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?
My coaching list is currently full.
However, I’d still love to hear from you if you would be interested in working with me in the future or if you just have any initial queries about my work.
Please do send me a message via the button below and I will get back to you to discuss your needs and give an idea of when I expect a place to become available.
Book a free, no-obligation thirty minute chat to see if coaching with me is the right option for you.
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
BY SIGNING UP YOU AGREE MY PRIVACY POLICY. YOU MAY OF COURSE UNSUBSCRIBE AT ANY TIME.
Finding interest in the boredom of lockdown
I have a pair of full length caramel leather boots that are mocking me. They are flopped over in my porch next to the shoe cabinet they don’t fit in. Of course, I don’t see them often because the front door is only used now for Tesco and DPD deliveries. Because my husband’s study is a flight of stairs nearer the door than my office he tends to beat me to the paltry excitement of taking in boxes. But still, I know they are there because they call to me. Remember when you bought me? Remember when you first wore
Are you there yet? How to get the benefits of a holiday from your home.
HOLIDAY [ Hol-li-day] any day of exemption from work EXEMPT [ig–zempt] to free from an obligation or liability to which others are subject; release: – Dictionary.com I live just at the edge of my town, my road running off a lane that starts with a school and church and peters out to fields with horses and rabbits. Every now and again my Mum will be in the car with me on that lane and will tell me (again) the story of when she went on ‘holiday’ along that lane. The Baptist church she belonged to, which was all of two miles away, hired
Is compartmentalising stress the best strategy for lawyers?
This week I heard a retired Judge speak to a non-legal audience about the challenges of doing High Court cases. * The audience was treated to just fifty minutes of well-told stories about children forced to deal in drugs for the County Lines gangs, children trafficked from the Philippines, vulnerable women from India enticed into surrogacy arrangements they later regretted. When questions were invited, the very first one was, “Are Judges given therapy to deal with all of this?” That’s a question I am asked often, but the speaker’s answer was different to my stock reply of “No, but they should
How to stop your inadequacy button being pressed.
This morning I was happily listening to a podcast when the writer being interviewed said something that pushed right on my Inadequacy Button. He was being asked about his writing process. He was a night writer, he explained, because, although he got up at 5 am and had a little time to read contemplative material and mediate over breakfast, the youngest of his five children got up at 6am, so there was no extra time to write then. He worked a full-time job from 8 to 4.30 which he described as ‘full on and with no possibility of half-assing it’.
The real gift of 2020
My coach took me through an exercise last month in which he asked me to write down a memory for every year of my life. The first interesting observation that cropped up was that the supposedly best years of my career, the nineties ,ended up blank. These were my years at the Bar and conference speaking, the ones which set me up for the judiciary and my current coaching business. I had plenty of stories I could recall; lecturing in London hotels for days on end and living it up on expenses in the city at night. Driving endless miles
How to create a legacy for the world every day.
Would you like to think that something you did today made the world a better place? Even though you are at home in your slippers and yoga pants, all by yourself, do you long to feel significant? Maybe it’s your whole career that you feel needs some sort of major upgrade so that you can feel you left a legacy that was worth all your years on earth. If you do you are not alone. A survey by BetterUp in 2018 found that 9 out of 10 workers would trade a percentage of their lifetime earnings for more meaning at work.