#184 From Painfully Shy to Unshakeable Leader

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #184 Andrea Horvath

“From Painfully Shy to Unshakeable Leader”

 

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing, and I’m welcoming you to my podcast, Find Your Voice, Change Your Life, where I get to interview guests who, somewhere along their journey into living the full life that they may be living now, they had a difficulty with speaking up. Today, I get to introduce you to one of my dear friends, Andrea Horvath. Hi, Andrea.

(00:35) Andrea Horvath: Hi, Doreen. Thank you so much for having me on here. I’m super excited for this conversation today.

(00:39) Doreen Downing: Yes. We’re going to open up, but first I want to give people a little bio about who you are and maybe just a tad about your history that you gave me. Andrea is a high-performance mentor for corporate leaders and executives who want measurable growth that is both strategic and deeply aligned.

Notice that word “deeply aligned.” Earlier in her career, speaking up was not easy, and she struggled with a fear of abandonment and a belief that using her voice might create chaos. Understanding the root of that pattern changed everything. You hear that in my voice, the excitement. It changed everything. Understanding what the root to that pattern was, finding her voice became one of Andrea’s greatest personal triumphs, and it continues to evolve as she leads others to rise with clarity, courage, and impact.

Here we go. How was that to hear yourself described?

(01:56) Andrea Horvath: It was a lot, actually. It was, but it’s all true.

(02:02) Doreen Downing:

(02:03) Andrea Horvath: You know, and that’s, I think, what sometimes we go along in life and we don’t take the time to reflect how far we’ve come. Everything you spoke is exactly truth. It felt really good to hear, actually.

(02:17) Doreen Downing: Yes, because it is a journey into becoming who you are today. I love at the end where we talk about evolving. That’s one of the values that I think you carry, that we don’t just get someplace and, hello, we’re leaders, we’re accomplished. It feels like the attitude of always growing, always learning, and always opening up to what’s next.

(02:46) Andrea Horvath: Absolutely. I think that’s important because we think at some point in the future, we’re going to make it, or we’re going to have it. Somehow there’s going to be this holy grail that’s going to open up and everything’s going to make sense, and it doesn’t happen. It’s actually not part of the human experience. It’s just not.

(03:02) Doreen Downing: Well, I usually go someplace else when I start, but I love this direction already. This kind of vision that you just put out for people, for us to think we’re always striving and wanting to be someplace other than where we are right now. Of course, that’s what growth is about, but I’d love to just go in that direction first before we go into what happened.

(03:32) Andrea Horvath: Yes, absolutely. I love that you pulled on this thread. I know when I was growing up, it was this belief that at some point, if you follow all these steps, you’ll make it. We have this construct that we’ve created in our society, and that’s really based on ego. Our ego wants safety, wants to know that at some point in the future, it’s all going to be worth it. The sacrifice, whatever we do.

The truth is actually our soul is here for expansion. That’s what our soul wants. Our soul wants experiences. It wants expansion. It wants us to really grow into our full potential. How could there ever be an end goal? How could there ever be a point where it’s actually complete?

As long as you’re living and breathing, you are expanding, and your soul actually wants that. That can liberate you from the struggle or the feeling that something is out there that somewhere along the way is going to make you feel whole and complete, because that’s just an illusion.

(04:35) Doreen Downing: Oh, oh, oh. The knowing, and this is partly what, even right now, I think the listeners are hearing, this idea, this concept, this belief that you have, that there’s something much deeper. That’s one of the words I used in the bio, more deeply aligned. Now what you’re saying, you’re aligned with your soul.

I don’t know if it’s really an “it,” but the soul is dynamic. I love the word that you are using now. Expansion. In every moment, there is an opportunity. What a different way to live.

(05:21) Andrea Horvath: It’s completely different because the ego wants control and it wants safety, and your soul wants expansion. I love the word expansion because growth, to me, can sometimes sound like you’re not there yet. There’s somewhere I need to grow into, where expansion is this idea that you’re never going to be there. It’s completely opposite.

(05:45) Doreen Downing: You already are.

(05:47) Andrea Horvath: Yes, exactly.

(05:48) Doreen Downing: If you have something and it expands, you’re expanding something that is already there, I think is what you’re saying.

