In Conversation With….

This month Wendy sits down to have a conversation with Caroline McKenna. In her early career, Caroline studied business, learning and development and personal management. She has a degree in business studies as well as diplomas in personal management and learning and development. Her career has been spent in sales management sales productivity and more recently coaching. Caroline is currently organisational coach for CDE global. A year ago Caroline set up her own business which she runs alongside her role at CDE.

Irene has worked independently as a consultant since 2009, specialising in leadership and organisation development. Prior to that, she was a senior leader across public and third sector organisations. Irene was the executive director of Human Resources with the Northern Ireland ambulance service.

I am in conversation with recent AoEC practitioners diploma graduate David Paulson. David has had a very varied career with two stints as Managing Director of a manufacturing SMEs in England, many years with GE capital and many years in academia (including a PhD undertaken between Cambridge and Harvard).

I’m in conversation today with Denise Ni Cheallaigh.

I’m Wendy Robinson, I’m delighted to be presenting this ‘In Conversation With….’ Series, which aims to discuss the topics of the day with Executive Coaches.

I live in Ireland and have had the pleasure of meeting and working with over a hundred Executive Coaches in N Ireland and the Republic of Ireland over the last 7 years.

It’s so lovely to catch up with graduates of the AoEC Practitioner Diploma programme, and find out how life has been, since finishing the programme!

I’m in conversation today with Denise Ni Cheallaigh.

Denise has been the company owner of Ni Cheallaigh Consulting for the last 2½ yrs.  This builds on 20 years experience across a broad range of roles – consultancy, senior level project management and operations, leadership of large global teams of 6-700 people, working with global organisations such as Citi, JPMorgan and HSBC.  Pretty impressive!

We first met in early 2020, when Denise signed up for the AoEC Practitioner Dip in Executive Coaching.

I’m delighted to have some time today, in conversation with Denise.  Our topic today is – ‘Covid and Coaching’!!  Where is the business world today, given over a year of living in this pandemic?  And where does coaching fit in?

I begin by asking Denise how life and work has been for her, since our first lockdown here in Ireland in March 2020….

This second episode is a chat between myself and Ryan Connor. Ryan is the Director of Springvale Employment & Learning, an employment and learning provider in Belfast where he has been since March 2021. Ryan undertook the AoEC Practitioner Diploma in Executive Coaching in Sept 2020, graduating just before Christmas.

I’m in conversation today with a Roscha McDonald.

Roscha is the Director of Turning Point Technique.

She has an amazing background in social anthropology, person centred counselling, family- and outreach-work in N Ireland. She teaches Mindfulness in the workplace, she’s a trainer, a mediator, executive coach and career coach!