Virtual psychotherapy across Ontario

Burnout therapy for tech leaders carrying sustained pressure

You may still be delivering, making high-stakes decisions and supporting a team while work consumes your attention, affects your health or follows you home. Therapy offers a place to understand the pattern and consider what needs to change in you, the role or the system around you.

Talk to Floyd →
  • Secure video across Ontario
  • Daytime and evening appointments
  • $150 for 50 minutes · Sliding-scale available

The focus

How can therapy help with burnout in technology leadership?

Therapy can help you understand how sustained pressure, responsibility and professional identity are affecting your thoughts, emotions, body and relationships. It cannot supply missing resources or make an unhealthy workplace fair, but it can support clearer decisions, communication and boundaries.

When technical leadership follows you home

If you are an engineering manager, director, VP, CTO, R&D leader or senior technical professional, you know what it's like to have people depend on you to make tough decisions, support your team, and deliver exceptional results at high velocity 24/7. You may even look successful at it. But privately, some of us pay the price: feeling depleted, trapped or unable to switch off.

Engineering leadership is relentless. Technology evolves overnight, org charts shift constantly, M&A can be the norm, and firefighting is daily business. You are stuck in the middle, forced to deliver what is promised while wrestling with what is realistically possible.

That pressure and stress can easily follow you home. A role that once brought purpose may now feel inseparable from anxiety, resentment or dread.

Burnout might just be the starting point. Depression, anxiety, trauma, neurodivergence, physical health, family struggles, harassment, moral distress or a poor fit between responsibility and authority may contribute.

With Floyd, none of these are academic concerns. His approach is informed by more than twenty years of software engineering leadership, living these dynamics firsthand.

Leadership & Psychotherapy: A fascinating convergence

Through personal, family and volunteer life, Floyd encountered the neuroscience of emotional regulation and neurodivergence. The application of these explanatory models and evidence-based clinical practices to the workplace became obvious.

Together we can explore:

  • how stress narrows attention and choices, explaining why others behave the way they do and why you might see fewer options than actually exist;
  • how neurodivergence can help us better understand ourselves and others;
  • how cognition and emotion are linked, often without our knowledge, and how to get the best answers from both;
  • how to communicate accurately in response to unreasonable demands and unworkable ideas;
  • how to effectively navigate a hierarchy, even when it's not behaving the way you think it should;
  • how your most important values get crowded out in the chaos of the day-to-day, and how reconnecting with them can help you steer your organization and yourself more effectively;
  • practical options like boundaries, leave, role change or departure without treating any one answer as predetermined.

Floyd draws upon acceptance and commitment therapy, cognitive behavioural approaches, emotional processing and skills informed by dialectical behaviour therapy, grounded in real-world leadership experience.

Floyd's experience

Floyd spent more than twenty years leading global software 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. Inspired by mental health volunteer roles and lived family experience, Floyd attained a Master of Arts in Counselling Psychology and became a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) with a goal to improve mental health care using an engineering mindset.

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

Practical questions

Questions about this therapy.

How can a burnout therapist help with technology leadership stress?

A burnout therapist can help you understand how sustained pressure, responsibility and professional identity are affecting your thoughts, emotions, body and relationships. Therapy may support clearer decisions, communication and boundaries, but it cannot supply missing resources or make an unhealthy workplace fair.

What can burnout counselling address for engineering managers and tech leaders?

Burnout counselling can address exhaustion, work-related anxiety, irritability, identity strain and the patterns that make absorbing more responsibility feel necessary. We also consider the workplace system, including demands, authority, resources and consequences, rather than assuming the problem is resilience.

Does executive burnout mean I need to leave my job?

No, executive burnout does not make leaving your job the only answer. Therapy can help you consider boundaries, leave, role change or departure without treating any one option as predetermined, while recognizing that burnout may not be the only explanation for distress at work.

Does Floyd understand software engineering and technology workplaces?

Floyd brings practical experience from more than twenty years leading global software teams. That background helps him ask informed questions about delivery pressure, technical risk and workplace systems, but it does not make him an expert on your organization or experience.