Career Counseling and Coaching in Santa Cruz, California.

Are you stressed or anxious about work? Struggling with career issues? Donald Dufford, Ph.D., Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Director of Anxiety Treatment Services can help you gain clarity, composure and confidence in your career. Dr. Dufford has over 25 years experience and provides specific tools and techniques within a caring, supportive environment for personal insight and change. Please call now for a free 10 minute phone consultation.

I support individual clients experiencing burnout, compassion fatigue, and mental and emotional exhaustion. I often work with Highly Sensitive People, or empaths, who are more susceptible to these experiences. I support those in helping professions like teachers, therapists, parents, medical professionals, and difficult work environments create their boundaries in their workspace for personal well-being.

Most frequently career counseling is utilized through high school guidance and college advisors, however, in private practice I have many opportunities to work with young adults trying to figure out what to do! This is a rewarding task because the path a young man or woman starts with can be life directing and life changing. Career is an important decision. Sometimes emotional or psychological blocks are hindering decisions about career or about moving forward all together. This is where counseling and sometimes therapy comes in to mediate any faulty thinking or negative beliefs about oneself that interferes with the process. This age group is one of my favorite.

Our careers make up a major part of our life. Careers can be pivotal for creating happiness in life or creating the opposite. In earlier days, people found their first job after high school or college and stayed in that job for the rest of their life. In past decades, the “one job for life” has evolved into six to ten job changing and career changing episodes. Every job change and career change often leads to anxiety, depression, fears, interview panic, lack of self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, somatic reactions and a devastating feeling that includes a lack of self-worth. Being fired and being hired revolve around rejection and the strive to be accepted. Career counseling works to make the above issues more tolerable and rational. It is directed...(view profile to read more)

As an experience psychologist, I can help people struggling with their career, important decisions, and/or purpose in life. Through specific evidence-based interventions as a certified Mindfulness-Based Therapist, I help people mindfully navigate these experiences in a healthy way. My goal is to help people overcome difficulties, reach their potential, and effect real and lasting change.