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Lara Kennerly, PsyD
Therapy for High-Achieving Professionals in Sacramento, CA
When the relentless pursuit of achievement and success never really turns off
You are used to handling a lot and succeeding at a high level. But over time, that level of responsibility and the pressures of constant achievement can lead to burnout, perfectionism, and feelings of inadequacy. It becomes harder to slow down, rest, or feel fully present, even outside of work.
This is where therapy can help. Dr. Lara Kennerly, PsyD, offers therapy for high-achieving professionals in Sacramento and online across California.
It’s time to redefine your balance.
Success should not come at the cost of your well-being.
When you are used to achieving and being the one others rely on, it can be difficult to acknowledge when something feels off. You may keep things to yourself, push through, and avoid slowing down because there is always something that needs your attention.
Over time, you may get so used to pushing through and remaining unwaveringly focused on performance related goals that you don't allow yourself the time and space to really reflect on your overall internal experiences. The constant pressure for achievement may become such a big part of your identity that other parts of your life are given less attention and time, and begin to fall away from focus. You may begin to feel on overall sense of unhappiness or dissatisfaction that you can't quite identify, try to minimize it by staying even more busy and focused on success, until you eventually realize succeeding is not the answer to what you are feeling. Often the hurdles faced by high-achievers are significant and, too often ignored.
Therapy offers a space where you do not have to keep everything contained. It allows you to step back, explore the patterns and currents of your life shaping your experience, identify what is driving your relentless pursuit of achievement, and help you begin to navigate the complexities of high performance while prioritizing personal growth and mental well-being.
Therapy for High-Achieving Professionals in Sacramento & Online Across California
At Navigating Rough Waters Therapy, Dr. Lara Kennerly, PsyD, provides therapy for high-achieving professionals who are used to managing pressure and carrying significant responsibility. Sessions are tailored to your pace and focuses on untangling self-worth from productivity, reducing burnout, and managing perfectionism.
This work is not about taking away your drive or ambition. It is about helping you better understand the deep undercurrents of your life that are shaping your patterns of keeping yourself relentlessly focused on achievement and success, and work towards setting healthy boundaries, cultivating joy outside of achievements, and addressing underlying anxieties, allowing you to rest without guilt and embrace imperfections.
Therapy may focus on identifying and challenging self-defeating thoughts and perfectionistic behaviors, reframing mistakes as opportunities for growth rather than failure, helping reconnect with personal values beyond professional accolades and accept imperfections. Therapy may also address underlying childhood patterns or trauma where love felt conditional on performance.
In-person therapy is available in Sacramento, with support accessible to individuals in nearby areas such as Elk Grove, Roseville, Folsom, Davis, Citrus Heights, Rocklin, Rancho Cordova, Natomas, West Sacramento, Carmichael, Fair Oaks, and surrounding communities. Virtual therapy is also available across California, allowing you to access care wherever you are located.
Meet Your Therapist, Dr. Lara Kennerly, PsyD
Dr. Lara Kennerly, PsyD, provides therapy for individuals who are used to carrying a high level of responsibility, including professionals in demanding and high-pressure roles. Her approach is evidence-based, compassionate, and focused on creating a space where you can explore the deepest parts of yourself and your life experiences in order to better understand how your past and present intersect and drive your ever-present need to succeed above all else.
With over two decades of experience, Dr. Kennerly has worked with individuals across a range of high-stress professions and in some of the most intense critical environments, and understands the complex challenges high-achievers face. She understands how many factors lead to issues with anxiety, burnout, perfectionism, "imposter syndrome", and the pressure of unrealistically high standards.
Therapy is tailored to your unique experiences and perspective, pace, and can involve any number and types of approaches to therapy that are the best fit for your therapy goals. The focus is not on just managing symptoms or day-to-day stressors, but on reaching the deepest levels of understanding of yourself in order to begin to untangle your personal identity from your accomplishments, and recognize your inherent worth.
A Different Approach to Therapy for High-Achieving Professionals
Many people in high-pressure roles are used to staying composed, solving problems quickly, pushing through discomfort, suppressing their emotions, and sacrificing time to savor their accomplishments, in order to keep moving forward in the relentless pursuit of the next goal. They often sacrifice personal relationships, hobbies, and essential self-care for the sake of professional achievement. This imbalance can lead to feelings of isolation, emptiness, and disconnection, as many struggle to meet their own unrealistically high expectations. For many high achievers, the drive for success arose from early life experiences that involved love feeling conditional on performance, or achievement becoming a way to feel safe in an uncertain world.
Therapy for high-achiever's provides a supportive space to explore the roots of your relationship with achievement. The process focuses on helping you reconnect with values beyond achievement, moving from a state of constant striving to one of balance, and address the patterns that maintain emptiness. Sessions are tailored to your pace and what feels most useful to you. Therapy provides a space for authentic self-reflection where you can be vulnerable without consequences, and explore questions of meaning, identity and purpose that often get pushed aside by daily demands.
Over time, this can lead to decreased stress and anxiety related to professional demands and pressure from unrealistically high standards, reconnecting with personal values beyond professional accolades, the ability to accept imperfections and mistakes, better emotional regulation through identifying and working though hidden emotional strain, improved work-life balance, and a greater sense of feeling able to rest without guilt.
For many high-achieving professionals, perfectionism is not just a personality trait. It is a a way of interpreting themselves and the world around them that drives how they work, how they measure their worth, and how they respond to mistakes.
It often shows up as extremely high standards imposed on themselves, setting unrealistically high goals for themselves that makes them fear failure, causes them to intensely focus on imperfections and to be overly critical of themselves and others, creates difficulty delegating or allowing others to “help” due to their excessively high standards and distrust that others can measure up to them, over-preparing for everything, and often an inability to feel genuinely satisfied with results that anyone other than them would look at and consider “a success”.
