Welcome to Light on Thinking!
A university-focused coaching and philosophical counselling service.
I am Dr Helen E. Lees. I coach academics and university students to enjoy their work and academic career by being their best self. I use Parts work and philosophy to help you. With my support you change for the better.
What is Light on Thinking’s Academic Coaching?
Academic coaching at Light on Thinking uses insider knowledge of university environments and experience to support you as an academic, or as a student, to move forward successfully with your academic career, or study.
Universities are difficult places. I understand this difficulty. I also understand how you can benefit from universities for all they offer. I guide you to find your right answers.
I have worked with senior academics, famous for their work at a global level, as well as first year undergraduates struggling to find their feet. What does such a diversity of people and experience have in common? The university and its affect on the human psyche.
Richard Hall calls the university an “anxiety machine.” Others have identified its violences. I wrote the definitive guide to navigating these issues through strategies for well-being: Playing the University Game -the art of university-based self-education (2022). Read it to understand first steps in a new approach to being in and with the university as experience.
Whilst my offer is not therapy I do use modalities used in therapy to help you. I use two main supports for you:
Parts work and the inner child
Philosophies of education, specific to university experience
Finally, there are the “technologies of the self,” which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality.
Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 1985, p. 18, Tavistock Publications.
“The answers you get depend on the questions you ask.”
― Thomas S. Kuhn
What is Light on Thinking’s philosophical counselling for universities?
My clients all have a relationship to the university for the sake of living a good life.
When problems strike, I help them to not lose their investment in university involvement.
There are many ways to lose. I help people win. Sometimes having a philosophical perspective on anomalies and crisis can really help support wellbeing and good decisions, for leading the life you want.
Here’s an example: I had a client who studied distant space objects. He was increasingly unhappy in his research as he realised his work would never be able to be properly validated (or verified) in his lifetime. The amount of time correct answers would take to travel back to earth, to prove his research was right (or not), was literally light years away. This posed for him a philosophical concern about his academic contribution. Who did it serve? What was the point for him personally? How could he relationally connect to himself and others about such obscure experience? Where could he gather to himself self-esteem and joy in such a field of research? He had lost his sense of purpose and meaning, despite having been fascinated by astronomy since a child.
We worked together on the nature of meaning and from whence it comes, using various philosophical perspectives. We also considered the meaning of a life lived by chance and how life paths evolve and what, in all of this, matters most. My client decided his job did have meaning after all, because he was good at what he did, was diligent and curious but most of all, his permanent post in a great city was a lucky break for the bringing up of his children in a secure way. He ended our sessions happy, and even grateful, to be a university astronomer after all. He had also found a new curiosity by refocusing his research agenda towards a slightly different area of astronomy. This avoided some of the features he had previously found so depressing.
Whoever I work with, all my clients have invested something important to them personally in their relationship to universities.
For some clients that is money and lots of it, over the years. From being a student paying for fees (and suffering loss of income to study), to various decisions that directed their life in certain ways which determined their income. These clients want a fair return.
For others it is energy, life’s purpose, time. Clients can invest their identity in the university in profound ways. Some end up struggling with that enmeshment and this needs understanding for what it offers and as well as what it costs psychologically.
University involvement is very often about forms of sacrifice: money, relationships, opportunities, self-hood or other valuable aspects of one’s existence.
When problems occur - and they often do, such is the nature of the university - this investment is put into peril.
I help you secure your investment. The university holds a unique place in our existence and has great power. How the university can affect us personally is not easy to understand, nor come to terms with. The landscape is complex; the impacts can be severe. One example is that people do kill themselves. Quite simply, call me first…
Increasing stress levels in university spaces can make a series of sessions with me an important act of self-care.
Universities can make you nervous. Work with me to restore your calm, confidence and clarity of meaning for yourself.
Who are my clients?
I see private clients who come to me independently of a university: staff and students in difficulty.
Sometimes the cost of our sessions is paid for by a university’s human resources department who invest in you via my service because you are not psychologically ill, but you would appreciate some support to flourish in the workplace.
I also work with students considering university, students about to leave and give up their degree, and parents at the point of funding their children’s education.
I charge on a sliding scale depending on your income. Whoever is paying can contact me for session costs.
I am not a career counsellor. I listen to your story and I ask why you think the way you do. We explore other ways to think about your situation, which often involves holding the university to account but also, inevitably, involves you taking responsibility for your responses. Any solutions you reach are always those you find.
Crucially for a service that costs you money, the ultimate aim is that it can save you more money in the short and long term than you paid to me.
How am I qualified to help you?
My qualifications for helping you are more than 30 years active and intense philosophical practice as a thinker with mastery over ways to use thought to navigate life. Practice makes perfect and thinking is a practice, just like sport or playing a musical instrument. I have a BA Hons degree in Philosophy from Durham University (1995) and an Education PhD, involving Alternative Education philosophizing, from Birmingham University (2011). My thesis was investigating what happens to the self of adults when they discover children don’t have to go to school. In other words, I researched the philosophical effect of freedom in the soul, in the context of education as a system of the world.
A profound understanding of universities as machinery and within systems of education comes from my own experiences in universities as an undergraduate (1992-1995), postgraduate (2006-2010) and academic researcher and teacher (2010 - 2018) of education, including education done otherwise than the norm. I am now an independent scholar involved in various academic activities to do with research, real world impact and publishing, such as co-editing a book series in my field, having been the founding editor of an online open access journal and developing journalistic responses to academic research and its uses (2009 - variously ongoing). Also, from research and university involvement, I have undertaken to better understand how universities can relate to us in more productive and positive ways, based on what we want for ourselves in the manner of self care. I published the book Playing the University Game - the art of university-based self-education in 2022 (Bloomsbury) and with this publication I begin my phase of taking thinking about the university into the public and practical domain of coaching and counselling
You are recommended to buy a copy and read it before we meet. Frankly, you may find this is a very cheap way to get the philosophical counselling you need. The book is designed to support you to care for yourself and make the most of university facilities and experience.
For those seeking a very personalised approach to their “queries” I am here as a one on one support.
Sessions happen usually online and last one hour. They can happen in person, by special arrangement. This is usually appropriate for senior academics and for university human resource workshop purchasing or bulk session buy-ins. Workshops are for a maximum of 10 people at a time.
Get in touch!
Get in touch to make an individual appointment. I offer all clients a complimentary first session of one hour. No obligation.
Philosophy may seem like a luxury service for those with time to spare. It is not.
By knowing more, we live better.
