Catherine R. Bell believes the future of business is deeply human.
An entrepreneur, leadership expert, executive coach, and bestselling author, Catherine has spent more than two decades helping leaders and organizations flourish through greater self-awareness, courageous leadership, and healthy culture. As Founder and CEO of The Awakened Company, she partners with executives and organizations around the world to navigate change, elevate leadership, strengthen teams, and build workplaces where both people and performance thrive.
What sets Catherine apart is her ability to bridge worlds. She combines the strategic rigor of business with the transformative power of the world’s wisdom traditions, helping leaders cultivate not only stronger organizations, but wiser ways of leading. The Enneagram is central to her work, providing a powerful framework for leadership, relationships, creativity, and personal transformation.
A serial entrepreneur and award-winning PROFIT 500 founder, Catherine holds an MBA from Smith School of Business at Queen’s University, a Sociology degree from Western University, and certifications in the Enneagram, yoga, corporate governance, and contemplative practice. She has taught at Smith School of Business, was a Jarislowsky Co-Fellow at the Haskayne School of Business, and sat on many not for profit boards.
She is the bestselling author of The Awakened Company, creator of two Enneagram audio programs with Sounds True, and co-founder of Awakenly, a mindfulness app that integrates contemplative practice with the Enneagram. Her forthcoming book with Russ Hudson explores the intersection of creativity and the Enneagram and will be published by Penguin Random House/Hay House in 2027.
Whether she’s coaching a CEO, leading an executive retreat, or speaking to thousands, Catherine’s work invites people to awaken: to themselves, to one another, and to what’s possible when business becomes a force for human flourishing
About The Awakened Company:
The Awakened Company is a boutique leadership development and global consulting firm that helps organizations build exceptional leaders, healthy cultures, and strategies that actually work in the real world.
We partner with organizations navigating growth, change, complexity, and transformation. Our work spans leadership development, strategy, organizational change, executive coaching, team facilitation, advisory, and immersive learning experiences that create lasting impact, not just momentary inspiration.
What makes us different is how we work.
We blend evidence-based leadership practices with gritty, practical business experience and the enduring wisdom found across the world’s wisdom traditions. Rather than choosing between hard business strategy and human development, we integrate both: creating what we call a fourth way of doing business: one that delivers results while cultivating thriving people and organizations.
The Enneagram is thoughtfully woven into many of our curated client experiences, we also offer public workshops, offering leaders and teams a powerful framework for self-awareness, communication, relationships, conflict, and sustainable growth.
Whether we’re facilitating executive retreats, coaching senior leaders, designing transformational public programs, speaking, or guiding organizations through complex change, our work is grounded, challenging, deeply human, and designed to create measurable impact.
Because the future of business belongs to organizations that are awake.
Catherine’s SVI Hollyhock 2026 Workshop: The Enneagram as a Leadership and Cultural Roadmap
Leadership begins with self-awareness.
The Enneagram is far more than a personality assessment: it’s a dynamic roadmap for understanding the unconscious patterns that shape how we lead, communicate, make decisions, navigate conflict, and respond under pressure. It shows us how we can be more present and human. While many leadership tools describe behaviour, the Enneagram reveals the deeper motivations and assumptions driving it, creating opportunities for profound personal and organizational transformation.
In this engaging and highly practical session, Catherine R. Bell will introduce leaders to the Enneagram as a powerful framework for cultivating emotional intelligence, resilience, and transformational leadership. Participants will discover how each of the Nine Leadership Points brings distinct strengths, blind spots, and growth opportunities, and how understanding these patterns can dramatically improve relationships, collaboration, and team performance.
Drawing from years of practical experience applying the Enneagram to her own and clients’ organizations from around the world, Catherine blends cutting-edge leadership research, practical business experience, and timeless wisdom traditions to help the people at SVI learn how to put this map to work in their own organizations. In a world of AI, this is needed more than ever.
Whether you’re leading a startup, a global organization, or a community initiative, this session will equip you with actionable insights to communicate more effectively, build trust, navigate change with greater confidence, and create healthier, more resilient cultures.
If leadership is an inside job, the Enneagram offers one of the clearest maps available. Come prepared to laugh, reflect, challenge your assumptions, and leave with practical tools you can apply immediately: to yourself, your relationships, your team, and your organization.
Because the quality of our leadership is ultimately limited only by the depth of our self-awareness.