#191 When Vulnerability Becomes a Voice

Today, I interview Catherine Bell who grew up painfully shy and afraid to speak, while also having to start over again and again as her family moved every two years. Making new friends, finding her place, and speaking in front of others overwhelmed her. Even later in life, she let others speak her words for her because she worried about how she would be received.

Her breakthrough came gradually. One of the clearest moments happened in a dimly lit café in New York City, when she suddenly felt called to write her book, The Awakened Company. Over time, she began to recognize that her voice could only fully come forward when she was willing to enter those vulnerable, softer places in herself.

Today, Catherine brings that awareness into the way she works with people. She encourages others to become more present, listen more deeply, and notice what life may be asking them to see or express. Her work continues to center on helping people move toward greater wholeness, trust their own voice, and bring their own piece of the puzzle into the world.

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Catherine R. Bell is the Founder and CEO of the Awakened Company, where she helps leaders, teams, and organizations create healthy, thriving cultures. She is an award-winning Profit 500 founder, serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, and certified Enneagram practitioner. Catherine also co-founded the mindfulness app Awakenly, has created two Enneagram audio programs with Sounds True, and teaches at Smith School of Business at Queen’s University. Her upcoming 2026 book with Hay House explores the Enneagram and creativity.

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Find Catherine here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bellcatherine/

https://x.com/AwakenedCompany

https://www.facebook.com/awakenedcompany

https://www.instagram.com/theawakenedcompany/

https://www.youtube.com/@AwakenedCompany

https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-awakened-company/

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/3868695/

https://awakenedcompany.com/

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Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #191 Catherine Bell

“When Vulnerability Becomes a Voice”

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing, and I'm host of the Find Your Voice, Change Your Life podcast. Today I get to interview somebody that I've already had a conversation with, so I'm very excited to share her with you. This is Catherine Bell. Hi, Catherine.

(00:17) Catherine Bell: Hello. Thank you so much for having me again. It's wonderful to be in our fields together.

(00:26) Doreen Downing: I know that you and I both value presence and value coming into a new now moment. So yes, we've had our conversation. We have a connection that's already been active with us, and today we get to go a little bit deeper into your story, how you found your voice, and what you get to do today, having gone through a journey. Let's put it that way, huh?

(00:56) Catherine Bell: Yes, very much so. It's been an interesting journey, and I don't think or feel that the journeys are ever linear. They're always kind of twisty-turny, up, down, easy, challenging, and also inviting. Every part of our path, I feel, is an invitation to learn and an invitation to kind of develop our being, to develop who we are, and to almost chip the clay off the old parts of our personality.

(01:32) Doreen Downing: I'm already excited. I just love hearing you express what is possible for people. I do have a bio, so I'll read that in a second, but I already feel like I've launched into introducing you as somebody who has deep wisdom, so thank you for sharing that.

And the whole idea about being, that's where voice comes from. The being of you is the truth of who you are, I believe. And what you just said about all the ways in which we encounter life, and the ups and downs and arounds and ins and outs, it takes a lot of voicing. It takes a lot of finding your voice, so it isn't just one voice.

(02:21) Catherine Bell: Yes. It's so true. I remember as a young girl, I would hide behind my parents when I had to speak to somebody. I'd prefer not to speak. I'd prefer to hide. Literally, I would scurry behind my mom or dad and hide behind them when someone spoke to me, because energetically it was very challenging for me to speak.

(02:47) Doreen Downing: I'm glad you said that right away because what I'm going to read about you in your bio is so opposite. So listeners, get prepared. We're going to have a conversation today, and if anybody can relate to what Catherine just said about being shy, hiding behind her parents so that she doesn't have to come out and speak, just express herself.

So let me read the bio. Catherine, I'm so glad we started the way we did today. Catherine is the founder and CEO of the Awakened Company, where she helps leaders, teams, and organizations create healthy, thriving workplace cultures through executive coaching, facilitation, speaking, and leadership development. She's also an award-winning Profit 500 founder, serial entrepreneur, best-selling author.

Catherine is the co-founder of the mindfulness app Awakenly, has created two audio programs on the Enneagram with Sounds True, and has a new book on the Enneagram and creativity being published this year.

