When “having it all” still leaves you empty

Senior executives have become extraordinarily good at optimisation. Sleep gets tracked, exercise gets periodised, diets get quantified, calendars get colour-coded, and leadership itself becomes a programme of marginal gains. It was perhaps inevitable that therapy would eventually get pulled into the same machinery.

Sophia Goh, principal counsellor and founder of Sofia Wellness Clinic, offers a useful complication: therapy does not necessarily exist to turn you into a more efficient version of yourself.

Her starting point is positive psychology, which focuses on what makes life fulfilling rather than solely on pathology. “The absence of mental illness does not automatically mean good mental health either,” she says. “You can be free of illness and still not be thriving, or living a life that feels worth living to you.”

That describes many of the people she sees. “The majority of those I see in practice” have no diagnosable mental health issue and take no medication, she says. “They are simply not happy.”

For business leaders, the distinction matters because executive culture often mistakes functionality for flourishing. If the company is growing, the family remains intact, and the calendar is full, what exactly is the problem? Possibly nothing, but Goh argues that curiosity itself can provide sufficient reason to look more closely.

“I would be excited to work with someone who is successful, functioning well, and satisfied with life,” she says. Clients often begin by telling her, “‘I thought I would have nothing to talk about.’ Then we get into the session, and things surface anyway.”

She describes talk therapy elegantly: “It turns the implicit into the explicit.” Putting words to a feeling or situation makes it conscious, allowing people to examine family histories, inherited beliefs, and patterns of relating that otherwise run “on autopilot”. Once a pattern becomes visible, she says, “you get to choose whether it is serving you”.

That proposition becomes especially interesting against contemporary self-optimisation culture. Goh points to the rise of “maxxing”, the online language for squeezing improvement from virtually every aspect of life, alongside biohacking and other forms of relentless personal refinement.

“This self-optimisation culture runs on the idea that there is always one more level, that you are never quite enough,” she says. Therapy, she argues, should operate differently. “Therapy runs on something else: self-awareness.”

Its destination is therefore less about endlessly upgrading the self than learning to understand and accept it. Therapy should encourage “being more authentic and embracing who you are”, she says, “which is the opposite of a mindset built on never being enough”.

That distinction also explains why therapeutic language can become counterproductive online. Goh regularly encounters clients dealing with people labelling them “toxic” or declaring “boundaries” without examining what actually sits underneath a conflict. 

“Relationships are complicated,” she says, and clinical terminology cannot carry all that nuance. Used well, the language helps people understand themselves. Used lazily, it can lead to “you end up avoiding the harder work of actually communicating with the other person”.

For leaders trained to see development as an endless series of improvements, therapy may therefore offer something almost subversive: a form of growth that does not begin with the assumption that the current version of you is inadequate.

Photography: Lawrence Teo
Art direction: Fazlie Hashim
Hair & make-up: Angel Gwee, using Lancome and Goldwell