About the Episode
How do you know whether you’re following your own path or someone else’s expectations? Whether you’re questioning what’s next, considering a change, or starting your career, this conversation explores how to recognize the difference between external pressure and internal alignment.
In this episode of Whole by Design, Dr. Julie Lopez sits down with David Gofman, founder of Gofman Therapy and Consulting, to explore the quarter-life career crisis and what it reveals about making authentic life and career decisions.
David shares how the body signals misalignment, what resistance and boredom can teach us, and three practical ways to move toward work that feels more aligned, whether you’re choosing your first career or making a change later in life.
If you’ve ever questioned your direction, this episode offers a compassionate framework for moving forward with greater clarity and confidence.
Episode Guest
David Gofman is a Licensed Professional Counselor, earning his Masters Degree from the University of Denver in Sport and Performance Psychology. He works with teens, young adults, and adults, and looks to bring flexibility, presence, authenticity, and compassion to everything that he does.
In his clinical practice, David specializes in utilizing Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP), the gold standard treatment for OCD and Anxiety, and he is also certified in Pain Reprocessing Therapy to treat chronic pain and other chronic conditions. David’s approach to counseling is pragmatic and goal-oriented, and he focuses on helping his clients to experience real change quickly. In addition to these specialties, David has a special interest in working with teens and young adults through periods of significant life transition. David has been offering career and vocational coaching support to emerging adults for nearly 10 years, supporting clients as they navigate through the anxiety, stress, confusion, and uncertainty that life often brings in this phase of life.
David has been practicing mindfulness meditation for 10 years, and is a Level One Certified Teacher in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) through the Brown University Center for Mindfulness. David has a diverse array of interests, and in his free time enjoys reading, running, cooking, hiking with his two dogs, and spending time with his family.
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Episode Transcript:
Dr. Julie Lopez: Hi everyone, my name is Dr. Julie Lopez, and I’m your host for Whole by Design. On this week’s episode, we will be diving into careers, the career market, especially for young adults.
It’s a dynamic time with a really big transition. Please stay until the end, where our guest is going to share his top three considerations for actually finding the ideal, perfect career for you, beyond what you think of logically or what you’ve been told about assessments or different types of tests to show you what’s right for you. Today, I’d like to welcome David Gofman.
He is the founder and a primary driving force behind Gofman Therapy and Consulting. And he is an expert on this topic, not only because they do career counseling, but they are all therapists as well. And let’s face it, it is an emotional, psychological benefit to have it all in one package.
Thank you so much for joining us today, David.
David Gofman: Yeah, it’s my pleasure, Julie. Thanks for having me.
Why Feeling Uncertain About Career Decisions Is So Common
Dr. Julie Lopez: Great. Well, I saw something really interesting. I know you do a lot of career counseling.
We’re talking about young people, relatively young people in their 20s, in the job market today. And what ends up happening when there’s this big transition from school life to professional life and those early years, and maybe some of that early pressure around getting the right career or being in the right space. What kinds of things are you seeing right now in terms of the pressures that our young people are facing at the beginning of their career search?
David Gofman: Yeah. I think it’s always an uncertain time, that phase of life being in your early 20s, you know, even late teens, early 20s. I think in some ways, the search, depending on the track that you see yourself going on, starts earlier and earlier.
I’m hearing from sophomores in college talking about applying for jobs for after college, like two years early for certain industries. But there’s always, I think, this pressure to kind of have it figured out, even though we see all of the data around how many young adults are moving back home after graduating college. It’s becoming more common for college to take more than four years for people to complete.
And yet there’s still this pressure, I think, that people face to have a plan, to have it figured out. And I still feel like sometimes people feel unprepared. They’ve maybe figured out, even if they figured out how to do school well, they can do the external, the assignments, the studying, you know, this transition from being good academically or doing well in college to figuring out life after college is something that feels like a chasm, I think, for a lot of young adults.
The Pressure to Choose the Right Career Too Early
Dr. Julie Lopez: Yes. I heard a term recently called a quarter-life crisis. You know, I guess that means like 25 years old or in your early 20s, depending on, I think that, I don’t know, the average life expectancy probably isn’t 100, but it’s probably early 20s.
And I myself can relate to a lot of external pressure to get my engineering degree. I got my first degree in systems engineering, and I did it because my parents told me it was a good idea. My teacher said I was good at math.
