About

Hi, I’m Colleen O’Malley. I have over 50 years of experience, well, in life. My first real job was managing a high-end boutique when I was 16. By the age of 18, I was working at the Pentagon, and by my mid-20s I was focused on saving the world. My career skyrocketed by the age of 30, however, I had made some choices in my personal life that knocked me down for the count. The year I turned 31 was the year of 9/11 and like many others, I watched my world fall apart. I sat in my despair for almost two years until a trip up to Ontario, Canada changed my life.

While there, I met and later married a very patient and loving Canadian who helped me see that I was safe being me. He gave me the space to recover, to be courageous again, and to see life as a journey. Amazingly, we are still married 18 years later and have an awesome but borderline angsty teenage daughter who has an activist’s heart and old soul! She certainly keeps us on our toes!

My career has been full of interesting turns from training Algerian Military Personnel to teaching graduate level courses to coaching executive level leadership to co-leading various initiatives related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I have even had the pleasure of running my own business for years and living in an RV full=time as we explored North America.

Thanks to life, I am very practiced at being an employee, a consultant, a wife, a mom, a survivor of sibling suicide, and a caregiver. Like everyone else, I have been slapped around hard by the COVID years and experienced great traumas and losses. I’ve pretty much just found peace with all that 2020 brought and spent 2021 creating the foundation for the life I truly want to remember. Trust me, wine was helpful in my journey too!

As I launch Forged by Life, I see the next 50 years full of collaborations, explorations, experiences, adventures and opportunities, All that I am and all that I’ve experienced has brought me to this place where I can support others during this great shift – as a strategic coach, professional speaker, and through my talents as a writer / message designer.

I love working with soulful purposeful individuals, leaders, and teams to build resilience, cultivate empowerment, and support their journeys as we reframe stressors and situations, especially through crisis.