What I especially appreciate about you, Catherine, is that, as we already started, all this brilliance, this award-winning, this authorship, this leading executives in companies, you didn't just pop out and have that as your goal. You had to find yourself along the way, and you've already shared that you had a lack of confidence and, one of the things you wrote to me, a raw fear of public speaking.

Listeners, do you hear already that there had to be some kind of, well, awakening, I guess, is what we're going to be talking about today. So this journey that we're going to be exploring and showing folks out here has shaped your life and the work that you do in the world today.

I appreciate you, Catherine, for having a life and being able to keep on going until you... Well, you still are. I think we all still are, as you said in the beginning, finding the ways that we can be more helpful to this world. So let's put the focus back on you now. How was it to hear that bio?

(05:45) Catherine Bell: It's interesting because the bio, it just is. It just is. And what matters to me is this present moment and how present I am right now, and how we're connected in time and space, all of us. So when the listeners listen to this, we're all connected.

And I would really like the bio to serve other people in finding their voice and in finding their particular piece of the puzzle to contribute to humanity, because I believe everybody has their piece of the puzzle to contribute. And often, to find our piece of the puzzle, it's not always easy, and we must be willing. I have been willing and often challenged to really go into those pieces of the puzzle so that something more full, more whole in myself, is illuminated.

(07:03) Doreen Downing: You are such a poet. You bring out words that are alive, and I think that that's part of what presence is about, that what we say has more vibrance, more resonance if we are absolutely with ourselves and with our listener or with the people that we happen to be with, no matter what, whether it's work or family.

Puzzle. Okay, good. Let's go back because of the origins of us, and you already mentioned hiding behind your mom's skirts. We are in this “Now” moment, yet this now moment has all the moments we've ever experienced, depending on how expansive you go. Let's just say this life.

And if you could, because you said raw fear. You said some things about shyness. What was it like for you growing up, maybe where you lived, the kind of family you had? I know we're talking now, and you're opening up some snapshots for us to not just look at, but to experience the best we can.

(08:41) Catherine Bell: So I moved every two years of my life growing up. Every two years we would move because of my dad's work. I'd have to make new friends. Every time it was like a new beginning, a new beginning, a new beginning. And in many ways, the challenge of moving so often caused me to really learn how to step away from behind my parents and into myself, because if I didn't speak to people, if I didn't connect with people every time we moved...

You can picture me going into junior high school. I don't know anybody. And so there was something in my system. I knew I had to connect. Luckily, I had sports. So sports really helped me to find my voice, to find my confidence.

And I remember in junior high, I won something for student council, and I got up to the microphone and I laughed and I collapsed because I was so nervous. It was that nervous laughter that I just couldn't contain, and everyone was laughing with me. And then I collapsed. I couldn't say anything. I couldn't finish what I had to say because I was so, so rawly kind of tense inside.

And also, I played the cello growing up, well, just in junior high, and in one of the concerts, I mistook which part we were playing, and I kept on going, and the whole orchestra had stopped. And I'll never forget my school teacher saying, "Thank you, Catherine Bell, for that lovely solo piece." I just remember I wanted to hide, yet everybody was laughing, but people were laughing in support. They weren't necessarily laughing at me.

It's almost like my nervous system has been on the outside, incredibly sensitive. Incredibly sensitive. So I have also wanted to pull in my voice, to hide, to hide, to hide what I have to say. In many ways, it's because I challenge the status quo. I see things that maybe not everybody sees, and so I go like this.

And what I've come to learn is that by tapping into that vulnerability and being willing to speak it, maybe not blurt it, because I always think there's a dance with this. There's always this absolute dynamism between... It's never absolute. I think the truth always lies in the paradox.

So I could speak sometimes, but sometimes my body would shut down. And even more recently, I'd give speaking notes to my colleagues, but not speak to them, but they would speak my words. So it's kind of because I was worried about how it would be, because we're always in this dance of relationship. So how would I be received? I was too concerned with the receiver. How will they best receive this? Will they receive this better from this voice or my voice?

And I've come to learn I must go into that vulnerable soft spot in my heart and in my voice, and it must rise, and I invite it to come. But it's interesting because it's the quiet whispers that need to be heard.

(12:36) Doreen Downing: Yes. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Just watching you... For those who are not able to watch Catherine, if you can go to my YouTube channel, you'll see her gestures. When she talked about going to the vulnerable place, she took her hand and just went down to her heart, inside of her body, inside of her soul. It felt like that soft place that you mentioned is where power is.

