How Therapy Is Keeping You From Reaching Your True Potential | (#004) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to “Beyond Success,” the podcast for high-achievers seeking deeper meaning, fulfillment and purpose. Now, here’s your host, world-renowned leadership coach and therapist, David Tian.

Welcome to Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers. I’m your host, David Tian, and for almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries attain success, happiness and fulfillment in their personal and professional lives—and in this episode, we’re going to get clarity on the limitations of therapy.

If you’ve been in psychotherapy, you’ve probably spent a lot of time exploring your past, and yes, that can help, but only to a point. Here’s the problem, therapy can easily get you stuck there, reliving the same old stories, feeling like a victim of your own life, constantly looking for more empathy and understanding and compassion before you feel ready to move forward. But how long do you want to stay in that loop? How much more time, how much more money are you willing to spend without real progress beyond mere healing? [01:07.4]

Therapy is great for healing, but if you want to break free from that victim mindset to create something new, therapy may not be enough. I’m not just speaking from theory here. I’m certified in IFS therapy at the most advanced level. I’m also trained in CBT, DBT, ACT, schema therapy, Gestalt therapy, the list goes on, and these are some of the most evidence-backed modalities out there. I have personally benefited from years of therapy myself, and I still do on a monthly basis, and it’s been life-changing for me in so many ways.

Therapy is especially powerful for treating trauma, particularly complex PTSD. Many of the men I’ve worked with as a dating coach over nearly 20 years didn’t even realize they were dealing with a form of trauma. Their social anxiety, approach anxiety and their core insecurities were fueled by deep-seated wounds. Therapy helps bring those to the surface, and for a lot of guys, it’s the best starting point. You can’t move forward if you don’t know what’s holding you back, right? [02:05.4]

But here’s the thing. Therapy is not the end of the journey. It’s just the beginning, and if you stay in it too long, it can actually work against you. Why? Because therapy often encourages a mindset of healing, but not necessarily one of growth. It can keep you focused on the past, on your pain, on what’s wrong with you. It’s easy to get stuck there, constantly unpacking the same issues without ever really moving forward.

Beyond healing, you need something that pushes you to take action, to take full, radical responsibility for your own life, and that’s where a lot of therapy falls short. It can leave you waiting for the next breakthrough, the next insight, before you feel ready to make changes. But you don’t need more breakthroughs. You need the courage to step up and make something out of your life. Therapy won’t always give you that, but a special type of coaching—in this episode, I’ll just call it leadership coaching—that’s a different story. [03:03.5]

Okay, I’ve got five major points here, so we’ll start with the first. Therapy’s focus tends to be on the past. You dig into your trauma, your emotional pain and all the reasons you’re feeling stuck. It’s important work. It’s necessary for acceptance and healing. But when therapy stays in that space for too long, it becomes a trap. You start identifying too much with your past. Everything becomes about what happened to you and how that’s still affecting you now. The problem is this can lock you into a victim mindset that’s disempowering.

In therapy, it’s easy to feel like your identity is shaped by your past experiences, that you’re somehow defined by your trauma or the things that have happened to you, and once you’re there, it becomes really hard to break free from that narrative. You’re constantly thinking, This is who I am because of what I’ve been through. But that mindset keeps you stuck. It’s hard to take action when you’re spending so much time processing the past. [04:02.7]

Leadership coaching, on the other hand, flips the focus. Instead of looking back, you start looking forward. You start thinking about who you could become, not just who you have been. Coaching challenges you to take control of your story, to realize that no matter what happened to you, you have the power to shape your future.

Leadership coaching is about empowerment. It asks you to step into a growth mindset where every obstacle, every setback, is an opportunity to grow stronger. I’m talking about real antifragility here. When something goes wrong, instead of getting weaker or just trying to survive it or bounce back, you actually get better as a result. You learn to turn adversity into strength. This is a massive shift in perspective.

Instead of dwelling on the pain and waiting for healing, good coaching gets you moving toward action. It helps you see that your future is not limited by your past. It’s not defined by what happened to you. It’s defined by what you choose to do next. That’s the mindset that sets you free. [05:09.7]

Here’s an example. A client I worked with spent years in therapy, talking about how his childhood shaped his insecurities. Sure, therapy helped him understand why he felt insecure, why he had this fear of rejection, but after years of therapy, he was still stuck, still thinking about the past, still identifying as the insecure, needy guy who needed to be fixed. He kept looking for more breakthroughs, more empathy, more understanding, more compassion. He was waiting for the perfect moment when everything would feel resolved before he could move forward.