(05:54) Andrea Horvath: Correct.

(05:57) Doreen Downing: So it’s a distinction.

(05:58) Andrea Horvath: It’s completely contrary to how we’ve all been raised. It’s completely opposite.

(06:05) Doreen Downing: Right. We don’t go to school to learn about our innate soul that’s alive and bright and growing. You’re right.

(06:16) Andrea Horvath: Yes. We go to school to get the certificate, the degree, whatever it is, to get to the next point, to get to the next point, to get to the next point.

(06:24) Doreen Downing: That’s what I did.

(06:26) Andrea Horvath: That we all did.

(06:26) Doreen Downing: Right. That’s what you did too. I know. Absolutely. That’s your story.

Speaking about your story, let’s wind back, because you probably somehow knew this, but you didn’t know it early on. We, as soulful women who have intuition and sensitivity, find ourselves in environments that don’t nurture that in us early on.

We need people like you later on in our lives to wake us up to that fact that it’s always been there. It just was not witnessed, seen, or celebrated early on.

Going back in your life, early on, what are some stories that pop out that say, this is what I learned first in the environment, that I should be this, I should do that, I can’t do this. Some of the ways in which you were cramped up, I guess.

(07:30) Andrea Horvath: Oh, I was very cramped up. I was born into a very, very conservative family. There’s a certain set of rules, very strict rules of how you’re supposed to be, what you’re supposed to do in your life. It was just, this is the way.

I think what was really problematic with that, and it’s problematic in a lot of ways, is that if you don’t follow the rules, if you don’t do it the way you’re supposed to do it, there’s something fundamentally wrong with you. That was drilled into me at a very young age. If you don’t follow the narrative of the family, there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.

You can imagine from a very young age how that created fear. I stayed within all the lines because I was scared. If it meant that if I actually went outside the lines, I was fundamentally flawed, that kept me for many, many years staying in line.

I went to university. I got my degree in economics. I got my professional accounting designation, my CPA. You talk about following all the rules. I got married, I had kids, I did everything right because I believed if I didn’t, everything would fall apart.

(08:48) Doreen Downing: I want to stay back just a little bit longer because it sounds like you definitely had your marching orders. However, we also can learn that if we cross a boundary, that’s when the consequence happens.

I’m thinking there must have been something that you learned. I better not, or else. The “or else,” you must have experienced something about that that was alarming or painful. Anything about that?

(09:27) Andrea Horvath: Absolutely. First of all, there’s something wrong with me. The narrative of my family is if you don’t follow the rules, you’re crazy.

(09:33) Doreen Downing: Crazy.

(09:34) Andrea Horvath: Very crazy, very dangerous. The other part was abandonment.

If I don’t follow the rules, nobody’s going to be there for me because they’re going to say, well, you’re crazy. We don’t want to be around you, and you’re gone.

(09:47) Doreen Downing: Did anything like that happen, though?

(09:52) Andrea Horvath: Eventually, yes.

(09:55) Doreen Downing: In relating to your story, I’m thinking about my mother. She got sick and went into the hospital when I was three or four years old, so she left. I have that abandonment, and we call it a wound.

I better be quiet, or my mom’s going to get sick again. I was looking for the learning that came out of being told you were crazy, or somebody left you, that kind of thing.

(10:33) Andrea Horvath: I basically learned to toe the line.

That was it. But I always had this thought, and I remember having thoughts growing up that I didn’t understand life. So many parts of it I didn’t understand.

I couldn’t understand how my mom got up every day and went to work, and she hated it. She was tired when she got home. I remember thinking to myself, this isn’t normal. Why do we do this in this world?

There were many times throughout all of this where I would question things, but if I voiced these, if I said something, it was like, well, that’s just the way it is. I’ve been told that for probably the first 30 years of my life, and even beyond that.

This is just the way it is. I certainly learned to stifle my voice because if I said anything that went contrary, I was shut down really, really quickly. So I kept it all in.

(11:32) Doreen Downing: Yes, I was looking for what the experience was when you did cross the line.

(11:42) Andrea Horvath: Essentially, yes.