Isn't that interesting, that you are pointing to where the truth is for some of us who know about where that power is and how to access it? I want to go back, though, to the introduction to your early family life and the moving continuously, and how that challenged you to, whether you liked it or not, you had to move. Like I'm kind of doing it with my body, you had to move a little bit yourself forward from the hiding position, from the holding back position.

And I'm thinking about you, watching you even right now, how you move and how you express yourself. There's something that you learned. You also learned how to let go as well as how to open up to a new moment, which is what I believe, from what I read, you do in your work. Part of what you bring to the world is the ability to come into this new “Now” presence.

So I don't know if that's part of it, being able to leave behind and move to the next.

(14:37) Catherine Bell: You bringing this up, something else is arising for me, and that is I feel home where I am. And when I'm not in the space of my body, my heart, and my head, I'm not really at home.

So the moving taught me where actually is home. I'm a little girl and I'm moving, moving, moving, moving, and my family's uprooted, uprooted, uprooted. I also realized that my mom was a teacher, my dad was a businessman, and I have two little sisters. So I also felt very responsible for my baby sisters in the whole moving situation, the moving scene.

And in many ways, the gem of moving was we became very close as a family, and it was also poignant, and it caused me to find my voice. I don't think I would have learned all the skills that I did had I not been... Literally, sometimes it felt like I was being torn apart from my community, from my friends, from my whole foundation, because friends meant so much to me. And making friends, and then, my goodness, we're moving again.

I'll never forget in grade 10 when I was told we were moving again. I was in grade 10, had a great group of friends, had a great boyfriend, and lo and behold, we're moving again. And we're moving to a place I didn't want to move to. It just absolutely shook my being.

And what's super interesting is that boyfriend in grade 10, we met up again in university, and now we've been married for 34 years.

(16:42) Doreen Downing: Wow.

(16:43) Catherine Bell: So it's like, what role does fate play in all of this? I think that I was meant to move, clearly, and the invitation was to grow up and also to take responsibility for who and what I am.

And I think so often there can be an abdication of responsibility. We've all been given this precious human birth, this precious time to be alive, and no matter what trials and tribulations, death has also walked beside me for so much of my journey that it's been a constant reminder we must live.

And in many ways, we also have to die before we die so that we can fully flower and be who we are. There's so much to the story that you're unearthing in me, that you're exposing, and how am I willing to take off all my trench coats to be raw and vulnerable so that I can serve humanity and the planet in helping other people to find their voice.

And I truly believe there must be stillness and silence, and it must be a reciprocal voice at this time. Too often we have seen the kind of what I call the talking head on the pedestal. I think it's a great time for the awakening of the collective.

So I'd really invite everybody listening to us to think about what's a tiny thing you can do to activate your voice, to activate that puzzle piece for yourself through going into, not sideswiping your challenges, going into them and finding what gem is meant to be revealed. And that's often our gift to the world.

(18:42) Doreen Downing: I love that idea and that image you have of the gem, and even being with you today and listening to some of the moments, especially what some people might label trauma, that kind of constant reorganizing yourself and your life over and over and over again.

But what I've seen you do is go into it, have the experience of it, and in the experience of it is the learning. I'm watching you even right now. Life gets revealed as you speak about it, as you remember it. And you aren't, Catherine, you aren't just remembering it. To me, I feel it. That's what I think being able to come into the now moment, talk about your story, is also bringing your story to this now new moment.

(19:53) Catherine Bell: Very much so. And this now new moment includes us in time, the listeners in time, and past generations as well, because we're all conditioned by each other. We're all socialized through and with each other, and that sense of interconnection in finding our voice, and also the sense of interconnection with our environment.

For example, I'm very intrigued by that picture to the right of you. It's black, and I can't fully see it. Is it butterflies on it? What is that?

(20:34) Doreen Downing: That's a batik I drew in Malaysia. It is butterflies. My mother came to visit me there. We went deep into the jungle. We were lying on a beach deep in the jungle, and Mom had a little blue butterfly family land on her. My mother was very special, so that's in honor of my mother, the blue butterflies.

And when she died, there was a butterfly. We were camping, and there was a butterfly that flew down and landed on my heart. So butterflies have a lot of meaning. Thank you for zoning in on that. That's very powerful. That's deep awareness, Catherine. Thank you.

