Introducing Dr Denise Quinlan

Dr Denise Quinlan is acknowledged internationally as a world-class facilitator who tackles difficult subjects with her trademark humour and compassion, generating hope and practical action to inspire and develop leaders.  A global thought leader in sustainable, future-focused wellbeing and resilience, Dr Quinlan synthesises insights from her multi-disciplinary background to develop solutions to the urgent issues facing work, family, and community.

Committed to developing leaders who can build a better future, Denise equips leaders with the tools to ‘put your psychological house in order’, develop Collective Resilience in your organisation, and empower Inclusive Re-design, to enable adaptive and innovative responses to future challenges.

Co-founder of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the University of Canterbury, Denise regularly presents at global conferences, creates and teaches courses online and face to face, and authors books and articles. An internationally published academic researcher, her award-winning Podcast, Bringing Wellbeing to Life, shares wellbeing insights from leading researchers and practitioners from around the world.

Originally an equity analyst and dealer-broker on the London Stock Exchange, and a consultant with Deloitte and KPMG in Europe and NZ, with degrees in international economics and politics, Denise’s corporate background informs her work with senior executives across the globe, including as an award-winning guest lecturer at globally ranked IE Business School, Madrid. Denise is the only New Zealand trainer to have worked alongside Prof Martin Seligman and Dr Karen Reivich delivering the University of Pennsylvania’s resilience and wellbeing programmes in Australia and the UK.

Introducing Dr Lucy Hone

Dr Lucy Hone had long been on a mission to translate the best of resilience psychology to help people cope with challenge and change, when personal tragedy transformed her understanding of resilience from the academic to the personal in 2014.

Her book, Resilient Grieving, and her TED talk, 3 Secrets of Resilient People (among the Top 20 TED talks of 2020), has fuelled demand for her Keynote presentations globally. Originally from London, trained by the thought leaders in the field at the University of Pennsylvania, and now at the University of Canterbury, her research is published internationally and her PhD was acknowledged for its outstanding contribution to wellbeing science.

She is co-author of the Educators’ Guide to Whole-school Wellbeing, co-convenor of Wellbeing in Education NZ, presenter on many of NZIWR’s online courses and has featured in the Guardian, the Washington Post, the BBC and ABC, Channel News Asia, Swedish Television, The Bolt Report Australia, TVNZ and TV3.