(11:42) Doreen Downing: Yes. Then this kind of curiosity that you had, which is natural, and already beginning to question. Remembering that you were questioning even at a young age why your mom would go off to something that burned her out, that wasn’t joyful, that wasn’t pleasurable, that wasn’t good for her, and seeing that as a young girl.

(12:14) Andrea Horvath: Wow. It blows my mind now. They say that a lot of the work you came here to do, in the planning, you knew when you were a kid.

(12:22) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(12:23) Andrea Horvath: I knew back then there was something wrong. There was something wrong with that system and that sacrifice that she did.

I had a number of those. That was one of the most vivid ones. I just remember so many times, even getting older, thinking, I don’t get this. I don’t get this life. Why do we do all these things? It was very confusing to me at times.

I was painfully shy because I had all these thoughts and questions in me. But as we’ve discussed, if I articulated them, it didn’t go well. I stuffed all of them down for decades, literally.

(13:03) Doreen Downing: I just have a visceral experience of that right now, listening to you, stuffing it down in my gut. What that does, because it’s an invisible process, but it’s actually energetically really true, that the stuffing of energy into your body is not only painful, but it can create disease.

(13:33) Andrea Horvath: Oh, yes. It does create disease. It really, truly does. It was an interesting time. It was tough. But life kept moving along, and I’d love to share what happened, if that’s okay with you, because there was a moment when everything changed.

(13:50) Doreen Downing: Yes. Let’s go there.

(13:54) Andrea Horvath: So as life often does, and I’m sure you can relate to this, the more you stuff things down, the longer you do that, the worse your life gets. Things eventually fall apart, and that’s what happened.

My daughter was born in 2004, and within two months, I knew she wasn’t well. I went on an almost two-year journey to figure out what was wrong with her.

What I had to do to figure out what was wrong with her was throw out all the stories, throw out what anybody thought of me, because my daughter’s health depended on it.

(14:32) Doreen Downing:

(14:33) Andrea Horvath: So I had to completely throw away what anybody thought of me, family included, and figure out what was wrong with her because she had symptoms.

A lot of people told me I was just a paranoid first-time mom. I got all the stories. There’s nothing really wrong with her. I was told that I could test her for certain things when she was three years old. I was given all these stories, and all I had was my intuition, which I had never truly tapped into before.

This was the first time in my life where I went, if I don’t listen to myself, my daughter’s health is at risk. Something came in, the perfect storm. The perfect storm where life said, if you don’t actually start using your voice to advocate for her, she’s not going to be okay.

(15:26) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(15:26) Andrea Horvath: Life created the perfect storm for me to break me out of my shell.

(15:34) Doreen Downing: Yes. I think in terms of the listeners today, that life circumstances can have that gift, that purpose. If we can say, what’s in it here that I can learn from, or if things in me are wanting to change, how can I allow that to happen?

What an interesting moment, though, for it being for someone else that that’s how it happened first for you.

(16:12) Andrea Horvath: I’ve thought about this too, so I love that you brought that up. Why was it her? It was a health issue.

(16:19) Doreen Downing:

(16:20) Andrea Horvath: It was pretty significant. When you talk about speaking up, this is not a minor thing. I saw her being autistic. She was showing all the classic symptoms of autism. I saw this as her path, and she was just really unhappy.

Absolutely, I think it was an easier way for me to speak up for her than to speak up for myself. I think that was a bridge. It was a bridge.

(16:50) Doreen Downing: Great, great image of bridging into the more that’s possible for you. Then how, on the other side of the bridge, what happened for you?

(17:02) Andrea Horvath: Well, after, yes. After. I just want to add before I move on that I actually got to the solution. Following my intuition and speaking up actually worked.

Can you imagine that?

But it was beautiful because it actually worked. Once I got through that, I was a different person because I learned that I really had my eyes opened.

Before that, I really believed that everyone around me in the world had it all figured out and that I was the one who was naive, not understanding life. Then I went, wait a minute. I’ve been really downplaying myself. I actually know a lot more. I understand things at a deeper level.

You know me, I tend to run quite deep, so it just changed my whole life. I always say there was Andrea before that and there was Andrea after that. Before that was following the rules, stuffing my voice down. After that, it was like, no, that’s not my path.

