Activate Your Leadership and Congruency and Become the Leader You Will Be

As leaders, we work hard to inspire others, build meaningful relationships, and create lasting change within our organizations. Yet, despite our best efforts — whether through learning new skills, launching initiatives, attending therapy, or doing all the “right” things — we often find ourselves overwhelmed, reworking tasks, burning out, and unintentionally damaging relationships. In our rush to improve, we frequently overlook our most valuable leadership asset: our presence.

Your presence is your impact, and when you reflect on challenges like burnout, rework, lost time, misalignment, conflict, poor results, or feeling unseen, a lack of presence is often the root cause. Fortunately, by activating your Intentional Energetic Presence® (IEP), you can regain control, improve relationships, and lead more effectively.

In this experiential keynote, Anese leverages insights from her book Contagious You to explore the concept of presence and its critical connection to leadership. She dismantles the three biggest myths that hinder presence, explores how presence is tied to your relationship with yourself, and demonstrates how strengthening your energetic presence helps you build resilience from external pressures and supports your ability to effectively inspire yourself and influence others.

You’ll learn how presence impacts teams, relationships, and everyday interactions — from boardrooms to personal dynamics. Anese will share practical strategies to quickly recover from energetic misalignment, navigate low-energy environments, and align the collective energy of teams. Her message is clear: when you own your energy, align with yourself, and approach leadership with intentionality and presence, you can transform your impact.

An Invitation to a New Kind of Leadership in 2025

Leadership is evolving — and what got us here won’t get us where we need to go. In fact, holding onto outdated approaches may hold us back. To navigate the future, leaders must cultivate a deeper level of intention, energy, and presence — starting with who they are becoming.

Inspired by Anese’s spoken word leadership poem, The Leader You Will Be: An Invitation is a powerful call to step into a new level of intentionality and conscious choice in how we show up and lead. With seven core principles to embody, this piece resonates deeply — impacting not only professional lives but personal lives as well.

Create a (Sustainable and Authentic) Positively Contagious Culture From the Inside Out

It’s a common misconception that leadership development and culture change can be transformed through strengths assessments, feedback frameworks, or an emotional intelligence workshop. While these ‘outside-in’ approaches are marketed widely, they rarely lead to lasting leadership behavior changes or genuine culture shifts. True and sustainable transformation begins from the inside out — through how you show up every day and the Intentional Energetic Presence® (IEP) you bring.

In this insightful session, Anese dismantles the three greatest myths that undermine sustainable organizational health today, showing how to foster a contagious, positively contagious culture — whether in person or remote.

You’ll learn how real culture change starts with you, and how the IEP Method® creates energy accountability that drives collaboration, open communication, trust, and resilience.

With transformative tools and frameworks, this session equips you to position your culture for long-term success, ensuring authentic positivity and resilience across your organization.

Activate Your Leadership and Workforce for Greater Innovation and Performance

The true pulse of your company’s success can’t be measured by engagement surveys — it’s driven by the energy and vitality of your leadership and workforce. While many companies rely on engagement metrics to assess workforce health, they often miss three crucial truths: engagement is a lagging indicator (by the time you measure it, the damage is done); energy can be shifted instantly to create a more engaged and productive future; and it’s up to every leader to create true culture transformation.

Year after year, organizations invest billions in engagement initiatives and training programs, yet continue to face losses from disengagement, eroding trust, and declining retention rates. To cultivate a truly healthy organization that drives sustainable innovation and results, leaders must move beyond surface-level programs and quick-fix culture solutions, and adopt a fresh approach that builds deeper trust, transparency, and collaboration.

In this inspiring session, Anese Cavanaugh introduces a forward-thinking approach rooted in the IEP Methodology, designed to break through outdated practices, help leaders to grow and perform better, and create lasting culture change. You’ll discover how to activate your own leadership energy and identify the culture and innovation blind spots you may not even realize exist.