Meet Els van der Helm the ‘Sleep Geek’; Neuroscientist and founder of Shleep - the sleep company
You hold a Master and a PhD in Neuroscience. Would you tell us more about your background?
I’ve
always been fascinated by sleep. I read a book by Prof. Bill Dement
from Stanford when I was in high school which taught me about the magic
of sleep and also the taboo around it: that we associate it with being
lazy or less ambitious. That really inspired me to study clinical
neuropsychology and neuroscience. So during my Master on these topics, I
started to do sleep research, first at the Netherlands Institute of
Neuroscience in Amsterdam and then at Harvard, looking at the effect of
sleep in emotional processing. And then I went on to do my PhD at UC
Berkeley, looking at the effect of sleep on our brain.
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| Els van der Helm, sleep expert and founder of Shleep |
How was your transition from the PhD to becoming a McKinsey consultant?
I
really enjoyed doing sleep research and learning about it, but at the
same time I realized that doing neuroimaging is very technical and not
necessarily my passion. I also missed working in a team and having a
more direct impact. I really wanted to help people and the slow pace of
academia didn’t fit me. So I decided to make a change and go into
business and learn more about the rest of the world, beyond academia.
How was your experience as a business consultant for almost 3 years?
The
beginning was quite rough in some ways and quite easy in others.
Starting with the roughness: there is much more time pressure on what
you are doing. I remember having meetings with my manager and instead of
saying ‘I’ll see you in a week’, which was kind of the pace in
academia, the answer would be ‘OK, let’s see in two hours where you
are’. So, suddenly, you’re doing everything under time pressure. And for
me it really meant that I still had a lot to learn about time
management and organizational skills. I also had to share my documents
with the rest of the team and the clients, whereas in academia it was
much more individual: I could make a mess, as long as I could understand
it. So the biggest changes for me were the change in pace and the level
of focus that it required. It was much more intense. Also, I was at the
client’s site the whole day and couldn’t for example go work out in the
middle of the day if I wanted to, as I was able to do during my PhD.
That was quite rough, to be honest. It was a very different way of
working that I needed to learn. Different skills were required and these
weren’t skills that you just get within 2 or 3 weeks. I would say I
really got the hang of it when I was doing the work for about 9 to 12
months. And that’s quite normal, but coming in after a PhD or a post-doc
as opposed to after a Master or a Bachelor’s degree, you expect more of
yourself. So for me it was a humbling journey, having to develop all of
those new skills, basically a 'consultant's toolbox'. This toolbox is
not just critical in consulting, but helpful in any type of job. I also
enjoyed the fact that you work in a team, you get so much feedback,
training and support around you, which I didn’t really experience during
my PhD. So my learning curve was a lot steeper than it had been in
academia. I felt like I was using my time better. It was always a
different project, team, manager, client, and industry. In consulting,
every year feels like a ‘dog year’: it’s worth 7 years! (laughs)
So it’s a rough transition but I’d say well worth it. You develop
yourself very quickly and it’s a unique experience. There were things I
loved and things I was less happy about, but overall, a very positive
experience.
What motivated you to make the career change of leaving consulting in a big firm to starting your own company?
It
was never really my goal to stay in consulting forever. For me, it was
all about purpose. I really wanted to focus more on something I’m really
passionate about. The funny thing is that when I joined McKinsey I
didn’t think I would ever do anything with sleep again, but not working
on sleep anymore made me realize how much I missed it, and how
passionate I was about the topic. Perhaps in academia I wasn’t working
on the topic in the right way: it was very technical and very slow,
which I didn’t really enjoy. When I started as a consultant, I also
quickly realized that, for me, business problems are really not as
interesting as neuroscience and the brain. But I did really love being
in the business world and interacting with people who are really smart,
care about their own performance and are very ambitious. In McKinsey, we
received a lot of training: in time management, stress, leadership...
But never ever did the word ‘sleep’ come up. Knowing how critical sleep
is for learning, attention, stress reactivity and developing new
insights, I felt that was a major topic missing.
'IT STARTED AS MY HOBBY AND THEN GREW INTO A COMPANY'
That really inspired me
to start giving sleep workshops for my colleagues and McKinsey clients.
It was so much fun and there was so much interest. Giving these
workshops made me realize how I could work with the topic of sleep in a
way that fits me much better: translating science into practical advice
(which I wasn’t really doing in academia) and seeing a direct impact on
the people I was working with. That was something I cared about much
more than being a consultant. It started as my hobby while at McKinsey
but I really made that grow and carved out a space for myself, as the
internal sleep expert. It was almost like a testing ground for me, or an
incubator, where I could test my ideas, get feedback, and grow my
network and skill set. So I decided to leave and started my own
business, called Shleep, in 2016.
Can you please tell us more about Shleep? What are its products and who are its clients?
Our
mission is to help the world sleep better. We help organizations
improve their performance by improving the sleep of their leaders and
employees. For this, we offer a number of products and services. We
design sleep programs for companies, which means that we help them
develop approaches to put sleep on the map and really embrace it in
their culture, so that all employees know how important sleep is and can
prioritize it better. This way, they perform better, are happier and
healthier. Some other services we offer are online assessments,
in-person workshops, one-on-one coaching, webinars, and we’ve developed a
digital sleep coaching app that will be launched soon in the App Store,
so it will also be available for individual consumers. Examples of our
corporate clients are McKinsey, Deloitte, Spotify, social network
companies, pharmaceutical companies, law firms, startups, amongst
others. Our startup team is quite international. The office is based in
Amsterdam, along with our marketing guru, Tom, and myself. My
co-founder, Jöran Albers (the ‘business guy’), is based in Munich, our
developer is from Switzerland but lives in the Netherlands, and Elena, a
circadian rhythms PhD, is based in Canada.
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| http://www.shleepbetter.com/ |
What advice would you give to current Master and PhD students in Neuroscience who would like to leave academia?
Join our company for an internship! (laughs)
I’m laughing, but I’m actually serious! What is great about our startup
is that we have experience in management consulting (two people in our
team) and we really use these skills in the way we run our company and
develop our employees, which we are very much focused on. At the same
time, you can get the startup experience, where things change very
quickly, we re-prioritize all the time, things are up and down,
exciting, moving fast. And we’re translating science into practical
advice and products on a daily basis.
'YOU REALLY HAVE TO DO SOMETHING THAT YOU CARE ABOUT'
Other
types of advice: you really have to do something that you care about,
that you’re happy to wake up for in the morning. Figure out what it is
that drives you. It’s not easy. It took me a while to figure out that
for me it was sleep. But look back at your life and think about some of
the key moments when you were really happy, inspired or content with
what you were doing. Pinpoint moments when you really enjoyed or didn’t
enjoy doing something, instead of trying to imagine what you would enjoy
doing, because a lot of things aren’t really like what they seem to be.
And focus on your own strengths. Ask people around you what you’re good
at, what they think is special about you, so you can leverage those
strengths. And reach out to people in different jobs, ask if you could
meet them for a coffee or talk to them for a few minutes on the phone to
ask some career questions. It can be incredibly helpful to get some
inside information. I wish you all the best figuring it out!
by Mariana Cerdeira, PhD Student AG Harms
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