Career Anxiety & Burnout
Anxiety, doubts, and fears about your career rarely begin and end with the job.
When you’ve worked hard to build a career and life you’re proud of, feeling dissatisfied with it or excessively anxious can be particularly destabilizing. Those who’ve spent their lives in high-stress, high-performing environments, in particular, may feel lost about how to pull back and reflect, let alone figure out what they want or how to feel better.
You may not want to slow down, but something has to change.
For those who have spent their lives always making the “right” decisions, finding themselves, after all that, feeling scared at work, burnt out, or directionless can be destabilizing and even terrifying.
But the options that seem on the table may feel even less palatable—who am if I’m not striving for the next best thing? Will people still value me if I’m no longer in a specific kind of job? Will I? How do I even define what “value” means to me now?
Career anxiety is often so intense because it can reveal more foundational lessons we internalized to adapt and survive when we were younger—for instance, that you would only be valued or receive affection and attention when you achieved things; or that the stakes of not over-performing were too high to risk.
Together, with compassion and deep understanding, we’ll work to alleviate some of your immediate symptoms of anxiety, and explore some of the questions and early lessons you learned, to understand how much of that you want to hold onto and what you are ready to let go of.
Therapy vs. Career Coaching
I often work with someone who is simultaneously working with a career coach. While there will be themes, topics, and questions that are explored in both, therapy is distinctly different from career coaching in some meaningful ways.
With your therapist, you might:
Explore your feelings of anxiety and how the symptoms show up in your body and impact you
Examine patterns that have re-emerged in different jobs and settings across your life, to understand what they’re rooted in
Define what you want to be different in your life, or explore what feels hard about defining this
With your career coach, you might:
Develop specific goals around your next career moves, including creating a job search strategy & interview prep
Prepare for difficult conversations, such as salary negotiations, or conversations with a manager or co-worker
Concretely work on how you discuss and present your experience and skills
There’s value in both, and most people find their natural balance in what to bring where.
Ready to get started?
Schedule a free, 15-minute consultation to see what it would be like to work together.