I started to speak up more and more. My daughter is now 21, so that was 21 years ago that journey started. It’s been a constant evolution of me learning more about my voice and why I suppressed it for so long, and learning how to use it, what I want to say, dealing with rejection, dealing with abandonment, dealing with all of those things, and evolving.

Into a completely different career. Obviously, I left being a CPA to do what I am now, but it’s been a constant evolution of finding my voice and allowing it to come out. It’s been a really huge part of my journey.

(18:45) Doreen Downing: Well, I want to go further into what you just brought up in terms of the evolution, that you don’t just find your voice, but there are some moments, like you’ve already pointed to, where you wake up your voice and you start to feel the power of it.

In your case, it was for your daughter, but then, like you say, it’s a bridge. I’m going to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back, and I’ll get to go further, deeper with your story.

Hi, we’re back. This is Dr. Doreen Downing, and I’m with Andrea Horvath today talking about the soul expanding, always, always, always from within, and what that means when we start out in life where we are told to be a certain way. If we don’t, we get called crazy, which is partly what Andrea’s story is about.

If you go back, you’ll get to hear some of the circumstances in her early life that stunted her voice. Then we started to talk about when she tapped into it, and it was about advocating for her daughter.

Now we’re looking at finding her voice because it worked for her daughter in terms of speaking up. It opened up even more because, Andrea, I know you are somebody who trusts yourself and who feels like voice is always becoming more. As we expand, our voice expands.

Anything you want to pick up from where we left off around you, your opening, your evolving, and your expanding?

(20:42) Andrea Horvath: I love what you mentioned about trust because, in my experience, to be able to speak in front of people, in any kind of group, in any way, and to speak your truth and feel comfortable in your skin, for me, it’s all been about self-trust.

It’s all about self-trust and reclaiming my power and being okay with what I’m saying. Being okay with somebody rejecting me. Being okay with somebody not liking me. Being okay with making a mistake in what I’m saying or fumbling on my words.

Isn’t that what we often worry about when we speak? We’re going to fumble our words. Who cares? Literally. We are not robots. We are not AI generating words. We’re human beings.

I built this trust within myself that if I can speak my truth and be okay with somebody rejecting me, there’s nothing really stopping me. But we are so conditioned to fit in.

This is part of what I grew up with, needing to fit in with my family. But that goes beyond family. That goes into cultures, into countries, into societies. The drive to fit in now is stronger than ever before. I see this now in the last five or six years. It’s all about fitting in, fitting in.

(22:04) Doreen Downing: Why would you say that?

(22:04) Andrea Horvath: If you look back 20 or 30 years ago, you could have differences of opinions and you wouldn’t get canceled. You live in a cancel culture now where you say the wrong thing, and somebody could have liked nine out of your last podcast episodes, and you say one thing, and they’re like, I’m done with you.

With that cancel culture, it creates this new place of, if I say the wrong thing, am I going to lose credibility? Am I going to lose this or lose that, opportunities or whatever it might look like?

I’m in Canada, but I know you’re in the US. If you follow the wrong political party, support the wrong political party, people can cancel you in a heartbeat. There’s so much misinterpretation.

There’s so much where you go onto social media and clips, podcast episodes, or interviews get clipped just to make it sound a certain way.

We’re all aware of this, and I believe that’s created this space of people not speaking their truth even more than ever. We used to be able to have political conversations or conversations about certain things and not get deeply offended like we do now.

(23:23) Doreen Downing: I’m glad you explained that. I understand a little bit more what you mean, and I do now that you’ve explained it. I can see it, I can feel it.

What you just said before that is trusting that. It’s not about not caring what people say about you, but there is something about it being more important to be true. It’s about valuing yourself.

(23:55) Andrea Horvath: A hundred percent. Something I came up with about six months ago, because I used to say I don’t care what people think of what I say.

It sounds awful, but what I realized is there was actually a little bit of a subtext beyond that. I don’t care if people don’t like what I say, but I care about people deeply.

(24:17) Doreen Downing: Ah, beautiful.

(24:18) Andrea Horvath: I had to have that reframe in myself because it’s not that I don’t care about people. I’m not here to be flippant. I’m not here to create chaos for chaos’ sake. I’m not here for any of that.

