Lawyers, do you want to manage stress, make changes or develop your personal and professional soft skills? If so, let's talk!
Lawyers are human too. You are expected to perform as if nothing touches you and to appear confident and competent at all times. But the reality is different. Practising law takes you through a full range of thoughts and emotions both positive and negative. How are you feeling today?
Traditionally the profession has not been good at acknowledging these feelings and meeting the needs they create. There is much talk about 'wellbeing' but few people empowering you to actually make your life better. Instead, lawyers struggle on alone in silence.
It is my purpose to change that.
About Helen L. Conway
I experienced all of these emotions in my work as a former solicitor and barrister specialising in family law and as a full-time District Judge in the Family Court, County Court and Court of Protection for over 10 years.
I learned that wellbeing is not just the absence of the stress-induced illness that plagues the profession. It is the positive state of having enough of all that you need, physically, intellectually and emotionally. It includes feeling supported, resilient, fulfilled, and happy at work. It is about having a sense of meaning, purpose, and balance. It is also about having sufficient personal time to enjoy life with family and friends, to engage in sustaining activities and to recuperate.
Having experienced what it is like to be depleted of all these positives and having suffered the consequences, I spent several years learning how wellbeing is really achieved and sustained. Having now achieved it in my own life, my purpose is to share what I learned with you so that you can create your own sense of wellbeing.
As a qualified coach, trained mindfulness teacher and associate at JSA Psychology, I combine my legal experience and my psychology knowledge to empower others to create and sustain a genuine sense of wellbeing at work and in their personal lives
You can read more about on my About page..

I focus on four common needs:
Space to think
A pause to reflect on work and its demands. A place to offload and process the toxic relationships and stories of abuse and trauma you hear . Someone who can support you to grow and develop as a lawyer and individual.
Workplace wellbeing
Practical ways to manage stress, prevent burnout and create a sense of meaning, purpose and yes, even joy at work and in your personal life.
Relevant bespoke CPD provision
Soft skills training and one to one self-development work that meets your precise, individual needs, relevant to the exact situations you face at work.
Support through transition
Stepping into leadership, career change, starting a business, returning to work after a break, retirement or making a passion project happen on the side. All these are easier with someone alongside you.
I do this by offering three types of service:
One to one
Family Law Supervision
An ongoing relationship providing professional support and one to one continual professional development to family lawyers
One to one coaching
Support for you if you need to make changes in your life, have a goal to achieve or find yourself at a transition point such as stepping up into leadership, job change or return to work. I also work with clients wishing to work on passion projects to bring balance and pleasure into their lives.
Group Training
Bespoke in house courses, online teaching and keynote speaking for conference providers
Considering working with me?
Book a free, no-obligation thirty minute chat to see if coaching with me is the right option for you.
Have questions? Read my Blog to get a feel for what I do. Or just send me an email and I’ll reply as soon as I can.
I'd love to be able to keep in touch with you
If you would like to hear about my latest articles, books courses and to get some useful resources please go ahead and sign up for my mailing list. Don’t worry. I won’t flood your inbox. You can expect an email about every 4-6 weeks
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Is art too expensive to learn?
An alarming fact dropped into my email in box today. The cost of a Master of Fine Arts degree at Columbia University is now $74,250. That’s just for a one year course. Which prompted me to ponder me: Is art now too expensive for most people to learn? It’s not quite so much in the UK – an MA in Fine Art at Central St Martins costs £6045 or £15.165 for international students. Which rather begs the question whether Americans wouldn’t be better having a year in the UK than paying their own domestic fees. However to start at undergraduate level and

Will you know when you reach enough?
Jim Carrey recently announced his retirement from acting. At the same time he released a short film about his love of painting called I Needed Colour in which he speaks about the importance of art in his life. (See the firm embedded below.) In an interview about his decision to step back from the film world he said: “I really like my quiet life, and I really love putting paint on canvas, and I really love my spiritual life, and I feel like – and this is something you might never hear another celebrity say as long as time exists – I

Why our strengths can stop us even starting.
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How to beat Imposter Syndrome
Do you feel that you don’t really belong in the world in which you work? Do you lack confidence and feel like an, imposter only pretending to be professional? Do you feel you are not entitled to have your job title or the recognition you have achieved even though you enjoy your work and have formal qualifications? I’ve never met a lawyer yet who hasn’t had those feeling at some time and the more time I spend with artists I realise that the same is true in that world too. Which is not surprising as these thoughts and feelings are

How to cope with the feeling of languishing
Languishing is the topic of the moment. Psychologist Adam Grant wrote an article about it for the New York Times back in May 2021 and since then his ideas have gone viral with any number of publications recycling his comments. It hit a nerve because the term ‘languishing’ explains perfectly the ‘meh’ feeling that so many people around the world have as the pandemic lingers. What none of the many articles I have read say, however, is how just the way we think and speak about languishing can make a difference to our experience of it. What is languishing? Let’s

How to square the circle of ‘wellbeing fatigue’.
Last week Lucy Reed wrote a , eloquent and thought-provoking blog entitled Wellbeing Fatigue. The rant (her word) should be read in full here , but the nub of it was that she was sick of wellbeing tips. She stated ‘the problems that were frying our resilience and longevity are structural not internal to us as individuals – take away the ‘look how busy I am b***s**t’ and there is still a major problem. We’re all talk and no action because ultimately, we as individuals are almost powerless.’ Then: ‘this is a circle that can’t be squared. There aren’t enough judges or slots in the