When he started working with me, we flipped that narrative. Instead of focusing on why he felt the way he did, we started asking, “What do you want your life to look like from now on?” We created a vision for his future, one where his insecurities didn’t define him, where they didn’t hold him back. [06:03.3]

Then we worked on taking action. Step by step, he started challenging himself, pushing beyond his comfort zone. He started turning that insecurity into fuel for growth. It didn’t happen overnight, but the shift was undeniable. His focus changed from fixing the past to building his future. This is what good leadership coaching does best. It challenges you to create a better story for your life, a future-focused narrative that empowers you to take action, even if you don’t feel ready, because the truth is, no one ever feels completely ready to step outside their comfort zone.

If you’re always waiting for the stars to align, you’ll stay stuck—and that’s where therapy often falls short. It can leave you waiting for the next emotional breakthrough, the next wave of understanding or compassion before you feel like you can move forward. [06:56.5]

But guess what? Beyond a certain point, you don’t need more breakthroughs. You don’t need to fix everything before you take that next step. What you need is a clear vision for your future and the courage to act on it, and that’s the power of good leadership coaching—it’s future-oriented, action-driven, and it puts you back in the driver’s seat of your life.

Okay, now we move to the second major point. Therapy often leads to more acceptance, and of course, acceptance is important. It’s a necessary step after awareness, but it’s an early step. Yes, it helps you to come to terms with your reality, especially when life throws difficult, painful experiences your way. Maybe you’ve been through trauma, significant loss or big failure. Therapy gives you the space to process that, to get to a place where you can say to yourself, “Okay, this happened, and it’s okay for me to feel this way about it.” But here’s the issue, acceptance isn’t enough. It’s a step, not the finish line. [07:59.1]

Acceptance gets you to a point of peace with your current situation, but it doesn’t propel you forward. It doesn’t challenge you to reach for more, to push yourself beyond your current limits, and that’s where good leadership coaching comes in. Coaching doesn’t stop at acceptance. Good coaching looks at who you could become, not just who you are right now. It’s not just about making peace with the present. It’s about challenging you to unlock your potential. It asks the bigger question: what more could you achieve? What kind of life do you really want to live? That’s a huge difference. Therapy says it’s okay to be where you are. Good coaching says, sure, it’s okay, but why settle? Why stop here?

I’ve worked with countless high-achievers, and let me tell you, these are people who don’t settle for okay. They want to grow. They want to become more, and deep down, I believe we all have that drive, that urge to go beyond the bare minimum of being okay and to create something truly meaningful, something fulfilling, something that pushes us to our limits and beyond. [09:04.7]

Good coaching doesn’t let you stay in the comfort zone of acceptance. It challenges you to pursue your potential. I’ve seen this over and over again in my clients. They come to me thinking they’ve hit a ceiling. They’ve achieved a lot, but they’re feeling stuck. They’ve accepted where they are and they’re comfortable, but they’re not fulfilled. That’s when we start digging into their potential. We start talking about what they really want in life, what would bring them true, real meaning, and then we get to work. We make a plan, we set goals, and we start moving forward step by step, out of that comfort zone, out of that acceptance phase and into real growth.

Here’s a quick story. I had a client who was extremely successful in his career, but he felt empty inside. He’d been through therapy, and he had accepted that certain parts of his life just weren’t working out. He’d made peace with some tough personal situations, but there was this lingering feeling of dissatisfaction and he couldn’t quite figure out why. [10:05.2]

When we started working together, the first thing I asked him was, “What do you want your life to look like in five years?” At first, he couldn’t even answer. He was so focused on just managing his present that he hadn’t even considered his future potential. But after some serious reflection, he realized he wanted more. He didn’t just want to accept his life as it was. He wanted to transform it.

So, we built a vision for his future, and once he saw that vision clearly, everything changed. He went from merely managing his circumstances to actively shaping them. He started making moves in his personal life and in his career that brought him closer to that vision every day, and that’s the power of good leadership coaching. It doesn’t just ask you to accept the present. It asks you to dream bigger, to push beyond what’s comfortable and to start living towards your full potential. [10:57.3]

If you’re feeling stuck, if you’ve hit that wall of acceptance, ask yourself, “Is this the life I really want or could I achieve more? Could I become more?” because the truth is, there’s always more that you could achieve. There’s always a next level, and good coaching will help you find it. It will challenge you to reach for it and will support you every step of the way until you get there.

