Speaking, Workshops, & Workplace Wellbeing
For more than a decade, teaching people how to pay attention, creating and holding space for connection, presence, and self-understanding has been my speciality.
I’ve gotten to work with organizations of all kinds and sizes (from intimate company retreats for small women-owned local Hudson Valley businesses to the national conference of one of the largest teachers’ unions with one-million+ members to teaching a thousand students inside Washington’s National Cathedral and YES, even returning to my former law firm to teach mindfulness for lawyers!).
And I love being brought on to support projects like these —
Stress Management for Lawyers (from executive coaching, leadership development, to my 8-week Mindful Stress Solutions for Lawyers course to summer associate lunch & learn programs).
Speaking on topics like
burnout recovery
mindful stress management
meditation 101
work / life balance
mindful entrepreneurship
embodied leadership
Mindfulness-based curriculum development
from supplemting in-house leadership development programs with mindfulness training
to creating full-scale programming for a mindfulness app developed by one of the country’s leading biomedical research university labs.
Have something you’d like to work on together too?
Sample Workshops + Talks
Self-Regulate Your Nervous System:
Mindful Stress Solutions
As humans, stress is part of our source code, vital to our nervous system functioning.
Stress, properly timed and utilized, helps us achieve our biggest goals and accomplish even our most essential everyday tasks.
And yet most of us are all too familiar with "bad” stress — the chronic and acute stress that makes us irritable and reactive, that keeps us up at night and burns us out, that lives in our bodies and manifests as pain, discomfort, illness, or worse.
This workshop, based on the gold-standard of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction will teach you how to become an expert in your own stress.
LEARN —
the essential difference between "good" and "bad" stress;
how to identify the key indicators of stress in your own body and the presence of stressors in your life to begin to transform your stress story;
the foundational daily practice of stress management; and
a simple-to-use, easy-to-remember, immediately-effective tool for mitigating stress in any moment that you can put right into your anxiety first aid kit.
You will leave this workshop with a wise understanding of how your nervous system works and a ready-to-use toolkit of mindful stress management.
Real Talk about
Burnout, Boundaries, & Work/Life “Balance”
I operationally define burnout as “continually asking ourselves to give what we no longer have left to give.” And I bet you’ve probably got your own working definition of burnout too.
To prevent burnout, we need to know our boundaries and let go of myths of stress culture like “balance” that keep our wheels spinning, pin us in a place of lack, and make it seem like we’re never “good enough” (no matter how exhausted by our endless efforts we might feel).
LEARN —
actionable strategies for burnout recovery and prevention,
a 3-part framework for determining your risk of burnout before it’s too late;
how to gain clarity around your real priorities & refine the skill of wise discernment: what’s important v. what just seems urgent, what you’d choose to focus on, not what you “should" so you can reframe "balance" to support your wellbeing;
and one simple strategy to determine set, protect, and communicate meaningful boundaries.
Expect to leave this workshop with renewed trust in your choices. And the confidence to own those choices and communicate them clearly. Unstick yourself from the stuck cycle of comparison (isn’t it absolutely the thief of joy?), of mindless consumption or FOMO (hello mindful tech use – yep, we’ll go there) and mindless rabbit holes. What would it feel like to get off auto-pilot and begin to say the YESES and NOS you really mean to say?
Healing Our Relationship to Time
How much of our lives are spent rushing around feeling like we’re always behind where we should be? Like there’s never enough time? Like we’re barreling through the everyday just to crash at the end of them or race to the weekend?
Or quite simply, how much of our days are spent multitasking and in many places at once (on the phone, ordering the groceries, daydreaming about a vacation sometime somewhere, all well in the zoom meeting about something completely different) – without actually being present with what (and who) is right in front of us?
Healing our relationship to time isn’t just about “mindful time management.”
We are so much more than the task masters of our lives.
The Ancient Greeks had two words for time: Chronos and Kairos.
We usually look for answers in “Chronos time” - that’s the scheduling, the task-mastering, the deadlines, the to-do list making.
This talk is designed to help you rediscover your deep capacity for “Kairos time” - that’s the time that feels like time disappears. Complete absorption, getting lost in the moment, sacred time. Rediscovering the time for “all the things we’d love to do if only we had more time.”
Weaving personal story with meditation experiences and poetry, Catherine invites you imagine what your life would feel like if you could finally lay down that “badge of busyness” we’ve been emblazoning across our chests for too long. Take off the armor of anxiety that comes with always rushing, always racing, always hustling, always grinding, never pausing or slowing down.
Isn’t it about time for that?
Navigate Uncertainty & Change
with Resilience & Grace
It seems like we are always trying to land, aren’t we? Like if we can figure out this next thing, check that next box, or finally crack that code, we’ll be good.
