What I See in my 400 Students Per Semester That Shows Up in My Therapy Office
Across all of my classes, I teach about 400 college students a semester. I also run a private therapy practice, which is the version that shows up here on this blog. People tend to assume those are two unrelated jobs, which is truly strange to me. They are not really that separate at all, and the overlap has taught me more about high-achieving adults than either one would have on its own.
Let me explain this connection a little bit more because I might have lost you. The things I watch students do when a question does not have a clean answer are the same things I watch accomplished adults do in my office when their life stops following the specific plan they envisioned and set for themself. Different settings, but there is a very similar response to change and uncertainty.
The pattern, from the front of the classroom
The students who struggle most are rarely the ones who cannot do the work, although sometimes there are more factors at play than what I am talking about today. They can actually be the sharpest in the room. What trips them up is that they have almost no tolerance for not knowing, which seems to be getting worse and worse the way we use technology today. The moment a problem is ambiguous, or a grade is uncertain, or a topic will not resolve into a single right answer they can memorize, they absolutely freak out. Not knowing feels like failing to them. Which is sad because not knowing is a very important tool on the road to success.
These students typically do one of two things. They over-prepare to the point of exhaustion, trying to eliminate any chance of being caught unsure and run themselves into the ground. Or they avoid, quietly, by not starting the paper or not turning it in, because in their minds a thing you never attempted cannot officially be a thing you failed at. And for them, failure is the single most terrifying outcome.
You can see how well that tends to work out.
The same person, ten years later
Those types of students I see in class grow into the adults I see in session. The pattern does not go away once they graduate. It just becomes more solidified as a practice and feeling in adult life.
The over-preparer becomes the professional who cannot delegate, cannot rest, and treats every gap in certainty as a threat to manage. They are viewed as incredibly successful and praised for their hard work, but on the inside they feel like a failure and are running on empty. The avoider becomes the person who stalls on the decision, the conversation, or the risk that actually matters to them, and calls it being careful. They are constantly wondering why they never seem to achieve up to their potential. Underneath both is the thing I see in the classroom: perfection that is used as protection. They think to themselves, “If I do it flawlessly, or if I do not do it at all, no one gets to discover my inability.”
This is not a moral failing, and it is not the generational problem people reach for when they want an easy explanation. Although I will say that the increased speed of technology has made us all way less comfortable with waiting, and the constant success of others broadcast in our face can lead to greater feelings of inadequacy. Either way, it is a learned strategy for avoiding one specific feeling, and the feeling is almost always some version of being judged and found not good enough.
What actually helps
The fix is not lowering your standards. Capable people hear that and rightly reject it, because their standards are part of who they are and part of why they are good at what they do.
What helps is building the one skill that neither school nor a demanding career ever taught you: tolerating not knowing without treating it as an emergency. Staying in the uncertain middle of a hard thing long enough to act inside it, instead of sprinting to make the discomfort go away. That is learnable. I teach a light version of it to students who are stuck, and a deeper version to clients whose whole life has organized itself around never being caught unsure.
The other piece is pulling your performance apart from your worth, which sounds abstract until you notice how much of your effort actually goes to protecting the second thing while you tell yourself it is about the first. When those two come apart, the standards stay and the panic drops. That is the goal. Not caring less. Being able to do hard, uncertain things without your whole sense of yourself riding on every outcome.
If this sounds like you
If you read this and thought, that is me, both the student version and the grown-up one. Cool, you are exactly who I work with! The people who do best in this work are usually the driven, capable ones who are tired of how much energy managing takes and are ready to put in the effort up front to change behaviors so things eventually get better and feel easier in a sustainable way.
Reach out so we can see if we are a good fit to help set you free from this cycle.