Executive psychotherapy for career mismatch
Sometimes the problems that lead a person to seek help are based in a role mismatch. What looked like a need for help for stress or depression can quickly reveal what is really required: executive psychotherapy for a career mismatch.
If you are a big picture, visionary extrovert, and your role requires attention to detail in some lightly peopled environment, it can hardly be surprising if your morale, motivation, self esteem, and ultimately your productivity take a downward path.
Most role-talent clashes are not as simple or as easy to spot as the one above.
Most are subtle, nuanced, and complex. For instance, a highly creative person in one role can thrive, where his/her boss welcomes and expects a steady stream of improvement ideas. Even in the same apparent role, a change of boss to someone who wants to keep things just as they are, will cause a change in the actual role. Day job plus lots of ideas to improve, becomes, day job and no, we don’t need any ideas, please leave your brain on the pillow on the morning.
You may consider that example very obvious, too. And that is the point. A skilled executive psychotherapist, looking at the problems that a person is experiencing, can often pin point, and articulate the issue with remarkable speed. As you would expect, such speed is slowly acquired over many years of practical experience.
Symptoms of distress masking the real problem is common in problems that require executive psychotherapy. Sometimes the layers of masking are multiple. What looks like the need for executive psychotherapy for career mismatch can be partial, or even very slight career mismatch.
For instance, a professional or executive may feel that s/he is in the right role, but the wrong industry, or wrong sector.
I have helped many lawyers who wanted to leave the law because of the clash with their ethics (e.g., a common experience is being asked to advise in such a way as to maximise income for the law firm at a client’s expense).
Looking behind the presenting symptoms one often discovers that the person finds such illegality and immorality reprehensible and considers that they are experiencing a career-ethics mismatch.
Further psychological analysis can reveal that they were and are attracted to the law as a vehicle to achieve justice.
When put in a position where they were expected to exploit others’ need for justice to impose yet another injustice on them, they experience a direct clash of their motives and values, which in turn led to anxiety, stress, depression etc.
The solution was not a change of career, but a change of firm, or a change of sector.
If you are experiencing symptoms and you think they may be related to a career mismatch, there are many factors to consider before walking away from a career. It may be you are in exactly the right career and exactly the wrong company, or exactly the wrong sector, for you.
If you wish to make an appointment with Prof Nigel MacLennan please call 
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