More and more career professionals say they are dissatisfied with their lives. Depression, anxiety, and anger are common complaints. Working harder doesn't help. Many try to buy their way to happiness. Others turn to drugs and alcohol for escape. Either way, they are left feeling even emptier and more out of control.Based on his landmark seven-year study of emotional lives of career professionals, psychoanalyst Douglas LaBier explores the range of conflicts and sheds provocative new light on the path to achieving success and personal fulfillment in the emotional battleground of the workplace.
Douglas LaBier, Ph.D. is a business psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Washington, DC; and Director of the Center for Progressive Development. He writes about creating an integrated life in a new era of constant turbulence, interconnection, and unpredictable change.
As a business psychologist, Dr. LaBier consults to senior executives and senior management teams on ways to integrate personal and career development with positive leadership practices. These include strategies to support individual growth, team collaboration, social responsibility, and sustainable practices; all necessary for evolving towards an emerging business model combining financial success with serving the common good.
As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Dr. LaBier helps individuals and couples resolve emotional conflicts that impact their personal life goals, intimate and family relationships, career development and transitions. His focus includes building emotional resiliency, self-awareness and psychological health in the context of today's turbulent, unpredictable and globalized environment. He helps men and women create more integration, sense of life purpose and human connection in their lives - the key challenge to adults from about 35 onward.
Dr. LaBier's long-standing focus on the psychology of the career culture, human development and the interplay between work and psychological health grew from the work he first wrote about in his highly acclaimed book, MODERN MADNESS. A pioneering examination of how work and career within organizations affect emotional and values conflict, it was cited by Daniel Goleman in the New York Times as "In the vanguard...offering sobering insights into the costs of modern success." it explained why personal and career-related conflicts are often caused, paradoxically, by successful adaptation to the roles, pressures, and culture within organizations and careers.
Dr. LaBier has published regularly in the popular press, and his work has been the subject of frequent coverage by national print and broadcast media, including the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other publications. He's been a frequent guest on national TV and radio shows over the years regarding issues of psychological health within current political and social culture.
He has served as a faculty member of the Washington School of Psychiatry; a Fellow of the Research Council of Healthy Companies, a nonprofit organization supported by the MacArthur Foundation; and a consultant to Lee Hecht Harrison, a global leadership and career development firm. He previously served on the staff of the National Institute of Mental Health.
Dr. LaBier is currently working on a new book project that redefines psychological health and emotional resilience in today's world and how to build it -- in personal lives, at the workplace, and in our responsibilities as global citizens in today's highly interconnected, unpredictable and tumultuous world.
He can be reached at dlabier@centerprogressive.org
