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High performing professionals are often rewarded for the very traits that can eventually wear them down, such as perfectionism, over responsibility, pushing through, difficulty slowing down, and feeling like they should always be able to handle more. Holly’s talks look at why those patterns develop, how they show up in work and life, and what they can cost us over time.
Drawing from years of clinical work as a therapist (over 15,000 clinical hours), trainer, and educator, Holly makes complex psychological ideas easy to understand without oversimplifying them. Her style is warm, engaging, conversational, and often funny, while still giving audiences something meaningful to think about long after the talk is over.
The same traits that help high performers succeed, like drive, responsibility, independence, attention to detail, and persistence, can become costly when they are overused. This talk explores how strengths can quietly turn into burnout, perfectionism, overcontrol, and disconnection, and how to recognize when a superpower has started working against you.
For many high achievers, success is not only about ambition. It can also become a way of trying to finally feel worthy, secure, or enough. This talk examines how shame can fuel achievement while making satisfaction nearly impossible, and what changes when success is no longer being used to prove your value.
What Happens When Your Career Outgrows Your Nervous System. Reaching the next level can bring more visibility, responsibility, uncertainty, and pressure, which means success itself can sometimes activate anxiety rather than relieve it. This talk explores why growth can feel surprisingly unsafe and how high performers can expand their capacity to succeed without constantly feeling braced for something to go wrong.
Trauma can show up at work in ways that are easy to misread as disengagement, overreaction, avoidance, or poor performance. This talk helps organizations better understand how trauma can affect behavior, stress responses, communication, and functioning, while offering practical ways to respond with greater awareness without losing appropriate workplace boundaries.
Holly can tailor talks to meet the specific needs of your organization, team, or event. Additional topics may include anxiety, high performance, stress, burnout, trauma, resilience, and mental health in the workplace, with content customized to fit your audience and goals.
This book is filled with more than 50 engaging exercises to help you understand and manage your anger so you can express yourself safely, without hurting others or yourself
This workbook is geared towards teens who are struggling with anger. It provides a variety of exercises and tools for teens to discover what is fueling their anger and ways to manage it in helpful ways.
Podcast Guest
Hear from EMDRIA-Certified Therapist, Approved Consultant and Trainer, Holly Forman-Patel, LMFT, LPC, about how this therapy works, why it's effective for emotion regulation, and what to expect from an EMDR session.
Podcast Guest
EMDRIA-approved Consultant and Trainer, Holly Forman-Patel, LMFT, LPCC, joins Curt and Michelle from EMDR Chat to share her sage advice from her years of working with children in EMDR Therapy.
Co-written Article
This article by Sik-Lam Wong and Holly Forman-Patel, LMFT, LPCC presents two vignettes on the successful use of the Flash Technique (FT) without bilateral stimulation and prompted without blinking.