Therapists, like our team here at Flourish Psychology, are here to help you manage your mental health. We are also here to guide you and act as a sounding board for your thoughts, concerns, and needs. It is that latter service that brings people to therapists when they’re looking for a career change.
Our therapists are able to provide a service known as “career counseling.” Career counseling helps individuals navigate their professional paths, make informed career choices, and address challenges related to job satisfaction and career development.
With career counseling, we provide support and strategies that help clients understand themselves, their goals, and the various factors influencing their career decisions, using techniques that:
Facilitate Self-Discovery and Self-Awareness
One of the primary roles of a therapist in career counseling is to help clients gain a deeper understanding of themselves. This involves exploring personal values, interests, strengths, weaknesses, and personality traits that can influence career choices. Through assessments, guided discussions, and reflective exercises, therapists help clients identify:
Core values that drive motivation and job satisfaction
Skills and competencies that align with specific career paths
Personality traits that may affect workplace dynamics and job performance
Long-term goals and aspirations
By fostering this self-awareness, we are able to enable clients to make informed career decisions that align with their authentic selves, leading to greater fulfillment and success in their chosen – or new – professions.
Address Career-Related Anxiety and Stress
Career transitions, job searches, and workplace challenges can be significant sources of stress and anxiety. Our therapists use our experience in mental health to help clients manage these emotional hurdles by providing coping strategies and emotional support. Techniques such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), mindfulness practices, and stress management tools can help clients overcome anxiety related to job interviews, career changes, work/life demands, and more.
Help Clients Develop Decision-Making Skills
Those in high profile careers are often tasked with making difficult decisions both in their jobs and for themselves, personally. Making these decisions can be overwhelming, especially when faced with multiple options, uncertainty, or profound financial risk.
Our career counseling therapists guide clients through structured decision-making processes, helping them evaluate their options, weigh the pros and cons, and consider the long-term implications of their choices.
Provide Career Assessment and Exploration Tools
Therapists that provide career counseling use various assessment tools to help clients explore their interests, aptitudes, and potential career paths. These tools include personality assessments, interest inventories, skill evaluations, and values assessments, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Holland Code, or StrengthsFinder. By interpreting the results of these assessments, therapists can:
Help clients gain insights into suitable career options
Identify areas of growth and development
Align clients’ strengths with potential job opportunities
Create personalized career development plans
These assessments offer a structured approach to exploring career possibilities, helping clients feel more informed and confident in their choices.
Support Career Transitions and Change Management
Many individuals seek career counseling during times of transition, such as changing industries, returning to work after a break, or navigating job loss. Therapists guide clients through these transitions by offering emotional support and practical strategies for adapting to change. This includes:
Helping clients redefine their professional identity and goals
Assisting with resume building, job search strategies, and interview preparation
Encouraging resilience during periods of uncertainty
Providing tools to manage the stress and emotions associated with change
Our therapists help clients view career transitions as opportunities for growth, enabling them to adapt more effectively and embrace new challenges.
Identify and Addressing Workplace Issues
Therapists often work with clients to address challenges they face in their current work environment, such as conflicts with colleagues, workplace bullying, burnout, or a lack of job satisfaction. In this role, therapists help clients develop communication and conflict resolution skills, establish healthy boundaries and work-life balance, address imposter syndrome or feelings of inadequacy, and explore strategies for coping with workplace stress
Enhance Soft Skills and Professional Development
Soft skills, such as communication, teamwork, adaptability, and leadership, are essential for career advancement. Therapists help clients develop these skills by identifying areas for improvement and providing strategies for growth. This can involve:
Role-playing exercises to improve communication and interpersonal skills
Coaching on leadership and management techniques
Providing feedback on professional behaviors and attitudes
By focusing on soft skills development, therapists contribute to clients’ overall professional growth and readiness for career advancement.
Promote Long-Term Career Resilience and Adaptability
In today’s rapidly changing job market, adaptability and resilience are key to long-term career success. Therapists play a vital role in preparing clients for ongoing career development by helping them:
Embrace a mindset of lifelong learning and skill development
Adapt to changes in the job market or industry
Set realistic career goals and action plans
Cultivate resilience to bounce back from setbacks or challenges
By instilling these qualities, therapists enable clients to navigate the ups and downs of their careers with greater confidence and flexibility.
