NSB Logo Bal Arneson Bal Arneson

Bal Arneson

Speaker

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

The Spice Goddess

Bal Arneson is an international TV host, award-winning author, and a celebrity chef for a 30-Billion-dollar food service company, Compass Group. She hosted 2 TV shows which aired globally, Food Network Canada’s Spice Goddess, and US Cooking Channel’s Spice of Life. Bal has been a judge on Iron Chef AmericaBobby Flay’s Dinner Battle, and Cooking with Fire. A charismatic, charming, humorous and relatable speaker, she provides audiences with tangible life lessons and skills to be able to incorporate into their personal and professional lives. 

Keynote Speeches

How to Rise to the Top

Through humor and charisma, Bal takes the audience on an inspiring and emotional journey through her humble beginnings being raised in poverty in a small Indian village. She details her hope, love, and joy growing up on the farm and climbing the mango trees and stealing food through the villager’s home so she wouldn’t go to bed hungry – which started her love affair with food. She explains first-hand the struggles and repercussions of being a female in that society, and how she found peace in cooking and creating recipes with fresh ingredients and colorful spices. Bal describes how she navigated her arranged marriage as a young girl, immigrating to Canada, the struggles and pressures which led her to run away to a women’s shelter as a single mother, which resulted in being disowned by her family. Step by step, Bal picked herself up, and without any resources, she talks about how she went from cleaning people’s homes during the day and learning English at night, to having her Master’s in Education, authoring award-winning and national bestselling cookbooks, and hosting 2 TV Shows on Food Network Canada and the US Cooking Channel. The audience will be left in awe of her strength and the power of resilience.

Bal ends her talk with optimism and hope, detailing her life lessons and personal skills that helped her self-awareness. She talks about tapping into your personal strength and not allowing external chaos to interrupt your internal peace. With forgiveness, gratitude, and dignity, she looks at her rise to the top.

 

How to Execute Your Dreams

In this motivational talk, Bal takes the audience on a behind the scenes look at how she created her career and business dreams into a reality.  She’s had various careers ranging from a dishwasher, to cleaner, to the police department, to a teacher, all of which have led her to a significant moment. One where she followed her passion and took that leap to write a cookbook that would change her career trajectory. Bal draws on her experience to demonstrate how she was able to level up in each phase of her career, and keep building and achieving her goals.

Audiences will hear first-hand, how an immigrant single mother with no resources and hardly any English became a Food Network Canada Host, and with no formal chef training became an award-winning, bestselling cookbook author who was nominated for a James Beard television award. She shares how she went from no formal business training to partnering with a 30 Billion Dollar Foodservice company and creating successful food concepts and products, revolutionizing the food scene.

She explains how you can take these entrepreneurial skills and apply them to execute your next goal – with grit, passion, and determination. She outlines how one goal leads to the next, and how she was able to turn her first cookbook into a national bestseller, media appearances to having her own international cooking shows, to launching them overseas, and building successful partnerships to be able to continue her passion and do what she loves. With all odds against her, she was able to harness her entrepreneurial spirit, believe in herself, and execute and launch her career and business. Bal believes in her key attributes that lead to her success as she continues to use them to level up, and helps the audience walk away with tangible skills to execute their next dream.

 

Walking Away from your Unchosen Life

Bal Arneson is a culinary TV personality who grew up in a small village in Punjab, India where she learned to cook as a young girl by observing and helping her elders. She moved to Canada after her father arranged her marriage – ultimately choosing the direction her life would take. Although Bal started an entirely new life from scratch without any English, family support, or formal education, she managed to overcome a series of obstacles and odds.

Female Empowerment | Capitalizing on Your True Self
There is no shortage of pressure on women from society to be the best mom, best employee, and best homemaker. Can we really succeed and level up in our careers and still be present mothers, and take care of our homes without getting burned out? Can we find a peaceful balance? The short answer is yes, and it starts with you as the priority.