(21:31) Catherine Bell: Well, in many ways, the context is always informing us, and the butterfly symbolizes deep transformation from the caterpillar to the chrysalis to the... And the color blue is deeply symbolic as well of the clarity of transformation.

So in terms of our authentic voice, I believe our authentic voice, we must look beyond what we've been taught and really begin to weave in context. And when we're present, context will give us meaningful clues as to what is being asked to be communicated. It is the universal wink, the universal nod. Jung called it synchronicity.

And how do we drop the plot, so drop the old story, to be absolutely present to what is here? What is here now? And then how does that actually inform our conversation? And now the blue butterflies have... So our authentic voice, I think, is asking for a megaphone for our context and our Earth and our planet, and for other beings.

(22:51) Catherine Bell: And so, for example, when we work with teams, there'll be something that comes up in the room, and that will bring up a key point. So it's no longer leadership teaching facilitation by script. Rather, it's from presence, it's from being, and recognizing there's this dance between the being and the doing, and we need both.

(23:17) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(23:18) Catherine Bell: And to experience it in our bodies, because our bodies, when you get a good idea and the hair goes up on the back of your neck and you're like, "That's such a good idea." When you were describing the butterflies, my body was just like, it felt like there was a honey serum to me in my body because it felt real and alive.

(23:40) Doreen Downing: I would say that I've had those moments with you already today, for sure, the tingling sensation. And that's what we keep coming back to today, is aliveness in this now new moment. I need to take a break, and we'll be back in just one minute.

Hi, we're back today with Catherine Bell, who is dancing in the moment with me. And we are creating, I feel, lots of gems, magical gems today for my listeners. Tuning in, what we already discovered is a basis of Catherine's life, which had to do with a lot of relocating. And in that relocating, what I learned is that Catherine located her real self.

If you're going to keep on going from a new environment to a new environment, what's really most important is coming back to yourself. And that seems to be what Catherine's already talked about today, the work that she does with groups, with teams, in your business, in the Awakened Company.

But before I go into just a little bit more about what you actually do with your work, can you tell me a little bit about, well, how did you... What were those moments you went, "Oh, ah," any moments along your journey of your own awakening?

(25:25) Catherine Bell: Well, in many ways, awakening for me hasn't been a sudden shift. It's rather been a momentary by momentary by momentary shift.

One really important one is I was in a dimly lit cafe in New York City, and literally it was just like a lightning bolt went right through me. And the lightning bolt said, "You are to write a book called The Awakened Company." And at the time, I was building, with a wonderful team of people, an executive search firm. I turned to my colleague Carolyn and I said, "Carolyn, I'm to write this book called The Awakened Company." And she's like, "Yes, you are." And that's when it began.

So that was an awakening. That was a shift in being and in doing, in listening to that lightning bolt. And I think it's really important that we listen, that we see, that we smell, that we taste, that we feel, that we hear. That hearing, that listening is so, so, so important.

There's also been times out in nature where I have a relationship with an animal. One time I was swimming in the lake. I love being in nature. I was swimming in the lake, and a mink was on shore. The mink looked at us, and I froze. I was like, "Oh my goodness, there's a mink. What do we do?" And then we swam over to the bay to meet some friends, and lo and behold, who popped up on shore but this mink.

(27:12) Catherine Bell: And the mink appeared. So that's a moment of awakening, like we're not separate, that we're all connected.

And many moments of awakening have been when people who I love have passed. So my dear Aunt Ruth, who introduced me to the Enneagram with my mother, who also wrote a book called Roads to the Top, who also did executive search, which I did, she helped me to find my voice because she was such a good exemplar for me.

And then when she passed, I was like, "Okay, it is time for me. I've got to carry the torch." So in many ways, every moment and every challenge, and also every beautiful thing. When my son John was born, that was, again, my heart breaking open. I realized everybody's somebody's child.

(28:14) Catherine Bell: So I've had portals of awakening, and I see it in teams and with leaders, where something drops in and they realize, "Oh my goodness, we have all these thoughts. How are we paying attention to our thoughts and how we're being?"

Because I believe that the only way we're going to solve our collective challenges is by leading and organizing differently, and that organizations really are this force for good. So here is an opportunity. I'm with you. It's an opportunity for awakening, a new page in the book, a new exploration of now. When I see blue butterflies, I'm going to think and feel of you.