The Comprehensive Role of Therapists in Career Counseling
Therapists in career counseling serve as guides, mentors, and coaches, helping clients navigate the complex and often stressful world of career development. Their roles extend beyond simply matching clients with job opportunities – they address the psychological, emotional, and practical aspects of career planning, ensuring clients are well-equipped to make informed decisions and manage the challenges that arise.
Flourish Psychology is a boutique private practice that works with those looking for more out of their career. We spend most of our lives working. You should be able to love your job and make decisions according to your own values. If you’re in the NYC area and you’re ready to gets started, please reach out to Flourish Psychology, today.
Flourish Psychology is a boutique private practice that often works with those in the public eye – celebrities, CEOs, lawyers, politicians, and other high profile clients. It is that work that we do that often makes us one of the leading therapists for influencers – a career that is directly in front of the public 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Influencers and content creators, for their careers, often live on their phones. But this can be a problem for their mental health.
Beyond Social Media
Many people – including right here at Flourish Psychology – have discussed the mental health challenges that can come from being a social media figure. It can be a very difficult profession. Negative comments, perfectionism, exploitation – content creators often struggle with issues such as anxiety and depression that come from such a public facing career.
We encourage you to view our “influencer therapy” page or blog posts like our phone addiction post if you’d like more information about those topics.
However, some of the issues that people experience when they’re influencers go beyond the comments, judgement, and other social media challenges. Many influencers – and non-influencers – also struggle with what’s known as “Digital Overload.”
Digital overload affects anyone that is on their phone too often. It refers to the constant, massive consumption of digital content that many of us engage in every day.
Our brains are not designed to consume that much media at once, on that many topics, in this type of means. Every day, those that are on their phones or tablets too often – which includes not only social media influencers, but also most adults these days – are consuming massive, massive amounts of media right in front of their eyes, cutting off the outside world in the process.
This is too much for our brains to handle. We aren’t built with the ability to process that much information. It’s important to remember that, while it can feel like this information is easy to consume, our brains find this level of processing to be stressful. As a result, we become more likely to develop:
Stress
Anxiety
Poor Concentration
Depression, and More
When our brains are overloaded with this much information, it can also lead to fatigue, insomnia, forgetfulness, and more. All of this can also occur subconsciously – meaning, you do not realize it is happening, and may feel “fine” or even relaxed while you’re on your phone. But behind the scenes, your brain is becoming more and more stressed.
Everyone, regardless of profession, benefits from reducing their information consumption and, ultimately, their digital overload.
But influencers are in a rough spot – you work online, which means that you need to be not only on a screen, but specifically on your phone. In addition, the more interaction you have and the more you do online, the more you can create content and build your brand.
Already at higher risk for depression, anxiety, and perfectionism, this added screen time and digital overload runs the risk of continuing to create more and more stress while also making it more difficult to cope with online and offline life.
What Can Be Done?
Unless you plan to give up being a social media celebrity, it will instead become important to have a strategy that you stick to with managing your online life. Examples may include:
Limit your working hours. Make sure that you’re only on your phone intentionally and be completely offline when you’re not working.
Limit your unnecessary content. Only follow people that are good for your career and follow friends/family, limiting all other unnecessary interactions and content.
Fill your “unplugged” time with outdoor activities, exercise, friends (without the content), and other things that reduce stress.
We also encourage you to reach out to Flourish Psychology. We’ll work with you on stress coping, time management, anxiety reduction, and how to log off when you lead a largely digital life. Through therapy, we can help provide support to give you back control and aid in your long term mental health.
If you’re struggling with digital overload, or you have anxiety, stress, phone addiction, or other issues potentially caused by being online too often, reach out to Flourish Psychology, today. If you’re interested in more personalized support, learn more about our exclusive mental health services.
Panic attacks are intense. They are difficult. They can be so powerful and so immense both physically and mentally that many people start to fear them.
They are also very hard to stop without help, and one of the reasons they are so difficult to stop is because panic attacks – and the fear of having another panic attack – cause a cycle that makes it very difficult to stop future attacks without the support of an experienced therapist.
