What the PGDM taught me about therapy

When clients first see my CV, the line that often surprises them is not the IFS certification or the eight years of practice. It's the PGDM.

"You have an MBA?"

Yes. A management postgraduate degree, before I trained in clinical psychology. People want to know how I got from one to the other, and they want to know what it has to do with therapy. The honest answer is: more than I expected, and probably more than I would have guessed when I was sitting in a strategy class wondering whether I had taken the wrong turn.

What the corporate-adjacent training did for me as a therapist.

It taught me the language clients actually speak.

Most of the people who come to my practice are senior professionals. They use words like stakeholder, quarter, headcount, runway, sandbagging the forecast without translating. When a client says "I'm being managed out and I haven't said it out loud yet," I know exactly what that sentence means and what it is costing them to keep it inside.

This is not a small thing. A lot of therapy with high-performing professionals stalls in the first three sessions because the therapist needs everything explained. The client gets tired of being a translator in a room they came to be unguarded in. They don't come back.

I don't need things explained. I have read the org chart with you, even when you haven't drawn it.

What it taught me about systems.

Management training is, at its core, training in seeing systems. You learn to ask: what are the incentives? Who benefits from this state of affairs? What feedback loops keep the dysfunction stable?

That is also a useful frame for families.

When a client is struggling with a parent who can't acknowledge anything, I don't only see a hurt person. I see a system in which acknowledgement was never reinforced because admitting fault would destabilise the parent's identity. The dysfunction is doing a job. Therapy then has to ask whether the job can be done another way, by someone other than my client.

Same logic, different context.

What it taught me about ambition.

This is the most subtle and probably the most useful.

I sat in classrooms for two years with people whose ambition was not casual. They had been winning at things since they were nine. They were the ones with the spreadsheets, the side ventures, the early-morning workouts, the polished narrative of why they belonged at the top of the next pyramid.

A few years later, several of them became my clients. (Not the same people, but the same archetype.)

What I had learned, sitting next to them in those classrooms, was that the ambition was rarely just ambition. It was a strategy. It was protecting something. Often it was protecting a small self who had once been told they were not enough, and who had concluded, early, and very precisely, that the way to be enough was to be the best in the room.

You cannot un-strategise that just by saying be kinder to yourself. It is welded to the operating system. Therapy with these clients has to honour the strategy first. Has to admit that the strategy worked, they got the job, the marriage, the impressive life. Only after that does the work of asking and is it still worth what it costs? become possible.

I learned to honour the strategy because I watched, up close, what it took to build it.

What management didn't teach me.

I want to be clear about what the PGDM did not give me. It did not give me clinical training. It did not give me a single tool I use to actually intervene in a session. The frameworks, IFS, CBT, NLP, QPR, those came later, from years of clinical training and supervision.

The PGDM gave me a kind of atmospheric fluency with the world my clients live in. That fluency means we don't waste sessions on translation. It does not, by itself, do the therapy.

Why I'm writing this.

Because the part of my background that the previous version of my website buried, PGDM, listed as the last bullet under qualifications, turns out to be the part that matters most to the people who eventually become my clients.

If you have looked at therapist after therapist and felt that none of them would understand the world you actually live in, the world that is exhausting you in ways that don't fit the standard categories, that is, in some sense, what I built this practice for.

The fluency was an accident of biography. The use I have made of it has not been.