Didn’t even really know what it was, but I knew when I said it, people were impressed. I mean, this was back in the late 80s, so there weren’t many female engineers. All this external pressure and validation to do something.
And I remember when I got out of school very distinctly, I got the prestigious job, and I was crying every day, not crying like sobbing sadness. I was so bored. I was crying these tears of boredom every day.
It was a terrible fit for me. It was about what everyone wanted for me from the outside. And I’m just wondering what you’re seeing and how you experience that as someone who is well-schooled in mindfulness and mindfulness-based stress reduction.
How do you see that showing up with young people today, and what kinds of tools and techniques do you use with them beyond traditional career coaching?
David Gofman: Yeah. I think what you described is actually far more common than people realize, and not necessarily just the fact that you felt pressured to pursue something, but that you changed directions at some point in your career.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Actually, I was, thank God, 24 years old when I changed.
You Don’t Have to Plan the Next 40 Years: Career Decisions One Step at a Time
David Gofman: Yeah. Right at your quarter life. But I still think that we have this idea societally that you’re supposed to pick a career and that’s what you do for the next 40 to 50 years until you graduate.
And so in my mind and in my experience, I think that’s where some of that crisis comes from, is like, is this really what I want to do for the rest of my life? And so one thing we do in our work is pump the brakes on that in a very direct way and say, this isn’t about figuring out what you want to do for the rest of your life. It’s about picking sort of as far as the road can see.
There’s a quote I like a lot that’s, when you’re driving a car at night, you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. Right.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Oh my gosh, I love that quote. David, say it again. Say it again.
Do you know who said that? I literally love it.
David Gofman: I don’t want to miss, I don’t want to miss quote. I want to say it’s Anne Lamott, but we can verify and confirm, but it’s when you’re driving a car at night, you can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Oh my gosh, that’s so powerful.
David Gofman: And so that’s the framing, I think, I think about a lot with the career coaching work is like, we don’t need to see all the way to the end of the road. We just need to be able to see kind of that, that next step, something that feels based on what you know now, based on the best that we can identify, what feels like sort of that next step for you.
Career Burnout vs. “Bore-Out”: When You’re Understimulated at Work
Dr. Julie Lopez: I could feel myself when you shared that quote, just like exhaling and feeling so much less, less pressure. And right, since the word crisis is in there, I imagine there’s really high anxiety with this idea that in this moment, I have to pick the right thing for all of eternity to dedicate my, you know, my prime years to figure out, you know, the right step now. So I love that quote, really.
There was another term that I recently saw called a bore out, as opposed to career burnout; it was like career bore out. And what they said was, this was chronically under-stimulated, under-challenged, and bored by daily tasks. I can tell you, although my job was pretty challenging, it was so meaningless to me, I really needed to be on the career path I moved into, working with people and healing and change in a tangible way.
And designing computer systems for massive companies was like, so meaningless to me. And I realized that for other people, it was like exciting and challenging. But yeah, I just wondered what you see in that realm with your work?
David Gofman: Yeah, I think it’s, it’s certainly prevalent. I think you see it, we see it in a few different ways. You know, both with maybe young adults who have struggled in a traditional academic environment, right, you know, academic environments are pretty sedentary.
It’s, you know, sit and listen, receive information. You know, there’s a lot of sort of cognitive work that, you know, if you’re somebody who likes to be up and about, who likes to learn and work by doing with your hands, you know, that type of environment is just not at all gonna, gonna align. You know, and then also with more young professional clients who maybe they’ve, they’ve tried to follow the path that society has sort of communicated to them, you’re supposed to follow, and they’re getting to a point where it’s two years in maybe to their career.
And, they’re just saying to themselves, like, this isn’t, this is not the next 30 years for me, you know, like, I can’t, I can’t do this, you know, for much longer. And so, you know, and I think to what you’re describing, it’s, it’s a, it’s not that they’re so overworked, and they care so much, and they’re so stressed out, but it’s more about feeling disengaged from what they’re doing. Yeah.
How to Identify Your Strengths and What Kind of Work Fits You
Dr. Julie Lopez: And so how do you guys work with that? One of the things I love about your practice is that it feels like it’s a whole systems approach. It’s not just the task lists, and getting the resume right, and all this kind of stuff, but really slowing down to listen uniquely to what your client’s nervous system is telling them.
And so yeah, tell me a little bit about how you might work with something like that.