Now let’s move to the third major point, and this has to do with problem-solving and the action orientation. Therapy can sometimes feel like a never-ending deep dive into your emotions. It’s about empathizing with your pain, understanding where it comes from and just sitting with it, and that can be important. Sometimes you just need to slow down and really understand what’s happening inside—but here’s the catch: staying in that space for too long can leave you stuck. [11:49.6]

Therapy can turn into an endless loop of processing feelings without ever moving forward. It’s like being in a boat constantly looking at the leaks, but never actually plugging them and getting back to rowing. Good coaching, though, doesn’t let you sit there forever. Good leadership coaching is about action. It doesn’t just ask, “How do you feel?” It asks, “What are you going to do about it?” It pushes you to move from feeling into action, from reflection to problem-solving, and that’s where real progress can happen.

Take one of my clients. He came to me after years of therapy, and while he had a deep understanding of his issues, his childhood trauma, his relationship struggles, his family-of-origin issues, he was still stuck. He could explain his pain in detail, but he wasn’t doing anything about it. When we started coaching, the first thing I said to him was, “So, great, you understand the problem. Now, what’s the next step for you?” and that’s when the light bulb went off for him. He realized he spent so much time thinking about his problems, but almost no time acting on them. [12:55.0]

Good coaching is all about movement. It’s about getting out of the passive reflective mode and into a proactive, solutions-focused mindset—and that shift is huge, because the truth is, you can sit and analyze your feelings all day long, but unless you take action, nothing really changes in your actual life.

One of the things I love most about good coaching is the emphasis on creative problem-solving. It’s not just about understanding your obstacles. It’s about finding a way through them, around them, or over them. Good leadership coaching pushes you to get resourceful. It challenges you to see obstacles not as reasons to stop, but as opportunities to get creative, to try new approaches and to stretch your problem-solving muscles.

Let’s talk about how that works in practice. Say, you’re feeling stuck in your career. Therapy might help you understand why you’re feeling stuck. Maybe you’ve got unresolved fears or limiting beliefs that go back to childhood, and that’s useful information. But what now? Good coaching takes it to the next step. It asks, “What are the actions you can take today to change this?” [14:02.8]

Good coaching helps you set clear goals, map out a plan and start moving. It’s not enough to know the problem. You have to take steps to address it and this is where good coaching thrives. It’s practical. It’s solutions-oriented. It’s not about sitting in the problem. It’s about doing something to solve it. This kind of action-focused mindset is what separates good coaching from therapy. Therapy might give you the emotional clarity to understand your pain, but coaching gives you the tools to build a path forward.

Another key difference is that coaching encourages decisiveness. It’s not about waiting for the perfect solution or spending hours, days or years, analyzing every possible outcome. It’s about making a decision, committing to it, and learning from the results, because indecision is the enemy of progress. When you stay in a state of reflection without action, you’re not growing. You’re not moving forward and you’re actually reinforcing a stagnant state. Coaching pushes you to decide to take that first step and to trust that you can adjust course as you go. [15:09.8]

Here’s another example. I worked with a high-level executive who was feeling overwhelmed with stress. Therapy helped him understand why he felt so stressed, overworked, pressured from childhood, the need for external validation, his family-of-origin issues, but it didn’t help him figure out what to do next.

When he engaged me for leadership coaching, we broke it down. We looked at his options. We set specific goals, like cutting back his workload, managing his staff better so that they could take over the tasks that he was overwhelmed with and creating boundaries around his time. Within a few weeks, he went from constantly stressed to actively managing his workload, taking concrete steps to solve the problems.

That’s the magic of action. It’s not about waiting for the perfect time or the perfect feeling to act. It’s about taking steps right now, even when you’re not totally sure how it will turn out—and in the process, you learn, you grow, and then you’ll make real progress. [16:06.3]

So, if you’re stuck in a cycle of overthinking, then it’s time to shift gears. Understanding your pain is important, but it’s not the end goal. The goal is to solve the problems and move forward, and good coaching is one of the best tools out there to help do that. It takes you from passive reflection to active problem-solving, from sitting with your emotions to taking real, meaningful steps towards a life that you want.

Hey, if you’re an achiever who’s been struggling when it comes to managing your emotions or navigating your relationships, I get it. So many high-performers hit a wall when it comes to emotional mastery. Maybe you’ve noticed that stress, frustration or anger is seeping into your personal or professional life, or you feel disconnected from those you care about.

That’s where my “Emotional Mastery” program comes in. It’s based on peer-reviewed, evidence-based therapeutic methods to help you find happiness, love and real fulfillment. Learn how to break free from the emotional roller coaster and start thriving in every area of your life. You can find out more at DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery. That’s D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.

Here’s the fourth out of the five points I want to share here and this one is about responsibility and agency. Therapy can be an incredible tool for digging into your childhood, into the original sources and roots of your current issues. It helps you uncover those hidden wounds, the stuff you might not even know has been affecting you. But there’s a downside to staying with that too long and it’s one that doesn’t get talked about enough.