What looks like intense dedication and personal expectations to others, can feel like something very different to the person living it.
Perfectionism to some degree can be a beneficial trait to have, as it leads individuals to ever higher levels of achievement, however the stronger this trait becomes, the more problems it creates.
The excessively high personal standards and self-criticism eventually begins to take a toll on the individual, both mentally and physically, as the constant internal pressure to meet unrealistic standards of “perfection” lead to chronic over-working, over-thinking, over-analyzing, and with each incident of not meeting impossibly high standards of what they view as “perfect,” self-doubt, intense self-criticism, and worsening self-confidence begins to creep in.
An individual who was once highly accomplished and self-confident in their abilities to perform and attain goals and success, begins to quietly and invisibly struggle with growing stress, indecisiveness, questioning their own decisions and choices on matters small and large, and begin to experience a chronic sense of dread and fear about falling short even in the smallest of ways, and regardless of what has actually been happened.
Therapy can help you examine where these patterns started, how they are impacting your current life in good and bad ways, begin to evaluate what parts of these high standards of “perfection” still serve you and which are causing you problems, and begin to shift the way you view your own accomplishments based on more realistic assessments, used perhaps by everyone else other than your own internal critic.
Dr. Lara Kennerly, PsyD, provides perfectionism therapy in Sacramento, Natomas, West Sacramento, Elk Grove, and surrounding areas, with virtual sessions available across California, for professionals struggling with chronic intense self-criticism, mainly self-imposed pressure to be “perfect” at all times, or the feeling that nothing they accomplish is ever “perfect” enough to satisfy their own internal expectations they have for themselves.
Perfectionism Therapy in Sacramento and Surrounding Areas
People Pleasing Therapy in Sacramento, CA
People pleasing does not always feel problematic at first. Saying yes may feel easier than disappointing someone. Taking on more responsibility may feel safer than creating conflict or letting others down. Over time, though, consistently prioritizing the needs and expectations of others can become emotionally exhausting.
This pattern can gradually lead to chronic stress, resentment that builds quietly over time, difficulty identifying your own needs, and a growing sense of disconnection from yourself. Many people become so focused on what others need from them that they lose touch with what they themselves actually want, feel, or need, and begin to lose touch with their own internal sense of purpose and direction.
For some, these patterns began early in life when maintaining relationships, avoiding conflict, or feeling emotionally secure depended on keeping others happy. As time passes, this way of relating to others can become deeply tied to identity, making it difficult to set boundaries, tolerate guilt, or prioritize yourself without discomfort.
Therapy can help you better understand where these patterns come from, how they continue shaping your relationships and emotional experiences, and how to begin reconnecting with what you find genuinely meaningful and important again.
Dr. Lara Kennerly, PsyD, offers people pleasing therapy in Sacramento and online across California.
Burnout Therapy for High Achievers in Sacramento, CA
Burnout is not just exhaustion. It can affect how you think, how you feel, and how you relate to the people around you. Chronic fatigue, difficulty concentrating, irritability, emotional numbness, a growing sense of detachment, feeling increasingly empty and unable to cope with new challenges within their daily life, are all common signs that the body and mind have been under sustained pressure for too long.
For high achievers, burnout is often the result of years of prioritizing output over rest, external validation over internal needs, and achievement over everything else. Most often tied to workplace demands, it can also begin to develop from rising demands outside of work (e.g. personal physical illness or chronic disease, an injury that changes your day-to-day routine, increased demands as a caregiver, changing complications within a relationship, increased demands of parenting, financial changes and challenges, taking on care for an aging or ill family member) which feel even more burdensome to the High Achiever, who puts so much pressure on themselves to focus the majority of their time and energy on work and achieving.
Understanding what drove those patterns, and what it would take to shift them, is often where the real work begins.
Dr. Lara Kennerly, PsyD, offers burnout therapy for high achievers in Sacramento and surrounding areas, with virtual sessions available across California.
Benefits of Therapy for High-Achieving Professionals
Therapy is not about changing who you are or taking away your drive. It is about helping you function at a high level without feeling isolated, empty, or disconnected.
Over time, many high-achieving professionals begin to notice changes such as:
Improved life balance:
You move from a state of constant striving to one of balance, allowing you to enjoy the journey rather than just the result.
Redefining Self-Worth
You begin to untangle your personal identity from your professional accomplishments to recognize your inherent worth.
Decreased Burnout:
You learn to recognize early signs of burnout- fatigue, irritability, and detachment at work and in personal life- and implement necessary rest.
Improved stress Management:
You are still able to handle pressure, but without relying on pushing through or ignoring what you are feeling.
Improved Emotional Regulation:
You are better able to manage anxiety, imposter syndrome, and the pressure of unrealistically high standards.
Improved ability to rest without guilt:
You feel more comfortable stepping away from work, and allowing yourself to rest without guilt.
Improved Relationships:
You are able to re-prioritize, and reconnect with personal relationships that may have suffered from neglect as your career consumed your attention.
Stronger boundaries without guilt:
You can set limits where needed without feeling like you are letting others down, and decrease people-pleasing behaviors
The goal is not to do less, but to carry what you are responsible for in a way that feels more sustainable.
Start Therapy for High-Achieving Professionals in Sacramento
If you are feeling the weight of the relentless pursuit of success, anxiety, or burnout, therapy can offer a space to explore the roots of this "drive", redefine your identity outside of professional achievement, clarify what truly matters, and build a life that includes meaningful success alongside other sources of fulfillment.
Dr. Lara Kennerly, PsyD, offers therapy for high-achieving professionals in Sacramento and online across California, with a focus on helping you move forward in a way that feels more fulfilling.
You can book a free 15-minute consultation to see if this feels like the right fit.