About

There is an art to understanding what someone means – not just what they say, but what their work stands for, and what they seek to achieve in their career. Lisa has spent her life developing that art as an academic coach, writer, editor, workshop facilitator, and researcher. The results for her clients are tangible: a grant won, an award achieved, a leadership role secured, or a promotion that honours years of dedicated work.

Since founding Mind Your Way in 2011, Lisa has led an interdisciplinary team of editors, philosophers, scientists, literary scholars, journalists, and coaches. They are united by one mission: to capture the stories that define academics’ lives and careers. That approach has substantially lifted clients’ grant and promotion success, along with their career satisfaction. Lisa also carries this storytelling mission into workshops as a sought-after facilitator, delivering grant-writing and promotion-application training to universities and research institutes across Australia.

Lisa’s focus extends to people as much as projects, ideas, and texts. She is a seasoned leadership and performance development coach, accredited with the International Coaching Federation (ICF) at Professional Certified Coach (PCC) level, with more than 3,000 hours of professional coaching to date. Alongside her Diploma in Life Coaching, she brings deep expertise in coaching for gender equity in higher education and research, and has coached on flagship diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the sector. She’s delivered coaching for Monash University’s Advancing Women’s Success Grant for over 10 years and was elected to RMIT University’s executive coaching panel. She also co-designed and delivered the University of Adelaide’s Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences’ Career Coaching Program and has served as coach for the university’s Barbara Kidman Fellowship recipients (now at Adelaide University). Alongside these flagship programs, she has worked with a diverse group of private and institutional coaching clients across academia.

Her experience as an entrepreneur and company director, grounded in formal business training through a Cert IV in Business, has proven valuable at scale. Over a period of five years, Lisa led the implementation of Monash University’s Prizes & Awards Strategy for the Office of the Vice-Provost of Research, training and mentoring her team to identify and promote award opportunities across the university, while overseeing prize and award bids for individuals and teams. The Strategy delivered a seven-fold return on investment across its lifetime, and Lisa has since carried those insights into engagements with other institutions.

These activities are enriched by Lisa’s intimate understanding of the academic landscape. She completed an MA in Philosophy and English Philology at the Technische Universität Berlin, a PhD in History at Monash University, and a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Philosophy, also at Monash. More recently, she returned to academic research and is currently an Honorary Fellow at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. Her 2023 monograph, Chasing Tourette’s: Time, Freedom, and the Missing Self, was published in Springer’s Philosophy and Medicine series, and her work since then has continued to explore the lived experience of neurodivergence.

For a list of recent engagements Lisa has worked on, click here.