Therapy, especially when it spends too much time focusing on the reasons why you’re struggling, can leave you feeling like your problems are just something you have to deal with, like they’re out of your hands. It can make you feel like life happens “to” you. [18:04.5]

Look, when you’re dealing with deep-rooted trauma or major life issues, it’s easy to start thinking, Well, this is just how I am. This is what happened to me, and that’s why I feel this way. Oh, well. That perspective can bring some relief, of course, but it can also leave you stuck, because when you frame your struggles as something that’s determined by your past, it’s easy to start thinking that you don’t have much control over it.

Good leadership coaching takes a completely different approach. It’s about ownership. It says, “Yes, this is where you are right now, and, yes, your past has brought you here. But what happens next? That’s up to you.” It’s all about taking responsibility for yourself, not in a “blame yourself” kind of way, but in a way that empowers you to take control. It asks you to stop focusing on what life has thrown at you and to start focusing on what you’re going to do about it. [19:02.2]

When I work with clients in a coaching setting, one of the first things I ask them is, what are you willing to take responsibility for? Sometimes that question hits them hard. A lot of people come in with a mindset that their life is happening “to” them, but good coaching flips that. It’s about taking agency over your life, even in areas where you don’t feel like you have a lot of control.

Let me tell you a story. One of my clients had spent years in therapy, working through some major personal issues, and therapy helped him understand where his problems were coming from. He knew all about his limiting beliefs, his childhood conditioning, the patterns that he kept repeating in his relationships. But there was a point where he said to me, “Look, I get it. I know where this is coming from, but I don’t know how to stop it,” and that’s where good coaching came in.

I asked him, “What if we stopped focusing on why you do these things and instead start asking what you’re going to do about it? What if you took full responsibility for your current behavior, no matter where it came from, and started making decisions from a place of power?” and that was a huge turning point for him, because once he took responsibility for his own actions, he realized he wasn’t powerless. [20:15.8]

He had a lot more control than he thought. He could choose how to respond, how to move forward and how to change the trajectory of his life. It wasn’t about blaming himself for his past. It was about owning his present and his future, and that’s part of the power of good leadership coaching. It’s not interested in pointing fingers, whether at others or at yourself. It invites you to take ownership of your life as it is right now. It’s about recognizing that while your past may have shaped who you are, it doesn’t have to define where you’re going.

Good coaching empowers you to stop asking, “Why is this happening to me?” and start asking, “What can I do about it?” It puts the ball back in your court, so to speak. It reminds you that no matter how difficult your circumstances are, you always have the power to choose your next step. [21:06.7]

Here’s another example. I worked with an entrepreneur who was facing some serious challenges. His business wasn’t doing well. His relationships were falling apart and he felt like everything was crumbling around him. He had a list of reasons why things were going wrong, market conditions, bad luck, people in his life letting him down over and over, and to be fair, some of those reasons were entirely valid, but focusing solely on those external factors left him feeling helpless.

When we started working together, a big shift happened when he started taking responsibility for his choices. We didn’t spend a lot of time on why things were going wrong. Instead, we focused on what he could control, and it wasn’t easy at first. Taking responsibility meant that he had to admit where he was playing a role in his own problems, but once he did, something powerful happened. He realized that if he was contributing to his situation, he could also change it. [22:03.7]

Good leadership coaching is about embracing that power. It’s realizing that even if things aren’t entirely in your control, your response to those things is always within your control, and that’s a huge paradigm shift, because once you start owning your decisions, once you start taking full responsibility for your life, you begin to see a lot of new possibilities. Ask yourself this, are you taking full responsibility for your life right now, or are you letting external factors dictate or determine your path? Are you waiting for circumstances to change before you make a move?

If you’re ready to take control, if you’re ready to own your choices and make decisions from a place of power, that’s where good coaching can transform everything. It’s not in blaming yourself for the past. It’s in owning your future. It’s in realizing that you have the agency to make bold decisions, to take meaningful action and to move forward with purpose. [23:00.0]

Okay, here’s the fifth and final major point, challenging comfort zones. Therapy often requires creating a safe space, a place where you can open up, be vulnerable, fully plumb the depths of your emotions, without fear of judgment and with compassion instead, and that is incredibly powerful, and it’s necessary for healing. But there’s a danger in always being comfortable and always being safe. If you spend too much time in that safe space without ever being pushed, you will get stuck.