In this inspiring talk, Bal outlines 3 key topics: the foundation of you, how to find a healthy partnership between work and home, and how to level up. Bal credits her success to the basic principle that the key is the foundation within you. When you are on a plane and if it loses oxygen, they carefully explain that you need to put the air mask on yourself first – and she uses this analogy on life itself. Bal outlines how to shed pressure from our peers and society on what you role you should play, and instead focus on who you want to be in this lifetime, and move backwards on how to get there. On how to find a healthy partnership between work and home, Bal shares her personal experience how she has been able to create and run her businesses which take her travelling internationally but still find time to be a single mom to her two kids. She says the secret to the success is feeling both fulfilled and happy at your job and at home because if one is overwhelming, you will carry that burden and stress into the other. If one drains you, there is nothing left to help the other one succeed, and it’s bound to fail.

She explains how she manages both to have a well-rounded life. How to level up focuses on how to take your career to the next level and how to be the best version on yourself with your family. She talks about how passion and discipline are the foundations that helped her be the best at her profession and with her kids. She talks about how to ask for that raise, how to take that leap of faith to start your business, how to strengthen the confidence within you, and how to strengthen the relationships around you. Audience members will fee enlightened and ready to make changes in their life to better themselves for their work and their home.

Female Empowerment | Capitalizing on Your True Self

There is no shortage of pressure on women from society to be the best mom, best employee, and best homemaker. Can we really succeed and level up in our careers and still be present mothers, and take care of our homes without getting burned out? Can we find a peaceful balance? The short answer is yes, and it starts with you as the priority.

In this inspiring talk, Bal outlines 3 key topics: the foundation of you, how to find a healthy partnership between work and home, and how to level up. Bal credits her success to the basic principle that the key is the foundation within you. When you are on a plane and if it loses oxygen, they carefully explain that you need to put the air mask on yourself first – and she uses this analogy on life itself. Bal outlines how to shed pressure from our peers and society on what you role you should play, and instead focus on who you want to be in this lifetime, and move backwards on how to get there. On how to find a healthy partnership between work and home, Bal shares her personal experience how she has been able to create and run her businesses which take her travelling internationally but still find time to be a single mom to her two kids. She says the secret to the success is feeling both fulfilled and happy at your job and at home because if one is overwhelming, you will carry that burden and stress into the other. If one drains you, there is nothing left to help the other one succeed, and it’s bound to fail.

She explains how she manages both to have a well-rounded life. How to level up focuses on how to take your career to the next level and how to be the best version on yourself with your family. She talks about how passion and discipline are the foundations that helped her be the best at her profession and with her kids. She talks about how to ask for that raise, how to take that leap of faith to start your business, how to strengthen the confidence within you, and how to strengthen the relationships around you. Audience members will fee enlightened and ready to make changes in their life to better themselves for their work and their home.

 

Speaker Biography

Born in a small village in India, she immigrated to Canada through an arranged marriage as a young girl. Soon thereafter she was disowned by her family because she ran away to a women’s shelter with her infant child. With hardly any English, no education, and no financial or family support, she began her humble journey from cleaning people’s home and learning English in the evening. Today, she has her Master’s in Education, a successful career, and is a mother of two amazing children, living in her dream home she designed and built in BC Canada.

Her journey is described “a classic rags-to-riches tale” by the New York Daily News, as her triumphant life story is the epitome of what it means to harness and tap into your inner strength and overcome adversity and challenges. Bal has risen to the top, building her culinary career and successful food businesses, landing her experiences such as launching her cooking shows on a media tour through Asia, walking on Oprah’s Red Carpet in New York, and highlighting Indian cuisine for the event hosted by the King of Sharjah in the UAE.

She has three national best-selling cookbooks: ‘Everyday Indian’, ‘Bal’s Quick and Healthy Indian’ which won the Asian Cuisine category prize for Canada by the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, and ‘Bal’s Spice Kitchen’. Her Hollywood Collaborations include ‘The Hundred-Foot Journey’ by Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, and ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’.

Bal spends her time giving back to local and global charities, and she is at the forefront of innovative health and wellness, stopping food waste, and revolutionizing the food scene to better ourselves and our planet.