David Gofman: Yeah, well, we find that people aren’t often asked, or taught to identify what they would be best suited to do and what they want to do. You know, there’s, I think there’s, again, an idea out there, you’re just supposed to know, or you’re just supposed to figure out what you want to do with your, with your working life. And, and your working life ends up being a huge percentage of, you know, of your, you know, waking hours on this planet.
So, you know, it does become, I think, an important thing to get right for people. And so helping teach people how to be introspective, we use a, we use a career assessment that I often tell people, even if it doesn’t tell you something groundbreaking, or open up a door that you just hadn’t considered, it always helps people develop the vocabulary, to be able to describe themselves, to be able to articulate their strengths, to be able to communicate the context in which they work best in. And that can be really helpful for people to be able to say, you know, I am somebody who really likes, you know, working outside of an office, or it is really important to me to work with people, or, you know, I am somebody who likes to do creative problem solving. And that’s a component of my work that would be really stimulating and engaging for me.
And maybe I kind of knew that about myself, but I never really was able to articulate it or use that to inform, you know, the types of work opportunities that I was looking for.
“There’s More Right With You Than Wrong With You”: Dropping the “I’m Broken” Story
Dr. Julie Lopez: I love that so much, because this podcast, Whole by Design, is sponsored by the Viva Center, and we are a trauma-informed organization. And part of that means really listening to the body and listening and understanding difference. And so what you’re telling me is you’re giving people language for their unique way of showing up in the world, right?
That it’s not that, well, I’ll tell you for me, you know, I thought, what’s wrong with me? Everyone’s telling me this is the best job, best salary, but so prestigious, right? This is great, you should be happy.
And I wasn’t. So then my next conclusion was, oh, my gosh, like, I’m broken. There’s something wrong with me.
This is the esteemed thing. I should be grateful. And I wasn’t.
I was bored.
David Gofman: Why am I not happy?
Dr. Julie Lopez: Bad and unhappy and anxious, even, right? Is this going to be the next 40 years of my life, is it going to look like this? Because I’m really a round peg in a square hole.
Like it’s not fitting well for me. So I love what you’re saying that really combats that story of like, oh, my gosh, I’m broken or something’s wrong with me. And actually, I don’t remember if it’s on your LinkedIn or on your website, but you have a great quote by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the master and prolific author and teacher of mindfulness and mindfulness-based stress reduction.
And it says, do you know what it is? Or do you want me to say it?
David Gofman:
You can go for it.
Dr. Julie Lopez:
There’s more right with you than wrong with you. And I love that, right? As opposed to being critical or thinking, gosh, I don’t fit.
It’s like, what is my body telling me? And you have these tools where they can be like, oh, you know, I like to be moving at work. Oh, I’m a, you know, creative thinker.
And that’s okay. Right? That’s different.
It’s important. I love it.
David Gofman:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And again, what we see is that, again, people haven’t necessarily been given the tools to ask these questions or to explore these things on their own.
You know that the high school structure is largely about fulfilling requirements and checking off education boxes. And college often is the same. You’re expected to figure out a major, you know, but does anybody guide you in that process of figuring out a major?
You know, you’re supposed to figure out how your major fits into a career path. But there is a career center. I’m not here to disparage career centers.
I think they do amazing work. And they’re often overworked and understaffed and they only have, you know, a couple of sessions. Maybe they can look over your resume.
But if you don’t know what you want to do, looking over your resume doesn’t exactly help you. You’re putting the cart before the horse a little bit.
How Therapy and Career Counseling Work Together for Young Adults
Dr. Julie Lopez: Right. There’s so much more to it on a deeper level. So tell me a little bit, since you are all therapists as well as career counselors, how does that fit in terms of really helping with success on this transition type of time period?
Like, what are the types of mental health struggles you see? How does that intersect with this desire to successfully navigate this transition time?
David Gofman: Yeah, yeah. And I tell people this often that, you know, we specifically work with young adults and young professionals who are navigating these kinds of non-linear, you know, sort of career trajectories. And, you know, we don’t work with executive leaders.
We don’t work with, you know, mid-career, you know, professionals who are looking to land a senior role. We specifically work, you know, with this population. And in that, we expect that reviewing a resume, providing a career assessment report with some career recommendations, you know, of course, that’s insufficient, right?