Therapy can turn into a disempowering place where you feel heard, yeah, but you’re not actually growing. You’re stagnating. Good coaching, on the other hand, isn’t interested in keeping you comfortable. In fact, the best leadership coaching will deliberately push you out of your comfort zone. It’ll ask you to take risks, to try new things and to pursue goals that scare you, and that’s where real growth can happen, not when you’re sitting in the cozy confines of what’s familiar and safe, but when you’re stepping into the unknown. [24:03.3]

Take another one of my clients, for example. He had spent years in therapy working through his insecurities and his anxieties around dating. Therapy gave him a safe space to explore those feelings, to process past rejections and to understand why he was struggling. But after a while, he hit a wall. He was comfortable in therapy for years talking about his feelings, but nothing was changing in his real life. He wasn’t going on dates. He wasn’t taking risks. He was stuck.

When he started working with me, we did something different. We didn’t just talk about his fears. We actively challenged them. I asked him to take bold actions. We set up small, manageable goals that pushed him out of his comfort zone, things like striking up conversations with strangers, putting himself in new social situations, and going on dates even when he didn’t feel a hundred percent ready. [24:55.5]

At first, it was uncomfortable, of course. He resisted, but that discomfort was a sign of growth, actually, and the more he pushed through it, the more resilient he became, in fact, the more antifragile he became. He realized that every time he stepped outside his comfort zone, his world expanded and he became stronger. His confidence grew. His fear of rejection shrank, and that was something therapy alone hadn’t been able to give him, the grit to take action, the courage to step outside his comfort zone, even when it felt risky, and that’s what good coaching is about.

It’s not about keeping you safe. It’s about pushing you to your limits and then watching those limits expand.4 It’s about putting you in situations where failure is a real possibility, because failure is a part of growth. When you’re always in a safe space, you never have to confront failure, but when you’re out there in the real world taking risks, you start to see that failure isn’t the end. It’s just a stepping stone. In fact, if you approach failure in the right way, it will make you stronger. That’s the definition of antifragile, not just mere resilience. [26:03.2]

Good leadership coaching doesn’t let you play it safe. It pushes you to reach for goals that might feel out of reach at first, because those are the goals that change you. When you aim for something that scares you a bit, something you’re not sure you can achieve, that’s where real important growth happens. You discover strengths you didn’t even know you had. You develop antifragility. You get comfortable with discomfort.

This is where therapy and good coaching diverge. Therapy often wants to make you feel better. Good coaching wants to make you better. It’s not about soothing your fears. It’s about facing them head on and coming out stronger on the other side, because the truth is, growth doesn’t happen in your comfort zone. It happens when you’re out there, taking risks, pushing boundaries, challenging yourself in ways you didn’t think were possible. That’s why good coaching is so powerful. It forces you to evolve. It forces you to stop playing small and start stepping into the bigger versions of yourself. [27:03.7]

So, ask yourself, when was the last time you did something that really scared you? When was the last time you took a risk that had the potential to fail? If you’ve been stuck in your comfort zone for too long, it’s time to break out. It’s time to start challenging yourself to discover your true potential, because that’s where the real growth can happen, and that’s where good coaching can take you to the next level, personally and professionally.

Okay, let’s recap. We’ve covered some big ideas in this episode.

First, therapy can get you stuck in the past, endlessly processing your pain, always asking and looking for compassion, and while acceptance is important, it’s not the end goal. Real growth happens when you start focusing on your future potential, not just your past wounds.

We also talked about the difference between reflecting on your problems and actually solving them. Therapy helps you understand why you feel stuck. Coaching pushes you to do something about it. [27:58.4]

Then we dove into responsibility. If you don’t take ownership of your life, you’re giving up your power, blaming circumstances, blaming others. None of that gets you anywhere in real life. Real progress begins when you take control and you decide how you’re going to respond.

Finally, we talked about the power of discomfort. Staying in your comfort zone might feel safe, but it’s the quickest way to stagnate. True growth comes from pushing your limits, stepping into uncertainty and discovering what you’re really capable of.

If you stay stuck looking for empathy and compassion for too long, you risk locking yourself into a victim identity. It’s comfortable and safe, yeah, but it’s also disempowering. If you wait until everything feels perfect before you act, you’ll be waiting forever. But when you step out of that comfort zone, everything can change. You realize that you’re stronger than you thought. You start fulfilling more of your potential, and once you experience that kind of growth, there’s no turning back. That’s one place where the real power of good coaching comes in. It’s in moving forward, taking risks and evolving into the person you were always meant to be. [29:06.6]

Thank you so much for listening. If this has helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else that you think could benefit from it. If you like this, then give it a five-star rating on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. If you’ve got any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to hear it. Leave a comment, send me an email. I’d love to hear from you.

Thank you so much for listening again. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [29:27.0]