Specializing in Coaching and Therapy for High Achievers
High-Stakes Work Requires A Healthy Nervous System
My work is centered on giving people tools for high-stakes roles so stress stops spilling into sleep, health, and relationships. Because we know that when your well-being is supported, your work gets stronger.
Stanford Law
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Former Big Law Litigator
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Former Senior Corporate Counsel at Amazon
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Licensed Therapist Trained in EMDR and IFS
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Corporate Mental Health Counseling
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Stanford Law | Former Big Law Litigator | Former Senior Corporate Counsel at Amazon | Licensed Therapist Trained in EMDR and IFS | Corporate Mental Health Counseling |
Who You’re Working With
I’m Annasara Purcell, a licensed therapist, executive coach, and speaker. I help high-achieving professionals feel better, think clearer, and handle high-pressure work without burning out.
Before I became a therapist, I built my career in the same kinds of environments many of my clients work in now. I graduated from Stanford Law School, worked as a litigator at a top law firm, and later served as Senior Corporate Counsel at Amazon. I understand high-pressure environments from the inside out.
Today, I support individual clients through therapy and coaching, and organizations through workshops that are:
Practical | Direct | Refreshingly Human
If you are searching for a therapist for lawyers, therapy for high performers, or a therapist for high achievers, you are in the right place.
High-Achievers Often Carry More Than Most People See
When your work is high-stakes, your brain and nervous system can start treating everyday life like an emergency. Over time, that can lead to anxiety, burnout, exhaustion, and numbness.
Many high-achieving people rely on patterns that once helped them succeed, like perfectionism, people-pleasing, or always staying one step ahead. Those patterns can be useful in demanding careers, but they can also keep you stuck in constant overdrive because your brain is always ‘on’.
For some people, the roots go deeper. Painful early experiences can give rise to negative core beliefs like:
“I have to earn my worth.”
“I can’t make mistakes.”
“I’m only safe if I stay in control.”
When those beliefs are paired with a high-pressure work environment, anxiety and burnout are predictable outcomes without adequate support.
In high-stress environments, generic advice such as “set better boundaries” or “improve your time management” won’t solve the problem. The real change comes when you understand what drives your stress response and can effectively employ tools to limit its negative impact, creating the freedom to thrive and enjoy all that you have worked so hard to accomplish.
Why Annasara Purcell | LMFT ?
There are plenty of people with impressive legal backgrounds who have become coaches. Executive coaching can be helpful, and that is part of why I offer it.
What is far less common is the combination of expertise I bring.
Alongside my legal and corporate experience, I am a licensed therapist with specialized training in two of the most widely used, evidence-based therapy modalities today: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Internal Family Systems (IFS).
These approaches are especially effective for helping people:
understand what drives their own anxiety, perfectionism, and burnout
work with patterns that lead to overworking, people-pleasing, or self-sabotage
build change that lasts, not just temporary relief
identify the early experiences that shaped core beliefs and free themselves from maladaptive reactions to those experiences
In other words, these therapies help you identify and modify the deepest roots of your stress patterns, not just find ways to adapt to them.
Because you deserve to thrive, not merely to cope.
How I Got Here
My passion for this work is personal.
Like many of my clients, I have been driven for as long as I can remember. When I was eight I decided I wanted to go to Stanford Law School, and I didn’t stop working hard towards that goal until I graduated twenty years later with a prestigious federal clerkship in hand. After clerking, I joined an AMLAW-100 firm as a litigation associate, where I spent years litigating on behalf of technology companies before moving to Amazon as in-house counsel.
I performed well in high-pressure environments, but at times it came at a significant cost. Early in my career my anxiety felt all-consuming. Even though I consistently exceeded external expectations, internally I lived with constant self-doubt and extreme perfectionism. I often felt that one small mistake could make the life I had worked so hard for come crashing down.
Fortunately as a young lawyer, I found the right therapist. They understood the demands of high-stakes work and helped me build tools to manage anxiety and challenge the beliefs underneath it. I learned how to care for myself even when work was at its busiest, and how to separate my value from my performance.
What surprised me most was how much taking care of myself improved my performance at work.
I had more confidence, clearer thinking, and I spent less time spinning in self-doubt. By the time I was promoted to Senior Corporate Counsel at Amazon, I was working and living with a level of self-assurance that my younger self could not have imagined.
As I became more open about my own early struggles with anxiety, I was struck by how many peers also reported feeling overwhelmed, burned out, and unsure how to find meaning and joy in their lives. After years of informally coaching and mentoring colleagues, I decided to leave Amazon to pursue my master’s degree in therapy so helping people could be my full-time work.
I find this work deeply meaningful because I have seen the difference it makes in people’s lives.
I am humbled each time a client trusts me to be a part of their journey.
faq
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My approach to therapy is highly tailored to the needs of each individual client, but it is always highly collaborative and cognizant of the many demands on my client’s time and mental energy. Therapy often proceeds in stages, meaning that if someone comes in completely overwhelmed or burned out, we first work to “stop the bleeding” and focus on practical strategies to make things feel more tolerable. Once these practical strategies are in place and things feel more sustainable, we can begin the deeper work of targeting root cause issues. I am completely transparent about why we are doing what we are doing and always seek out client feedback to make sure you feel your time is being well spent.
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Yes. I frequently partner with leaders to evaluate how they can foster team dynamics that are more supportive of mental health, resulting in less burnout, conflict, and churn on their teams. Corporate leaders lose hundreds of hours every year to employee burnout, interpersonal conflict exacerbated by poorly-managed stress, and employee turnover. I help leaders create an environment that supports team mental health, resulting in increased work satisfaction and productivity.
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While law firms and tech companies are both high-stress environments that attract a lot of high-achieving people, they tend to have key differences that impact how stress manifests in employees. Law firms often reinforce perfectionistic tendencies by treating mistakes as uniformly unacceptable. By contrast, tech companies are often more forgiving of mistakes in the interest of moving quickly and taking risks, but the pace of work and constant pressure to innovate takes a different kind of toll. I help clients understand how their unique personality traits interact with workplace stressors to contribute to anxiety, and how they can undo maladaptive patterns to function better at work and enjoy life more.
FAQ