Hi. This is Paul Belizer. Welcome to the AwarePreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through values based business. Thank you so much.

Today, I'm thrilled to welcome back to the show, Catherine Bell, and our topic today is Business as a Force for Good and Impact Leadership. Catherine loves to help people, teams, and organizations thrive. She is the CEO, author, and founder of the Awakened company. Catherine helps organizations create healthy corporate cultures through executive coaching, team strategy sessions, speaking, and online webinars. She holds an MBA from Queen's University and is an award winning Profit 500 founder. I had the opportunity to interview Katherine back in July of 2020, episode 141. I'll put a link in the show notes. And full disclosure, Catherine is a friend and I'm honored to partner with her and some things we'll tell you about in this episode.

Catherine, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Paul. And I wanna give a big shout out to you because you were the person who helped me to birth the Awakened company. So Paul was, for those who don't know and are listening, Paul was my coach, and you helped me birth the book and you helped me through a whole series of transitions during that time. So big shout out and thank you to you, Paul.

Thanks, Catherine. That was a pretty exciting time from that profit 500 company to a new startup called The Awakened Company, which has now won awards and is doing all these amazing things, which we're gonna tell people about. But you move at such a fast pace that 4 years is too long. So let's let's get into it, Catherine. So we have episode 141. That's the deep dive of your background and a little bit about your original company, Blueair, which has been acquired. But just if somebody didn't know Catherine, didn't know a little bit about your background, just give us, like, what's the 1 to 2 paragraph backstory of you, and why you launched The Awakened company?

Backstory is number 1, I'm a human. And the invitation for everybody to remember our humanity, especially during this time of radical shifts in what I believe in consciousness and the way we are, in the way we work together, in the way we play together. So in terms of of me, I'm a human first and foremost, a human that absolutely sees organizations as a force for good, organizations as the way we're gonna solve the greatest challenges of our time, and I believe it's only by organizing differently that we will do so. I am founder of Awakened Company. I'm also founder of Awakened Project. Awakened Company helps companies with culture and leadership development and creativity. Awakened projects helps people get out of poverty by starting their own business. Now I'm also an adviser to Impact Society to the Science Center, and I'm on the board of Tara Mandala.

So I'm a mom too, Paula, and I'm also, like, love windsurfing, and I love playing tennis. So back to the humanity, like, I think we need, in organizations, we kind of just focus on the leadership, but behind every leader, there's like there's a story. There's a backstory. There's a real story. There's a story of how we greet our family. Family when we return from work, how we play in our gardens. And I think what is being so sought after right now is that real story, that real story of who are we really and to investigate that. And I love people, and I love the planet.