Therapy for leaders carrying sustained pressure at work

Work can look successful while becoming increasingly difficult to carry

You may be meeting deadlines, making decisions and supporting other people while privately feeling depleted or trapped. Sleep may revolve around unfinished work. Irritability or withdrawal may follow you home. A role that once brought purpose may now feel inseparable from anxiety, resentment or dread.

Burnout is not the only possible explanation. Depression, anxiety, trauma, neurodivergence, physical health, family strain, harassment, moral distress or a poor fit between responsibility and authority may contribute. We begin by understanding what is happening rather than assuming that the problem is resilience.

What we may work on

Depending on your goals, therapy may include:

• understanding how stress is narrowing your attention and choices;
• examining beliefs about responsibility, competence, loyalty and failure;
• separating the demands you control from those you can influence or cannot presently change;
• communicating capacity, risk and trade-offs more accurately;
• recovering parts of your identity and life that work has crowded out;
• considering boundaries, leave, role change or departure without treating any one answer as predetermined.

The work may draw on acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive behavioural approaches, emotional processing and practical regulation skills within Floyd's training and competence. The approach is collaborative rather than a fixed program.

Experience that helps Floyd understand the context

Before psychotherapy, Floyd spent 35 years in software and 20 years leading global engineering teams, most recently as VP R&D at Qlik. He understands delivery pressure, organizational ambiguity, competing stakeholders and the personal logic that can make absorbing more responsibility feel like leadership.

That background does not make Floyd an expert on your workplace or guarantee that he will understand every industry. It gives him a practical context for asking about the system as well as your response to it.

Therapy is not a substitute for workplace action

Psychotherapy cannot supply missing staff, reverse an employer's decision or resolve discrimination and unsafe conditions. Clinical support may be useful alongside advice from a physician, union, lawyer, human-resources professional or occupational-health provider when those resources are relevant.

The aim is not to help you tolerate anything. It is to understand the situation and your responses well enough to choose your next step with greater awareness.

Related reading

• When pressure at work feels unbearable