So how do we use our life as the catalyst, both good things and bad things, same, same. It's all experience.

(29:08) Doreen Downing: I love that. I love that, same, same, what you just said around what we bring to anything that may feel like a struggle. If we can see the gem and if we can learn that there's something that's trying to be expressed, something that's trying to be revealed to us, we have a whole new relationship to what life is, what life brings.

And I thought of that earlier today when you were talking about your husband, the boy, and having to leave him. And you said, "We have to grow up." Well, there was that reality that you had to deal with, and there's also resilience. There's so much that is possible. The remembering that you're doing, there's just so many moments that we, if we have this attitude, this acceptance of every moment in our life has meaning. I think that's what I'm going to...

(30:22) Catherine Bell: Yes. Every moment in our life has meaning, and to find the vulnerable soft spots that we're meant to go into to be the fullest expression of our whole selves. So for me, getting in touch with realizing when I wasn't communicating, it was because I wasn't prepared to be vulnerable in the communication of my own voice.

(30:49) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(30:52) Catherine Bell: So to turn into that and to say, "Okay, what needs to be empowered in me so that I can truly be of service?" I really feel it's important for people to live with intention and to have a personal vision, and then using that as our sun or star or moon to really fully inhabit, to reclaim our own wholeness, which is...

We're doing that course in the fall, which will be wonderful. But how do we... It's a reclamation of our fullness of being and our fullness of doing. And we can't forget that intersection.

(31:33) Doreen Downing: Yes. I was just going, hey, there's another R. Reclamation. Well, because we're moving on and I want to make sure people... I think they already have a sense of the kind of work that you do, but we've talked about the book coming out, the Enneagram work that you've done, the app Awakenly. So what would you like to offer the listeners today?

(32:05) Catherine Bell: Yes.

(32:05) Doreen Downing: What would you like them to know about the work that you do currently?

(32:11) Catherine Bell: Well, I would really invite people to join our newsletter, because we offer really practical, useful information as it relates to awakening, as to how to awaken your full leadership, your relationships, your teams, your organizations. So do that.

We have a culture survey on our website. I would also invite people to join our course in the fall called Reclaiming Wholeness, and it's related to how do we relate the Buddha families with the Enneagram to embody our full leadership, to embody our fullness. But we look through the lens of the seasons, because I believe nature holds so many clues for us for how to be, because nature contains it all.

So I would invite people to do that, and also, when you sign up for our newsletter, you'll get special invitations to the book launch on The Creative Moment. That book is an invitation for us all to realize we are creative beings. Everybody is. But again, we each have particular facets of the gem to offer the world in terms of our creativity.

(33:26) Doreen Downing: Well, I liked what you just did about us being part of the larger gem, the brilliance that is out there. Each one of us has our brilliance, but we also have a part to play. Thank you so much for all of these bright, I keep coming back to your word, gems. But I also feel like delicious is the word I'm coming up with right now. It's tasty. It feels good to my body to be with you and to hear you point to how we can live in such a way that our voice is inside of us, and it's also expressed in a way that we are seen and heard for who we truly are.

I'm going to give you this last moment here to listen into our time together, and however the words want to, if there are words, what wants to be said as we close our time together?

(34:40) Catherine Bell: You really matter. Our listeners really matter, and without this field that we're weaving together, we all could not be together. The invitation for us is to show our full colors, to live our fullness of life, to live into our potential, because I believe that that's what everybody is here to do. And it requires us to go into our soft spots, our tender spots.

Sometimes we need to put a bandage on them. Sometimes we need to open them up. Sometimes we need to just smile and say, "Aha." And everybody's voice matters, so does everybody's listening.

This would not exist without you, Dr. Doreen. So this is the field. The dynamic field is also to recognize the invisible, all the people on Zoom who are making this happen, your mom with the butterflies.

So that's our invitation, because I really... We don't have a moment to lose. So how do we take ultimate responsibility and go into our soft spots so that we can truly shine, and everybody shines their own brilliancy and depths of heart and wisdom, and also healthy power in service to this very poignant time of awakening humanity, and also awakening in service to the planet.

So I just have huge gratitude for you opening up the space for me, inviting me to do this with you, and thank you to everybody who's listening.

(36:32) Doreen Downing: Yes, thank you. Thank you, Catherine, and thank you, listeners.