If you don’t like what I’m saying, I’m okay with that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care for you, or care about you, or care about humanity. I think that’s important to distinguish. For me, it was somebody listening to you a lot.

(24:47) Doreen Downing: Yes, yes. I so agree because the “I don’t care what people think” doesn’t say who you truly are, which you just said. But I do care deeply about people.

I trust that telling the truth has more value than what other people might say or think. I think you just explained it really well for folks, that phrase, “don’t care about what other people think.” That’s not the full guidance that you bring to your work with people.

(25:35) Andrea Horvath: Thank you, and thank you for saying that. It’s exactly it because we have been built in a culture where we’re taught to really care what people think of us. Isn’t that interesting?

Isn’t that why we so often don’t express ourselves? Because we’re told to care so deeply what people think of us. But it actually stifles our own growth, our own expansion, and our own voice.

For me, it’s not about not caring, but it’s caring more about me expressing myself. There is an integrity that goes in there. That’s actually my most important value.

(26:14) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(26:15) Andrea Horvath: There are a lot of layers to that. This is not flippant, which we often see, that very flippant “I don’t care what people think of me.” That’s not it. That’s a different archetype. That’s a different level of consciousness altogether. That’s not what this is about.

This is important. I truly believe that if we can, we’re all getting to that point now. I’m seeing this shift, especially this year. I think 2026 is going to be huge, where we’ve all witnessed the last number of years of being canceled or saying things that ruffle feathers, and I think we’re tired of it.

I think the collective is tired of not being able to just speak, not be canceled, not be called out. But we have to build that inner resilience, that inner trust within ourselves because that’s what speaking is about.

It’s about actually saying what you want to say, speaking your truth, or what your vocation is, your expertise.

(27:13) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(27:14) Andrea Horvath: Owning it. Just owning it and going, I am okay if you disagree with me. Bring it on. Let’s have a discussion. Let’s actually have a conscious and evolved discussion. It’s okay.

I say this on my podcast sometimes, don’t take on what I’m saying. If you don’t like it, if it doesn’t resonate with you, leave it. It’s not for you.

We need to be able to do that. We need to be able to speak and say, if you don’t like this, that’s okay. I’m good. We can still be friends. We can still be colleagues.

We don’t have to agree on everything, but we need to be okay with that and just own what we’re saying and not worry so much. It’s exhausting. It is so exhausting worrying what people think of you.

(28:04) Doreen Downing: Well, the other thing I just realized, the way you said that was, the speaking comes from what you believe, but you aren’t speaking in a way where you’re trying to make people believe a certain way. You’re giving people permission to accept it or not.

You’re just saying, this is what’s possible, this is what’s true for me. I like the staying lined up, because that’s one of the things we talked about in the beginning, aligning with yourself. It’s not about trying to force something on people. It’s just the isness. It feels so fresh with you.

So what is alignment then?

(28:53) Andrea Horvath: Alignment really is alignment with your soul. I have my podcast, it’s called The Soulful Shift, and the reason why I called it that is because we are aligning away from ego to soul.

So much of what we do, like worrying about fitting in, keeping ourselves small, stuffing our voice down, that’s all ego. Aligning with our soul means ultimately listening to yourself as your greatest authority.

We’ve been taught to outsource our authority and look to others. When I say don’t take on what I’m saying, I don’t ever want to override anybody else’s sovereign thinking and sovereign being. That is the last thing I want.

I actually want people to think critically. I want them to ask, does this feel right and true for me? Because that’s where we’re moving into now. We need to start connecting with ourselves and our own inner guidance rather than looking for answers outside, because the answers are not out there.

That’s what aligning with your soul is. It’s actually being still enough, which is one of the hardest things for people to do. Being still enough to ask yourself, does this work for me, and not just take everything in blindly.

I believe this is happening at a collective level. If you look at AI now, this conversation could go there, but we don’t know what’s true and what’s real anymore. There’s such advanced AI, and what that’s asking of all of us is to ask ourselves, don’t just believe what you see because somebody says it’s true.

You have to connect with yourself. Does this make sense to me?

That’s where we’re at in our evolution. That’s what alignment really is. It’s aligning with who you really are instead of who the world told you to be, or who you should be, or what you should do.