The Cycle of Panic Attacks
All anxiety has physical symptoms, but panic attacks are specifically physical events. Although they do trigger symptoms that affect thoughts and emotions, it is their physical symptoms that are most disruptive:
Rapid Heartbeat
Chest Pain
Trouble Breathing
Weakness
Sweating, and More
The cognitive symptoms also are connected to the physical ones. People experience “feelings of doom,” for example, that enhance the effects of these physical symptoms. There is a reason that many people seek out medical professionals when they have panic attacks, because it can be hard to believe something like anxiety can trigger that type of reaction.
Because panic attacks are so physical, we start to fear them. And like most things we fear, we become both:
Easily triggered when we think a panic attack is coming.
More likely to monitor our bodies for signs of an attack.
These have names: “hypersensitivity” and “self-monitoring.” We see them with most people that have frequent panic attacks. When we struggle with panic attacks and panic disorder, we tend to be more sensitive to sensations our bodies experience and more likely to notice them. Once we do, they can trigger more anxiety.
Finally, panic attacks are also stressful on the body. Over time, they can cause physical symptoms related to chronic stress, and chronic stress itself causes a variety of physical symptoms – including strange ones that may not normally be associated with stress.
So what typically happens when someone has panic attacks is the following:
Person experiences a very minor sensation of some kind, possibly caused by stress.
They notice the sensation immediately due to their self-monitoring.
They immediately react with fear as though a panic attack is coming.
Their hypersensitivity means their anxiety symptoms feel more pronounced.
Their fear that a panic attack is coming increases, causing more anxiety.
Their anxiety triggers a panic attack.
It’s also not a cycle that is easily in someone’s control. It is very hard to talk yourself out of it without help. Because the person is also living with frequent stress, they are likely to always have triggers – for example, the stress from recurring panic attacks can lead to breathing poorly, blurry vision, a jump in one’s heartbeat, and all of those trigger the fear that a panic attack is coming.
People with panic attacks may also develop health anxiety and other challenges as a result of these attacks, leading to even more anxiety-related triggers.
Stopping the Cycle
It is for these reasons that panic attacks often benefit from and require professional help. It is very, very difficult to stop this panic attack cycle without support, because your body is essentially primed to experience panic attacks. The work that is required to stop this cycle takes time – it requires retraining your mind, teaching yourself to relax, helping you cope with stresses, and more.
During that time, a person may still have panic attacks – although hopefully much less frequently. But with a therapist there with you, it’s also possible to address those without struggling with setbacks and gain those reminders that all the effort you are putting into reducing the attacks is worth your time.
Working with a therapist that specializes in anxiety is one of the best ways to make sure that you can stop that cycle. At Flourish Psychology, our therapists can make sure that you’re getting the support you need for panic attacks, anxiety, stress, and more, all with evidence based techniques. Get started today in NYC with Flourish Psychology, a boutique private practice.
How Fear of a Climate Change Future Can Cause Couples to Struggle to Decide Whether to Have Children
This past month has been the hottest recorded global temperature in recorded history. But that is not new. The past few years have seen records broken one after another. It’s understandable for this to cause people distress, especially when most reports about the likely future with climate change are fairly grim.
These fears are causing people to alter their lives in preparation for a climate change future, and one of the ways they may do this is by reducing their desire to have children. This, in turn, can affect relationships, happiness levels, and more.
Living to Your Values
Now, the decision to have – or not have- children is uniquely personal, and there is no right or wrong reason. Fears over climate change may be perfectly valid reason, and there is no wrong choice when that choice comes from you and your values.
One of the challenges, however, is determining whether that choice is being affected by other factors, such as anxiety and depression. Many people are experiencing anxiety and depression as a result of climate change. Those conditions affect how a person thinks, how they make decisions, and more.
If you’re struggling with a climate-change related depression, and that is the reason you do not want to have children, then it may be worthwhile to work on that depression first before finalizing that decision. In the end, you may find that it is still very much within your values.
But you also do not want to wake up one day years into the future and regret the decision, either. If your decision was caused by anxiety/depression and not solely by your values and goals, then you may end up with regrets that can affect your mental health in the future. Evaluating how you’re feeling, why, and whether or not there is something worth treating first can thus be advantageous.
