Winning business award has added fire to my belly...

FROM running her own personal training business that was shut by the pandemic, to setting up a unique community to help women realise their full potential, Aisling Vaughan has always marched to her own beat.

The Cork woman has just recently celebrated her 30th birthday, but has already had huge professional success, including winning the Emerging Business category in Network West Cork’s recent awards. She’ll now represent the group at the national awards in September.

“I’ve had a pretty wild journey profession wise in the last six years!” she its.

Aisling grew up in Aherla, just outside Ballincollig, and being very involved in the traditional Irish Music and dance scene in her youth, she did a degree in Music and Irish in UCC before completing a Professional Masters of Education through Irish in NUIG.

After qualifying as a teacher, she subbed for a couple of months in a gaelcholáiste in Cork city before heading off to Australia in 2017.

“I qualified as a personal trainer while I was doing the masters too, and leaned into that qualification when I moved to Sydney. I saw the opportunity to try something completely different job wise and started working as a trainer in the city.

“It was so refreshing to be doing something I lived and breathed for, and my clients were all so different and fun to work with.

“I trained and had the craic working with hundreds of people, from some of Australia’s top CEOs to guys in the navy… it was such a learning curve and massively outside my comfort zone at the time,” she said.

Aisling was also “musician in residence” for The Gaelic Club in Sydney.

“I was gigging a few times a week at night and teaching trad music at the club. That was also an amazing experience, getting to play lots of folk festivals all across Australia and meeting the characters that come with that scene!”

Not one to stand still, after a year in Sydney, she founded her own personal training business aged 25, and started to employee other coaches and scale that business. But then Covid hit.

“Like it did for many, the pandemic changed the course of everything for me and when the gyms closed, I grabbed the dog and went in search of something different again.

“I moved to an old Arabian stud farm up the coast to start another mini life there and started building an online business that would keep me ticking over.

That grew into the business ‘Ayrie’ that you see today.”

Ayrie, she says ionately, is an online programme and community for women.

“We work with women from all different walks of life in helping them get the very best out of their potential, whatever that looks like for them. Health and lifestyle coaching is a large part of what we do, in the sense that we coach women in nutrition, their relationship with food, having a more realistic approach to exercise, etc, but the programme has grown exponentially from that.

“A lot of the women we coach are high performing professionals and business owners and struggle with things like time management and organisation, work/life balance, having vision and clarity around where they are going, limiting beliefs and lack of self-confidence.

“We work with our clients in helping them get to grips with the above, which are, a lot of the time the real problems which hold them back day to day.”

She feels that Ayrie is different to anything else on offer at the moment, because her approach “holds space for the feminine (intuition, balance, rest, community, mindfulness) and also masculine energy (getting s*** done, goal setting, hard work and structure) which is very unusual in the coaching space but it has been transformative for our clients.

“We’re leading the way in doing things differently, which I think they recognise.”

The community has in Ireland, UK, Europe the UAE and Australia and continues to grow.

“We have regular in-person meetups and events alongside the online stuff - we’re just back from a weekend spent camping, hiking, river dipping and connecting in Wicklow!” said Aisling.

When she came home from Australia in 2020, she moved to Skibbereen where she lives with her partner, Paul.

“My mother is a proud Ballydehob woman so we spent a lot of our childhood back West - it’s always been another home for us.

“Living next to the sea is a non-negotiable for me too with being involved in triathlon and sea swimming, and I’m lucky enough to have several amazing beaches on my doorstep, and I have my office in a co-working space called The Ludgate Hub in town.”

She ed Network West Cork at the start of this year to connect with other business women in her locality.

“I’ve loved being part of the network so far. It’s lovely to have that and familiarity with people and I’ve really enjoyed the in-person meet-ups and networking events.”

Not surprisingly, she’s had ‘win an award for Ayrie’ on her vision board for the last couple of years and said it was ‘amazing’ to see this materialise!

“It’s lovely to be recognised and it’s only added more fire to the belly to work hard and stretch the boundaries on the impact we can have.”

Her willingness to take risks, and to be adaptable to change, has certainly paid off.

“Learning how to cope with discomfort and backing myself in finding a solution is one of my biggest strengths. Those challenges have made me the woman I am today and I’m sure there will be plenty more challenges to come!”

Aisling will be hosting ‘Ayrie LIVE’, an in-person day of workshops and lunch at The Mayson, Dublin on August 12. See www.ayrie.ie and follow her on Instagram @coach_ashyv for more.

Finalists in the Network West Cork awards also included Michelle Fox of Michelle Fox Interiors, and Noreen Coomey, Coach & Psychotherapist.

Aisling was picked to go forward to the Network Ireland Businesswoman of the year national finals later this year.