Through more than a decade providing psychotherapy and leading attention skills groups at the University of Colorado Anschutz, I've worked closely with graduate students, medical residents, and other professionals managing ADHD and attention difficulties in demanding academic and work environments.
Professionals and students in Denver often come to therapy describing a version of the same experience: they know what they need to do, and they can't execute it consistently. They fall behind on things that matter, start tasks later than they intended, and struggle to stay organized despite wanting to do so. They have tried many strategies, such as making to-do lists, prioritizing, and setting reminders, but the changes do not take hold.
From the outside, this can seem like a discipline problem. From the inside, it rarely feels that way.
Attention difficulties are often framed as a focus problem, but they're more complicated than that.
Many people find they can focus intensely on certain things and barely at all on others. Tasks that feel unclear, unrewarding, or overwhelming are much harder to start. Last-minute pressure can be a genuinely effective way to generate focus until the costs outweigh the benefits. Strategies that help for a while stop working when demands shift; sometimes it's because the strategy itself was a workaround that had a limited lifespan.
These tendencies often overlap with anxiety, perfectionism, burnout, and self-criticism. Over time, repeated experiences of falling short can turn a manageable difficulty into something that feels like a character flaw, rather than a treatable condition with identifiable causes. That shift matters because it's no longer just about productivity — it's about who they think they are.
Strategies help but don't address why the same difficulties keep recurring. For some people, the work stays practical: clearer insight into how they work and which conditions foster success. For others, therapy or a psychological assessment is an opportunity to reinterpret a history of falling short, to develop a clearer sense of what they've been working against and what they're actually capable of.
If this sounds familiar, a consultation is a good place to start.
I also work with:
Procrastination · Relationships · Partners of people with ADHD · Women balancing work and family · Work performance