About Dr Toby Thompson

What sort of person spends time thinking about existence?

That'd be me... and I've done this over many contexts and years. Previously I was at a UK postgraduate University, where I taught philosophy to academics and postgrad students – as well as designing programmes of executive development and running an online teaching studio. Prior to that I was a management trainer in the corporate university of a US IT company. My PhD is from UCL's Institute of Education: I studied the philosophy of executive education. This became a book Heidegger and Executive Education and is where I bend standard notions of time using the thinking of Martin Heidegger. I know the stresses of being an executive in a corporation, executing against handed-down orders, all while trying to find in them personal meaning. This stress even popped up in my talk with a NASA astronaut aboard the ISS.

Underpinning these career-long appreciations of the notion of existence stand my 6 years as an ordained Zen Buddhist monk in a UK Zen monastery, the perfect context to peel back all the familiar layers of existence. I'll be putting these experiences to good use in our online conversations, and we can talk about this some more when I introduce the 4-marks of existence as the dialectical basis of our ongoing existential coaching relationship. You'll be in safe hands.

I'm a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA), have a BA in philosophy, an MA in management learning, and a certificate in therapeutic counselling. I'm married with 2 grown-up kids, I meditate daily as part of an online Sangha, I love walking & litter-picking, and reading philosophy. And, like you, I take ontological precarity very seriously. Let's start talking!