The Curiosity Cure for Clinicians: Untangling People-Pleasing, Perfectionism, and Procrastination in Insecure Overachievers

Course overview

High-achieving clients are a frequently encountered pattern across clinical settings. Beneath the polished exterior of what this training calls the "insecure overachiever" often lies an overlapping cluster of people-pleasing, perfectionism, and procrastination: patterns that look contradictory on the surface but may be maintained by overlapping processes, including approval dependence, contingent self-worth, perfectionistic concerns, and avoidance of aversive emotion. Clinicians who treat these behaviors as separate symptoms or worse, as simple habits to fix often find themselves stuck, while clients cycle through insight without lasting change. This 3-hour training equips clinicians to see the fuller architecture of insecure overachievement: how it may develop, how people-pleasing, perfectionism, and procrastination can reinforce one another, and how to intervene at the level of maintaining processes rather than surface behavior. Participants will be introduced to the CURIOUS Framework, a clinician-developed conceptual tool informed by research on attachment, perfectionism, emotion regulation, and curiosity-oriented therapeutic exploration for helping high-achieving clients replace self-criticism with self-authorship, and will practice applying it through case conceptualization and live demonstration. Clinicians will leave with a working conceptual model, a set of clinical questions and interventions they can use in session immediately, and a clearer lens for distinguishing healthy striving from insecure overachievement in their caseloads.