The Therapist or the Coach Part 3 — Twice as Good, Twice as Tired

Making the Case for Wellness in Business and in Life / A 4-part series for EURweb · Black Mental Health Awareness Month (July 2026) By Dr. Loren M. Hill, Ph.D., PCC · Licensed Clinical Psychologist & Executive Coach, Founder of Acclivity

*You were raised to be twice as good. Nobody warned you it would leave you twice as tired. So now what?

When a new client sits down with me, we don’t start with a vision board. We start with the truth. The thing holding most high performers back isn’t a skill gap. It’s a pattern that built their early success and then quietly turned into a cage.

Here are a few common patterns:

The over-functioner. You catch everything, fix everything, and can’t delegate because; ‘It’s faster if I just do it.’ It is faster today. It’s also why you’ll never scale, and why you’re burning out. There’s a name for this push-through-everything coping. It’s called “John Henryism.” Researchers have tied it to higher blood pressure and depression in Black adults across the income ladder. We build the systems, and the trust, to finally put some of it down.

The boundary-less yes. Every request gets a “yes” because “no” feels dangerous. We practice the “No” out loud, until it stops feeling like betrayal and starts feeling like leadership.

The imposter in the corner office. You earned the room and still feel like security’s coming. In my practice we separate the feeling from the facts.

Here’s where the therapist-or-coach question gets real. When the exhaustion has tipped into something heavier, when you can’t sleep, can’t feel joy, can’t quiet your mind, that’s not a productivity problem. A coach isn’t the fix there. A therapist is. But when you’re steady and simply stuck in the pattern, coaching is exactly the tool. Knowing which is which is half the work.

The shift I’m after is always the same. We move from surviving, that place of reacting, bracing, and getting through the week, toward strategy: choosing, building, and playing offense with your own life.

In my experience, the break comes one of two ways. Sometimes it’s a quiet realization, a moment of I have other options, and you step out on faith. That was me. I was overworked, unrecognized, and worn down by a workplace that wasn’t well, until I quietly planned my exit and rebuilt my work around what actually mattered. The other way is harder. You get pushed out, and only then, forced to finally stop, do you see how much you’d been carrying and how depleted you’d become.

Read the full piece → theacclivity.com/twice-as-good-twice-as-tired

Loren M. Hill, Ph.D., PCC, is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified executive coach, and the founder of Acclivity.

Learn more at  Acclivity  | LinkedIn  |  Facebook  |  YouTube  |  Podcast

Dr. Loren M. Hill is the Founder and CEO of Acclivity, a strategic leadership consultant, executive coach, and licensed clinical psychologist with more than 25 years of leadership and coaching experience. She helps professionals and leaders navigate career growth, leadership challenges, and complex transitions with clarity, confidence, and purpose.

Learn more at  Acclivity  | LinkedIn  |  Facebook  |  YouTube  |  Podcast

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