5 Steps to Intentional Impact

Ideas

Sep. 26

Written By Overlap

“If you do not set a conscious intention, your default intention will win”— in her book, Contagious Culture, Anese Cavanaugh talks about how to show up, set the tone, and have the kind of impact you want to have on the people around you and in your organization.

It’s one thing to have good intentions and it’s another thing entirely to have the impact you want to have. When we are inundated with day-to-day tasks, hopping from one meeting to the next, or when suddenly we find ourselves having to work in new creative ways—

it becomes increasingly difficult to show up, be present, and be intentional about our impact.

These 5 steps to intentional impact come from Anese’s IEP Method (Intentional Energetic Presence). You can use these 5 prompts anytime anywhere to help you prepare to facilitate a session or meeting, participate in a difficult conversation, or generally show up as your best self for the day.

Download and print our Five steps to Intentional Impact for your next Remote Facilitation worksheet to use in place of your own notebook or computer.

How to get started…

Start by grabbing a notebook, or opening a doc on your computer. Write down these five headings with some space for notes between each:

Outcomes
Impact
Show Up
Believe
Action

Step One: Outcomes

These are the outcomes you’d like to see happen.

Take a moment and imagine your upcoming meeting/conversation/day was a huge success. In that future scenario: What do you see? What happened? What would be different? What becomes possible?

Write them down.

Step Two: Impact

This is the impact you want to have.

In that future scenario you’ve just imagined, how do you want people you’ve connected with to feel at the end of the meeting/conversation/day? How do you want to feel?

Write it down.

Step Three: Show Up

In that future scenario you’ve imagined, how are you going to need to show up to your meeting/conversation/day to create the outcomes and impact that you have identified? What will your presence be—your body language, your tone, your energy?

Write it down.

Step Four: Believe

This is powerful. It causes us to take a moment to consider the default believes that are at play in our own minds.

What will you have to believe to show up and have this presence? What will you have to believe about the people, the project, the meeting, the company? How are your current beliefs supporting your intentions and which beliefs might you need to shift?

Write it down.

Step Five: Action

What do you need to do to prepare? Consider what actions you will need to take before, during, and after your meeting/conversation/day to support your intended outcome, impact, presence and beliefs.

Write it down

More ways to use these 5 Steps to Intentional Impact…

Create a team intention

Bring this framework to your team at the beginning of a new project or initiative. Explain the method and give the prompt for step one. Ask each team member to start solo and jot down a few ideas, then share with the group. Cluster similar ideas together and build consensus on your response to step one. Repeat for steps two through five until you’ve built out your intentional impact as a team. Come back to this intention at the beginning of each meeting going forward.

Five minutes and done

Use these 5 steps as a mental framework you can quickly run through in just five minutes. Aim to have one answer for each of the steps. Until it becomes second nature, you might want to post the five steps in a calendar reminder, or in a notes app on your phone.

Life is full of interruptions, unplanned events, and busy-ness. When we take the extra 5 minutes or twenty minutes to be intentional—write down our reflections, or pause to reflect internally—we can dramatically improve our ability to show up and have the impact we want to have.