In my Denver therapy practice, I work with people whose work stress comes from their performance not reflecting their ability. They're falling behind, missing details, or receiving feedback that feels confusing or disproportionate. For some, it means a performance improvement plan or a formal warning, and the pressure to fix it immediately can be intense. What's often missing is a clear sense of why it keeps happening despite so much effort — and making sense of that means looking at more than surface behaviors.
Sometimes the obstacles are practical: interruptions, unclear expectations, a mismatch between the environment and how someone works best. Sometimes they're internal: perfectionism, avoidance, a critical inner voice, or people-pleasing that pulls attention toward everyone else's needs first — any of which can make it hard to start or finish something. Often it's a mix of both, reinforcing each other in ways that are hard to catch.
The pressure to simply perform better, to will your way through, usually backfires. It adds self-judgment without addressing what's causing the problem.
In therapy, we work on practical strategies for the immediate stress while doing deeper work to prevent these problems from repeating in the future. For many, there is a pattern of saying yes to too much, prioritizing whoever is in front of them in the moment, and only later noticing they've fallen behind on the work they're measured on. Once that is understood, it becomes easier to make different choices.
If this feels close to home, a consultation is a good place to start.