About me

Lawyer, educator,
wellness practitioner

Towards clarity,
balance, positivity

I understand what it takes

For 20 years I was a legal educator. My work centred on coaching and mentoring adult students about personal, study and professional issues as they sought to achieve their career goals.

I was also a practising lawyer for several decades, and like all of us in professional, corporate or academic careers, I faced many challenges. This led me to seek out strategies that helped me pay more attention to self-care.

These days, I am inspired to support other professionals in high-pressure environments to create balance and clarity across all aspects of their life, built on foundations of positive psychology and mindfulness.

I have been deeply engaged for many years with fostering mental health literacy and wellbeing in professional life.

In 2011 alongside my peers at the College of Law in Sydney, I developed a mental health and wellbeing workshop which has since been delivered to more than 40,000 law graduates. I have run more almost 100 of these workshops, trained my colleagues to teach it and delivered conference presentations in Australia and abroad.

I have been a member of the Wellness Network for Law for more than 10 years. I co-convened the network’s annual forum in 2016 and was invited to join the Board of the inaugural forum of the Wellness Network for Law (UK) in 2017. I became a founding supporter of the Global Compassion Coalition in 2023.

Appleby Coaching & Consulting was launched in 2023, offering services to individuals as well as organisations.

Qualifications

  • BA LLB University of New South Wales

  • Lawyer

  • Solicitor of the Supreme Court of New South Wales

  • Solicitor of the High Court of Australia

  • LEADR Accredited Mediator, since 1997

  • Certificate IV in Workplace Training and Assessment (UTS), 2003

  • Gateway to Best Practice, College of Law, 2001

  • Mental Health First Aid Trained

Selected publications and presentations

  • ‘Mental health promotion in the law: What would Janus say?’ 2016 Annual Mental Health Lecture, ACT Law Society at the Supreme Court of the ACT; subsequently published under the title ‘A good lawyer’, in Ethos: the Journal of the ACT Law Society, December 2016.

  • ‘Promoting law student mental health literacy and wellbeing: a case study from The College of Law, Australia’ (with Judy Bourke, 2014) 20(1) International Journal of Clinical Legal Education 461.

  • ‘The development of programs to support good mental health for law students’: Paper delivered at the Conference of the International Journal of Clinical Legal Education, Durham, UK, 2012.