How Relationships and the Future Can Be Affected by Climate Change Fears
Similarly, the choice to have children is often one that people engage in as a couple. Partners may not have the same view of the climate or of the world. This is a decision you’ll often want to make together, and it would be harmful and hurtful if it was being influenced by anxiety/depression. It may affect your relationship together in ways that may not be ideal for your long term mental health.
Working with a Therapist
Therapy – either individually or with couples – can be a healthy and productive way to address and identify what your fears are and help you determine what your values are (yourself or you both as a couple). It can help you examine any internal struggles, whether or not you will be comfortable with your decision in the future, and what can be done to reduce anxiety should you ultimately decide that you may want a child but are still struggling with these fears.
Your choice to have children is personal and uniquely yours. But issues like anxiety can also cloud what your “true” self wants. Through therapy, we can determine what you really want, and – if anxiety is affecting your decision – how we can reduce your anxiety so that you can live with fewer regrets. Learn more about our therapy services by contacting Flourish Psychology, today.
Life is so busy. Most of us are working full time, commuting, managing family obligations, and on and on, taking up our time and making it difficult to take back control of the day.
We also have goals for ourselves that will improve our quality of life, our happiness, our health, and more. But when the days get busy, it’s so hard to set aside any time to achieve these goals.
Eliminating and Replacing the “Time Sucks”
One of the first things that we notice, however, is that the truth is a bit more complicated. It is not always that we do not have time. It is often that we prioritize things that are not productive to our day. Easily the #1 example of a “time suck” (an activity that dramatically reduces the amount of time we have in the day) is the time we spend on our phones. The average person spends 3 hours and 15 minutes on their phone every day. That is roughly an entire day (24 hours) on our phone every week.
Yes, of course, if you lose an entire day a week to your phones, you’re not going to have much time to do your daily activities. The reality is that you’re losing even more than that, because most people are only awake 16 hours of the day. So, you’re really losing almost 2 full days out of a 7 day week browsing your phone.
Of course, that is not the only “time suck” we have in any given day. We waste time on commuting, or on unnecessary errands, or on working longer than we need to work just to make things perfect. We may also find ourselves watching TV shows we barely enjoy, or “vegging” on the couch for longer than we need to. Yes, our days are stressful, and many of these provide an escape. But an escape that adds additional stress is not really an escape at all.
Getting Your Time Back
It is for these reasons that we need to make an effort to reclaim our time and use it on our goals. We can do this in a variety of ways:
Eliminating the Time Wasting Activities – See if your phone offers limits, or delete any apps that waste time. Most social media apps, for example, can be safely deleted without it affecting your personal and social life. You can keep your profile, even check it once in a while on your computer, but removing it off your phone can help. For non-phone related time wasting activities, set reminders (using your phone for this one purpose) that tell you to stop what you’re doing and focus on your goals instead.
Make Your Goals Public – It’s one thing to eliminate time wasting activities, but it is quite another to replace them with activities that help you achieve your goals. One effective way to do this is to put your goals in a prominent place in the house so that you’re always reminded of them, and then make sure that you set a plan to knock out different activities every day. Doing so also helps fulfill that sense of satisfaction that can fuel you to reach your goals even more.
We are busier than ever before. But, for most of us, there IS time available to help us achieve the things that we want to achieve. Look at your life and figure out where your “Time Sucks” are, and then make every effort you can to cut them out and replace them with more fulfilling activities.
We are thrilled to introduce a new therapist here at Flourish Psychology: Keshia Webb-Lavergne.
Keshia is a profoundly gifted therapist capable of addressing common concerns with anxiety, depression, stress, grief, and relationships/couples. As a woman of color, she is also both intimately familiar with and trained to provide support for issues such as race-related stress, racial identity, and an understanding of the unique needs of black couples in today’s environment.
Keshia views therapy as a “collaborative journey.” She is warm and comforting, and will create an environment where you feel seen, welcomed, and supported. She also strongly believes in moving you forward and helping your progress. She views patients not as diagnoses, but as people that are looking to improve their life and take control of their wellness.
Together, the two of you will work to accomplish your personal goals and learn more about yourself in the process. Keshia is amazing, and we are so excited to have her as a part of Flourish Psychology. Start working with Keshia by contacting Flourish Psychology, today.
Location: 300 Cadman Plaza West Floor 12 - Brooklyn, NY 11201
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