It’s a big shift. Going from ego to soul, like I said at the very beginning, that is a seismic shift to be walking through. That’s what we’re all walking through right now.

(31:02) Doreen Downing: Big breath. This is just wow.

I love the idea and the guidance that you’re giving, to move out of the patterns and go into the soul. Then what you said is listen. This is what you said, being still enough.

That seems to be where the teaching would have to start. How do you be still so that you can listen and be able to discern what is soul and what is trained pattern, ego, any of that?

That’s the work I think you must be doing with women, right? Helping men as well?

(31:57) Andrea Horvath: I do it with women and men, but yes, absolutely. We’ve been taught in a society that if you don’t keep going, everything is going to fall apart.

People cannot get off the hamster wheel because there’s a fear that once you step off, things are just going to fall apart and everything will be lost because there’s a scarcity program running.

(32:16) Andrea Horvath: There’s deep programming around scarcity, but it’s exactly what you said. It’s looking past the patterns, the conditioning, the program, and it aligns so much with what you do.

When we start to see we’ve been doing all these things from a wound that we had 40 years ago, it’s like—

(32:34) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(32:36) Andrea Horvath: Yes. Not to get into blaming or shaming, but just bringing light to it and going, okay, we don’t have to do that anymore. I’m not a kid anymore who’s going to get rejected from the nest. That’s not going to happen.

I’m not a kid anymore, and we keep running on these programs and this conditioning and all the shoulds and coulds.

But that’s not working as a society. It’s not working for most people. It is about slowing down long enough to hear your voice. Listening to it and following through with it.

That takes practice. It doesn’t happen overnight. There’s a process. There’s a whole deconditioning that has to happen. I’m sure you do that with your clients. You have to reprogram yourself. Really step out of that programming and ego and conditioning.

(33:29) Doreen Downing: Yes, and that’s partly why I think you and I have done the journey of going through and breaking down our conditioning, then learning how to listen and to really celebrate something deeper that’s inside of us.

Then value it, trust it, and give voice to it. Have it have the deepest power in ourselves, to have a voice.

A word I’m thinking about you right now, because we’re coming to an end, is freedom. You represent freedom to me, of how to be free.

Tell us a little bit more about your work, because before we get off, I want to make sure people know how to find you. Anything specifically about how you work that they might want to find you and get the benefit of being in your presence.

(34:32) Andrea Horvath: Thank you so much, Doreen. My website is andreahorvath.com. There are links and information there, but I work with corporate leaders who have awakened, who are recognizing that what they’re doing is not working anymore.

There’s a whole conversation about when you shift into the soul, and we all are, the old rules don’t work anymore. The way we used to do things doesn’t work anymore.

High achievers who want to get to that next level, who know they’re meant to lead and are not getting there, whether it’s a promotion, a pay raise, or stepping more into their truth.

I work with individuals as well as teams. I do corporate events, speaking events for companies that really want to embody this, because this is how we’re going to create success moving forward.

We can see the old success rules don’t work anymore. That repeat, rinse, and repeat narrative doesn’t work. We’re seeing so many systems crumble right now because they’re being rebuilt.

Who are those leaders who are wanting to rebuild these systems and step into their next level of leadership?

I have a leadership series, a prerecorded one called The Unshakeable Leader, which I just started this year, which I love. It’s all about reclaiming your power, stepping into your truth, and I share things about energy and abundance and money and reclaiming your power.

I also do one-on-one work with individuals and teams. I’m on LinkedIn. I have my podcast. There are lots of different places to find me.

(36:10) Doreen Downing: Find you, enjoy you, learn from you, and be guided by you in all the ways in which you represent the new person, the new leader, the new what’s possible.

That’s what I’m so attracted to in your work, the depth of it. To me, it feels like when you ring a bell or a chime and it vibrates.

(36:42) Andrea Horvath: I love that.

(36:42) Doreen Downing: That feels like a voice that’s connected to depth and soul. It has that quality. That’s why I’m glad I got to be with you today and highlight you. Thank you.

(36:59) Andrea Horvath: Thank you so much.

(37:01) Doreen Downing: You’re welcome. Thank you.