breaking automaticity | awakening culture, creativity & business | catherine bell

WE ARE ALL AWAKENED. WE’VE JUST FORGOTTEN.

When I connected with Catherine Bell, Founder and CEO of The Awakened Company, one phrase stayed with me long after we finished recording.

“We are all awakened. We’ve just forgotten.”

It completely reframed the way I was thinking about leadership.

Perhaps we don’t need to become someone else.

Perhaps we simply need to remember who we already are beneath all the conditioning, expectations and automatic ways of living.

In this Bee FormlessTM Flow Driven CEO conversation, I connected with Catherine to explore conscious leadership, culture, creativity and what she calls automaticity—the unconscious patterns that quietly shape the way we live, lead and do business. As Catherine shared, many of us are operating from default programming rather than genuine presence.

We’ve become so busy doing that we’ve forgotten how to simply be.

Together we explored why organisations are living systems rather than machines, why culture and commercial performance strengthen one another, and why the future of leadership won’t belong to those who simply adopt more technology, but to those who become more deeply human alongside it.

One of my favourite moments came when Catherine reframed boredom and procrastination. Rather than seeing them as problems to eliminate, she described them as spaces where creativity has room to emerge. Sometimes the answer isn’t doing more. Sometimes it’s pausing long enough to notice what has been trying to emerge all along.

A few Bee FormlessTM Shape Shifts that emerged:

• Automaticity quietly shapes more of our lives than we realise.
• Presence begins the moment we interrupt our default patterns.
• Organisations thrive when culture and commercial success grow together, not separately.
• Creativity doesn’t always come through constant action. It often emerges through stillness, reflection and space.
• AI asks us to become more human, not less.
• Perhaps awakening isn’t about becoming someone new, but remembering who we’ve always been.

Maybe the greatest leadership shift isn’t learning another framework.

Maybe it’s simply waking up.