Counselling for Professionals

Therapy for people in tech, finance and law whose work does not leave room for a bad day.

I offer counselling for professionals in high-pressure careers in Vancouver, Burnaby and online anywhere in BC.

Some jobs demand focus, discipline and attention to detail, and reward people who supply all three. Caring about the quality of your work is not a problem. It becomes one when your sense of who you are starts resting on getting it right, because at that point an ordinary mistake stops feeling ordinary.

If that has happened to you, the pressure is usually invisible from the outside. The work still gets done. The results still arrive. What changes is what it costs you to produce them.

I work with professionals across the range of concerns people bring to therapy, including anxiety, depression, trauma, relationship difficulties and life transitions. Within that, the work I go deepest on is what sustained pressure does to high performers.

What this looks like day to day

Most people who come to me for this describe some version of the same list:

  • a mind that keeps working long after you have stopped

  • exhaustion that does not lift at the weekend

  • small errors that feel out of proportion to their actual size

  • a standard you hold yourself to that you would never impose on a colleague

  • success that registers as relief rather than achievement

  • boundaries you keep meaning to set and keep not setting

None of these are character flaws. They are what happens when a mind built for high standards runs without a limit for long enough.

Why the pressure stops working

There is a point where the drive that got you here starts working against you.

The internal voice that pushes for higher standards is doing something useful up to a point. It helps you tell better from worse. Past that point, it stops being a guide and starts being a tyrant. Every result becomes a baseline rather than an achievement, and every shortfall becomes evidence about you rather than information about the work.

The cost of running that way is not only emotional. Sustained pressure of this kind produces poor sleep, less cognitive capacity and a shorter emotional fuse, and each of those makes mistakes more likely. That is the part most people miss. The pressure that is supposed to protect your performance is what eventually erodes it.

How I work with professionals

My approach is structured, active and focused on the present. I will guide our sessions rather than wait, and you can expect me to ask questions that open up why a pattern exists rather than only what to do about it.

Underneath the specific techniques, I work from a single question: what is this thought or behaviour actually doing for you? Not whether it is rational, and not whether it is helpful, but what job it is performing. That question tends to take people somewhere more useful than surface-level advice, because a pattern that looks irrational from the outside is almost always doing something sensible from the inside.

What we actually do

In our sessions we will:

  • map how the pressure operates in your specific work, rather than in general

  • identify the automatic thought patterns feeding anxiety and self-doubt

  • get to know the protective parts of you, so they can work for you instead of burning you out

  • build strategies that survive contact with a real workload

The first few sessions focus on understanding your history, your work and your goals. Once those are clear, we work through them.

Where and when I work

I see clients in person at:

  • my Burnaby office in Metrotower II, 4720 Kingsway

  • my Pine office in Kitsilano, Vancouver at 1682 W 7th Ave

  • online with anywhere in British Columbia

In order to make therapy as accessible as possible to fit into the busy schedules of my clients, I offer sessions during the day (including lunch time), in the evenings, and on workdays and weekends.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about counselling for professionals

  • No. People who ease the internal pressure tend to hold standards just as high, and reach them with fewer errors, because they are not spending capacity on self-criticism.

  • It can. We set clear goals early so the work has direction, and online sessions remove the travel. What matters more than frequency is that sessions are focused.

  • That depends on what we are working with and what you want from it. We set goals in the first few sessions, which gives us both something concrete to measure against rather than an open-ended process.

  • No. Those are the industries I know best, and I work with adults across the full range of concerns that bring people to counselling.