That is the beginning of the process as we understand it, right? And where we meet our clients is in the work of actually, you know, digesting the information, utilizing it, moving forward in a job search process. You know, we operate under the assumption much, I’m sure like you guys do in your clinical work, that our clients have been trying on their, maybe on their own, maybe they’ve been researching, you know, whatever strategies they’ve, they haven’t just been sitting around, not wanting to make things better for themselves.
You know, and so it’s helpful to us to really understand what their process is and to accompany them in that process, to support them in looking at job opportunities, to support them in applying to jobs, to help them with goal setting, to help them with accountability, to help them, you know, because within that you see self-confidence and self-esteem and self-worth, you see maybe knowledge gaps that you’re helping somebody, you know, develop. You look at, we’re frequently talking about, you know, what clinically we would refer to as, you know, whether it’s, cognitive distortions or mindfulness strategies of staying present in the moment and focusing on what’s in front of you and not jumping too far ahead.
And so, you know, we see the real work with our, with the clients, who we work with around, it’s not just about giving you, sort of a fancy report that has some information on it, but it’s about really helping you understand yourself in the context of your experience and to help you in taking concrete steps towards something that feels really meaningful.
Feeling Stuck or “Lazy”? What That Signal Is Really Telling You
Dr. Julie Lopez: I love that. And you actually said something earlier to me before we started recording about how sometimes you’ll just see your clients get stuck, right? And you just said, you know, you trust and believe that they’re doing the best they can before they come into you.
And if they’re stuck in some way, there may be a more complex, or there may be a more sophisticated block in their system, maybe in their nervous system, in their body, right? That by using all these different, more advanced techniques, you can help them move it and actually dislodge what might be holding them back or kind of in a stuck place so that they can move forward. And I really love that, especially as it relates to using the mindfulness piece and using the body, right?
Or the somatic experience to give information, clues, and data around what might be really going on. I wonder, are any stories coming to mind like that, where you’ve been able to have that type of a breakthrough with one of your clients in a career space?
David Gofman: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I was thinking as you were talking, what was coming up for me is that I frequently end up having this conversation with parents, you know, because when working with young adults in this phase, the parents are inevitably involved in some way. They’re present, you know, as a component of either initiating treatment or inquiring about services for their child, or they’re certainly anxious, they’re stressed, they’re worried that their child isn’t going to kind of figure it out, or that, you know, like how can we help them?
And a while ago, I wrote a blog post for our website about motivation and this idea that, you know, like laziness in some ways, right, like, doesn’t really, I hate the word lazy, you know, it’s a symptom. It’s not, I’ve never met a client who just didn’t want to be independent, who didn’t want to be in a fulfilling career, who thought the world should just give them everything they needed, and they shouldn’t give something back and be a contributing member of the world around them. It was just about helping them to figure out how to get there.
You know, and so helping, you know, whoever it is, if it’s parents, sometimes it’s clients as well, understand that it’s not about, you know, the lack of motivation or the laziness or whatever it is that we’re talking about. That’s a signal that there’s something going on that’s blocking this young adult, right, from being able to engage in the world in a way that feels aligned for them. And so they’re protecting themselves however they can, you know, and so we need to help them identify what’s going on underneath that and help give them the tools and the experiences that ultimately help them feel more competent, feel more capable of moving through the world.
How the Body Holds the Answers: A Somatic Approach to Career Decisions
Dr. Julie Lopez: I love that. I just saw something, a video. It was an experiment where a teacher gave three different words, and the goal was to find, to re-scramble the words, and get a new word.
And half the class had super easy words for the first two, and she just said, and the others, like, the first two were impossible. There was no other word you could unscramble. And so she said, okay, unscramble the first word and raise your hand when you’ve got it.
And, you know, half the class raised their hand very quickly, and the other half, and she’s like, that’s okay. It’s okay. If you didn’t get it, just move on.
Let’s go to the second one. And the same thing happened again, and the same people were like, oh my gosh, these are so impossible. And then the third word was exactly the same word on both sides, and the ones who’d been getting it right and getting the praise all raised their hands, and the other half didn’t.
It was powerful. It was about the power, the psychological power of learned helplessness, and how powerful repeated experiences of feeling disempowered or feeling incompetent can actually change your ability to engage with a task. And it’s a simple exercise, but that’s what I thought of while you were speaking, and how powerful our life experiences can be in changing the way we engage with a challenge.
