagement Survey and one or more business units are below the acceptable norm.

You’re promoting or onboarding 10 or more people into leadership roles and want to make sure they’re set up with a good foundation so that any other training you do is more effective and they are a cultural-enhancer from the start.

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 The energy of your company just feels “blech,” disorganized, confused, anxious, and/or exhausted — and you’d really like to cut through it all and get back on track for creating solid results AND feeling good

Anese B&W

How We Work

There are several pathways to creating usefully contagious leadership and authentically Positive Energy Workplaces with our clients. We offer a range of experiences from enterprise-wide solutions for the whole organization to online self-study courses. Our approach is bespoke for each company we work with and may include a combination of consulting, training, retreats, coaching, cohorts, keynotes, and more. Each engagement includes our proprietary ACI Client Journey which involves a Discovery Phase and a Positive Energy Workplace™ Diagnostic, for assessing needs and crafting an ideal engagement to optimize your experience and results.

The best way to proceed is to contact us for an Exploratory Conversation to see how we might partner together.

Paying It Forward

We do our best to pay this work forward in multiple ways and we do it in community. When you participate in this work with me, you pay-it-forward, not only with the people you love and lead, but in supporting others. We contribute 10% of our annual profits to supporting food security and our Impact Scholarship Fund which expands access to our programs to leaders from traditionally underserved and underrepresented groups, or who’ve been significantly impacted by the pandemic, for whom paying full fees in our programs would be prohibitive in helping them get the support they want/need.

Ready to Learn More?

Anese can be found on podcasts, in columns, on (virtual) stages, on the blog, and in social media. You can also learn more about the IEP Method® and ACI’s work with partners in Anese’s books

 

Why is this Work Important?