From Consulting to Therapy: Reflections on Career Change and Meaning

Clients sometimes ask how I moved from engineering and consulting into becoming a therapist. Often these questions come alongside reflections on their own careers: How do I know if I’m on the right path? What if I want something different? How do people make these kinds of changes?

In my role as a therapist, it’s not useful to give my own roadmap and I’m more interested in helping people explore their own questions. But when I think about my path, one day from consulting always stands out.

At the time I was working on a defense site carrying out what’s known as a “Time in Motion” study. These kinds of studies are used to examine workplace efficiency by looking at how employees spend their time—productive work, preparation, delays, and interruptions. Consulting teams often gather data from a sample of employees and use it to make broader conclusions about how an organization functions.

Even when these studies are not directly tied to layoffs or restructuring, they can create anxiety. Having someone follow you around all day with a clipboard and stopwatch rarely puts people at ease.

On this day, I had been assigned to shadow a mechanical fitter in his late 50s. He was friendly and easy to talk to. I explained, somewhat vaguely, that I was there to understand obstacles in his workday. That wasn’t entirely untrue. But I was also quietly recording and categorizing every minute of his day.

As we talked, he mentioned that he was feeling nervous. He had a doctor’s appointment the next day. He told me he’d previously had cancer that was in remission, and he was going in for a scan.

I remember feeling the atmosphere shift.

Suddenly I became acutely aware of the strange position I was in. I was there to observe efficiency and productivity, to convert a workday into categories and measurements. Yet sitting in front of me was a person carrying something much heavier: fear, uncertainty, and concern about what he might hear the next day.

I wanted to stay with that conversation. I wanted to know more about how he was doing. And I also felt uncomfortable knowing that my presence—someone observing and measuring him at work—was likely adding another layer of stress on the day before his scan.

I struggled that day with compartmentalizing, which can be an important skill in careers like consulting. Focus on the objective. Complete the task. Put the human concerns to one side.

I don’t think that moment alone made me decide to become a therapist. Career changes rarely happen that way. But I remember realizing something important: I found myself more interested in understanding people than measuring systems, efficiencies and productivity. 

Many people I meet in therapy—particularly professionals, high achievers, and people in demanding careers—find themselves asking questions about burnout, meaning, work stress, identity, or whether the life they’ve built still feels like their own. Sometimes beneath questions about productivity or career satisfaction are deeper questions: What matters to me? What kind of life do I want? Who am I becoming? Regular in-depth therapy can be an important space to start exploring some of these questions. Book a consultation if you want to start the conversation.