David Gofman: Yeah, yeah. I think it’s a great example, and I wanted to come back to you. You had asked me for an example as well from my work, and I think something that kind of illustrates this idea of, you know, identifying what’s going on under the surface. You know, I was working a number of years ago with a young adult who, one of his challenges was sleep hygiene.
He was staying up until the sun had already risen and sleeping through the day, and the parents were beside themselves about it. They couldn’t figure out what was going on, all of this stuff. And over the first sort of few months of working together, one of the things that emerged was that there was tremendous interpersonal conflict in the home between the young adult and his parents.
And he ended up, functionally, right, kind of, not even necessarily fully consciously, but adjusting his sleep schedule so he was awake when they were sleeping.
Dr. Julie Lopez: Of course, a more peaceful home.
David Gofman: Because he had more autonomy and more independence.
He was sort of stuck in this environment, and it was his way of getting some space, some room to breathe, some room to…
Dr. Julie Lopez:
Brilliant! Right..? If we look through that lens, it’s his active, right? It’s his body.
David Gofman:
And so, you know, as we began to kind of peel those pieces away and identify other ways for him to feel independent, to address some of the dynamics at home, to help him feel more competent, to help him feel more capable, you know, eventually moving out of the home and into a dorm room, right, like the sleep schedule shifted, right? It wasn’t necessarily about, like, how do we beat him over the head and get him to wake up at nine o’clock and go to bed by, you know, 11. It was about, like, what is that telling us, right?
What is… There’s a reason this is happening, you know, that we just need to figure out and don’t know yet.
3 Practices for Finding the Right Career Decisions for You
Dr. Julie Lopez: So good. I mean, could a traditional career counselor do that? Probably not.
Because you have to slow it down and look at the bigger picture and trust that the body is giving important signals. I love that about you guys. I know this sounds crazy, but we are at the end of our time.
Can you believe it? So we’re ready. We’re ready, David.
We’re ready for the three critical components to finding your best career path, your best one for you. So let us have it.
David Gofman: Yeah. So, you know, first and foremost, and this is something we tell all of our clients who are going through this exploration process, is that we need to be willing to get it wrong. Right.
And what we mean by that is that we learn about ourselves through engaging in the world, engaging through action. We can’t just sit in our room and think really hard about what we want to do and come to a conclusion. We learn about ourselves by engaging with the world.
And with that comes needing to be willing to get it wrong, to make a mistake. You know, you can think in some ways about the career exploration process as sculpting, right, rather than maybe architecture, where you start with this block, and you can chip away. You know, I don’t want this piece.
I don’t want this piece. I didn’t like this. I didn’t like that.
And what’s left is the sculpture. Right. And so, you know, that is something that’s really, really critical that people need to engage in the world and reflect on their experiences.
And kind of along with that, number two is to have your own experiences. We’re fed so many ideas about how we’re supposed to feel about certain things, what we’re supposed to want, what we’re supposed to like. I used to joke with people about, you know, can you go to the movies without looking up the reviews of the movie before you go?
You know, can you just go and watch the movie and form your own opinion about it, and just have that experience? Right. And that can feel uncomfortable for a lot of people.
Some people decide whether or not to go to the movies based on the reviews. Right. So you’re already letting people decide for you whether or not the movie is good or not.
Right. And we apply that to other aspects of our experience as well. It’s part of our career exploration work that involves looking deliberately at individual careers so that we don’t just dismiss something because we don’t know much about it or because somebody said they didn’t like that, you know, or whatever our preconceptions are about it, you know, really learn about it and discover for yourself what it’s about.
So have your own experience. And with that, you know, the third piece is trust your gut. Right.
Which is just, you know, we believe that, you know, you know, that there’s a part of you that you can develop the capacity to listen to and give voice to that can guide you in this process, in reflecting on those experiences, in trying something, and again, having an opinion about it for yourself. Right. That’s separate from other people’s expectations.
Dr. Julie Lopez: David, those are amazing. I love them all because they are so much about factoring yourself into the whole process. I love it.
Thank you so much, David, for being with us here today on Whole by Design. And thank you, audience, for joining me on this episode. I hope it left you feeling inspired to toss out the labels, embrace new perspectives, and take one step closer to joy and clarity that is waiting for you.
Let’s spread the message, subscribe, review, or share this episode with someone who could benefit from a stigma-dropping approach to mental well-being today.