And yet, what life keeps showing us is that you never really arrive. Change and transformation and uncertainty are the only constants we can count on.
In this talk, Catherine explores how meditation can us help us face these inevitabilities with more resilience and grace and less burnout, as she guides you through an experience of meditation practices and tools that can make you the calmest person in the room, able to function with poise, equanimity under fire and in the face of all the things we can’t control (yet somehow spend so much of our energy trying anyways!).
Catherine teaches you how to work with the raw materials of your life as it is, in this moment, to cultivate a wellspring of good. We’ll activate neuroscience-based practices of taking in the good and shifting otherwise fleeting nice moments into hardwired happiness, an underlying hum of feeling settled and even and grounded in your days, and a deeper capacity to access the positive in any moment.
What would it mean for you to cultivate a quality of contentment in your everyday life?
So that no matter the rises & falls of change and uncertainty - you can call on your inner reserves of resiliency and an unshakeable core of confidence and calm to carry on, truly.
You, But Rested.
You’re tired. I’m tired. We’re all a little collectively exhausted. And it’s impossible to do the deep work of becoming ourselves – being who we truly are and doing the good work we came here to do - when we feel like we’re barely keeping our heads above water.
For our own engines to run smoothly, we have to fill the gas tank. Yet we can always come up with a reason why we have to delay or earn our rest. (You know that, “when I get to the other side of this deadline, then…” thinking).
In this talk, you will learn how to —
create the space and grace and time to rest regularly, so you can practice regularly resetting all of the time (not just when work slows down, not just on vacation, even on your busiest days),
eliminate distractions, focus on what’s important, and wisely edit down your daily rhythm to the most essential pieces,
how to meet yourself in the moment, how to make magic in the margins o f your daily life as it exists right now, doing a little bit better at building back up your reserves each day, so you stay on the right side of burnout.
This is not “just self-care.” This is self-preservation. This is a quiet and powerful revolution against the hustle and grind and burnout culture so many of us are beyond ready to leave behind. Are you ready?
What Does Wellbeing Mean for Your Team?
Wellbeing and wellness are workplace buzzwords.
But what does that really mean, operationally & on the ground, within your organization or team? How does wellbeing impact policy? Leadership development? Teamwork and communication? Expectation setting? Achieving goals and tracking ROI?
This workshop is designed for small groups to make big impact on defining what it means to BE well and do the good work in alignment with your company culture & organizational nervous system.
It proceeds in 3-parts:
Pre-workshop assessment, given to your selected MVPs to give you both quantitative and qualitative data on how wellbeing is perceived in your company or team right now.
The workshop is designed as a working group. We’ll review the data together as I facilitate collaborative discussions and decision-making on how to actualize well-being in your workplace, so you can see exactly what’s already working and what needs to be done to create a culture where people thrive and company values come alive. The workshop will also contain workplace wellbeing training, on topics like stress management and resilience-building and mindful communication, curated specifically for your group, based on the assessment.
A post-workshop report will leave you with the data and a set of recommendations for training, leadership development, and executive coaching to ensure your ongoing commitment to wellbeing and real impact for your people.
For rates and availability, please FILL OUT THE INQUIRY FORM.
Stress School
Catherine’s signature 8-week stress management and mindfulness training, based on the blue-chip standard of research-backed, evidence-based mindfulness stress reduction curriculum. This training is designed to be given virtually in a cohort-style setting. Each week, participants receive new curriculum via private-course portal, which they can move through at their own pace. And each week, a live 90-minute session brings everything to life with group participation, lecture, discussion, Q+A, and experiential learning.
The weeks of Stress School, at a glance:
Week 1: Become an Expert in Your Own Stress
Week 2: Relaxation Practices for Immediate Stress Relief in Body & Mind
Week 3: How Mindfulness Shifts our Perception & Helps Us Manage Stress
Week 4: Working with Stressful Thoughts
Week 5: Stress & Communication: How to Transform Stress Reactivity Cycles into Mindful Responses
Week 6: Work from Your Optimal Zone: Resilience, Creativity, and Productivity
Week 7: Balance, Burnout, and Boundaries
Week 8: Mindful Leadership and Success without Chronic Stress
If you're looking for a comprehensive training strategy to fully support your team, Stress School was made for you.
To bring Stress School to your organization — FILL OUT AN INQUIRY FORM.
I’m on a mission —
To put the tools of immediate stress relief in as many hands as possible.
I empower leaders and embolden companies to mindfully manage stress and create organizational nervous systems that are on the vanguard of inclusivity, creativity, belonging, and innovation.
