Can You 'Therapize' Your Way Out of Greatness?

How to take care of your mental health without killing your ambition in the process.

Matt Hunter • May 6, 2025

The best leaders have an insatiable drive—one that keeps them moving forward long after others would stop.

But that kind of drive doesn’t always square with our ideas of well-being and mental health.

To keep their drive alive, great leaders often go to incredible lengths to prevent the complacency that comes with success. Some get creative with it, like Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang. As Huang describes his daily mantra: “I wake up in the morning, look at myself in the mirror, and say ‘You suck.’”

Now, this approach doesn’t work for everyone. Telling yourself “You suck” is well beyond the zone of balance and compassion. Most of us don’t want to treat ourselves this way. This kind of toughness comes at a cost—it’s exhausting, relentless, and rarely feels good.

And yet, it has its place at the highest level of business. The reality is that if you’re driven by a deep internal pressure to prove yourself, to win at all costs, you will likely accomplish more than those who prioritize ease and comfort.

Most high-level leaders need to find a middle ground of pushing themselves, striving towards their goals, and avoiding complacency, while taking care of their well-being and being good enough and ‘worthy’ as is.

With this in mind, let’s talk about therapy.

On the whole, I see the infusion of mental health awareness and therapy into the business world as a positive development. I believe in it. I’ve participated in it. It’s a powerful tool for self-growth and healing. It helps us to work through the self-defeating patterns, emotional blockages, and inner conflicts that drain our energy and dilute our power. On top of that, integrating emotional intelligence into business leadership is a net positive. I won’t belabor you with the upside of doing therapy as a leader, particularly if you can reduce the harmful behaviors that sabotage your (and your team’s) success. It will likely make your life and those closest to you more pleasant.

However, therapy’s potentially harmful effects on drive and ambition can be a concern. When we over-index on therapy and emotional work, it can lead us to coddle ourselves, and to avoid anything that creates stress, friction, or discomfort—including our drive and ambition.

Therapy changes people—it softens the edges, discovers unhealthy motivations, and encourages self-compassion over self-criticism. Therapy will challenge your assumptions, beliefs, and motivations, potentially leading to a shift in priorities and a re-evaluation of your definition of success. And for some leaders, that can mean dialing down the very drive that made them successful in the first place. If you’re no longer running on a deep-seated fear of failure, are you still willing to grind all day and night? If you start valuing inner peace over external validation, will you still sacrifice everything for your mission? If you stop seeing yourself as never enough, do you lose the edge that once propelled you forward?

So I’m not saying therapy is bad or that leaders shouldn’t engage in personal growth work. It just means you need to be intentional about how you do it. You may want to avoid going too hard on the introspection and emotional processing, and make sure you find the right therapist who understands not only your inner world but your work in the world.

Most leaders benefit more from working with executive coaches or therapists with a leadership-specific background than therapists who use trauma-focused or depth-oriented modalities. You want an approach that strengthens your edge rather than blunts it; that balances emotion processing and action; and that emphasizes the development of a strong and healthy ego rather than the dismantling of the ego.

Not all therapists will align with these suggestions. Some aim to “heal” what capitalism rewards—and research shows that a therapist’s value system can have a significant impact on the person undergoing therapy.[1] You chose to be a business leader, and they chose to be a therapist, so it’s important to be aware that your values may be quite different. While therapists are trained to maintain objectivity and avoid imposing their values on clients, their own beliefs and perspectives can influence the therapeutic process[2]. Studies have shown that clients may unconsciously adopt values like those of their therapist, a phenomenon known as “values conversion.”[3] If you want to stay in the game while also evolving as a person, you need a therapist who understands your goals and values—who helps you refine your drive rather than diminish it. A heavy emphasis on self-compassion, for instance, might be great for your well-being, but not so good for your mission.

The best approach isn’t about erasing your ego or your dark side—it’s about learning to work with it constructively. That means cultivating self-awareness, the capacity to self-regulate, and emotional intelligence, without losing your edge. Can you turn that relentless fire on and off as the situation calls for it? Can you keep that fire stoked to a healthy level—one that doesn’t destroy everything in its path, but that also doesn’t burn down to embers? Can you harness your intensity as a tool, rather than let it consume you 100% of the time?

Buyer beware, for the ability to successfully integrate these behaviors is generally a good thing, but it may impact your ability to push as hard. I speak from experience here. How do you think I went from being a founder in New York City to a coach in Boulder? Often, therapy will heal these parts wholesale, teaching your dark side to play nice and rarely come out again. So whatever choices you make about inner work and personal development, be sure to make them in the context of your mission and your larger objectives.

When it comes to the right balance of well-being versus success, there are no easy answers. Every leader has to evaluate these tradeoffs and decide for themselves where they stand—and who is best equipped to support them.

​[1] Ethics and Values in Psychotherapy, https://societyforpsychotherapy.org/ethics-and-values-in-psychotherapy/
​​[2] VALUES IN COUNSELING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY - The Sage of Asheville, http://www.sageofasheville.com/pub_downloads/VALUES_IN_COUNSELING_AND_PSYCHOTHERAPY.pdf
​​[3] Ethics and Values in Psychotherapy, https://societyforpsychotherapy.org/ethics-and-values-in-psychotherapy/​