Life Coaching–my beloved profession–is part of a larger trend of alienation in our culture. Every coach wants deeply to help others while making a right livelihood for themselves. But inadvertently, we in the healing professions accelerate the larger problems of meaninglessness, empty relationships, alienation, and the commodification of everything in our very attempts to solve these problems.
Coaches, therapists, and healers are activists for better living. We are the ones who will change the system based on a level of consciousness that is harming us all to a system that can truly represent the abundance of the universe.
But many of us are blind to collective problems because of our focus on individual responsibility. We also tend to buy into a naive view of business and marketing as unquestionably good when wrestling with the ethics of getting clients, and tend to present ourselves as 100% optimistic in order to keep up a facade of what a coach “should” be (with some notable exceptions).
The Problem of Meaninglessness
Our friendships are fairly meaningless in our society. We don’t really need any particular person for anything, so we generally become friends by sharing entertainment, by consuming together. Rarely do we create anything together–a meal, a song, a game–because someone else more talented and creative and specialized has already created something far better for our consumption. Rarely do we engage in meaningful conversation, except perhaps to comment on the news–the work of a specialist. It’s more efficient to consume someone else’s creation than to create our own. And increasingly, rarely do we break down in front of someone or lean on someone else for emotional needs–unless the person is a paid specialist.
Indeed, to deal with the sense of meaninglessness in our lives, many of us hire a Life Coach. Life Coaches are meaning-making specialists. We know how to reframe problems as opportunities, how to figure out your life purpose in 20 minutes, how to create a values hierarchy and set SMART goals–all of which leads to a more meaningful individual life.
Some of us even become Life Coaches to deal with a feeling of meaninglessness, finding that having meaningful conversations with others about purpose and passion fills a hole in our soul and is deeply nourishing. Or at least, this was a primary motivation for me.
The Outsourcing of Meaningful Conversation
Every time we purchase a created product, GDP goes up. Every time we make a song or paint a picture that is not for sale but just “art for art’s sake,” nothing whatsoever is added to GDP. GDP or Gross Domestic Product, is a measure of all the “goods” and “services” exchanged–or at least that’s what it is supposed to be. If something is given freely or created for it’s own sake, it doesn’t “count” and can’t be accounted for. Therefore, freely given things are not only bad for the economy–which must forever grow exponentially in order for interest-bearing currency to function–but also freely given things do not fit into the definitions of what is “good” or a “service”!
Similarly, every time we get “coached” by a friend or family member or even by our minister, GDP does not go up. This represents an untapped market for the economy, an area in which things could be made more efficient if performed by a specialist. This outsourcing of meaningful conversation robs our friendships, intimate relationships, and religious institutions of what little depth was left. We seek out coaches because of our sense of meaninglessness, but one very unfortunate side-effect is that our ordinary relationships become even more irrelevant as we no longer share as much of our direct human messiness with our friends and family.
Imagine this scenario: If I have a major life crisis on my hands, do I seek out my wife, my best friend, or my Life Coach to talk to first? My coach is the obvious choice, as he is well-trained and will listen to me without interrupting, providing just the right balance of reflection and challenge. Sure, I’ll share the details afterwords with my friends and family, but it’s just too messy to have a breakdown in front of them, and plus I don’t really trust them with this stuff, so I’ll do my process first and then share the sanitized version. That will be better for my personal brand too, as I will present an image of having it all together.
Of course, nobody would ever admit to that kind of reasoning. But just wait a few years. The economic pressure is enormous to outsource that which is inefficient–whether meaningful conversation or childcare–to a paid specialist.
Alienation causes the need for a Life Coach, which then adds to the alienation because we aren’t sharing our deepest challenges in a human and messy way with those people whom we are wanting to be closest.
Let’s dive a bit deeper…
Finding Meaning through Coaching
Coaching and therapy has largely arisen in response to the meaninglessness that people feel in our culture. People go to a coach because they have lost a sense of mission and purpose, a purpose that used to be a given before the modern age. It used to be that you were born into a profession, that a man knew how a man was supposed to behave, and that your place in the universe was clear. But those roles were confining, stultifying, and kept our hearts from truly singing. Life Coaches and therapists help clients to further break down any identification with socially-given roles so that they can individuate and follow their own bliss.
This bliss-following is wonderfully romantic, however when done independently of all others (it is after all my bliss not our bliss), the hero’s journey contributes even more to the feelings of emptiness, alienation, separateness, etc. of the modern condition. Only by sharing common values, goals, dreams, hopes, fears, and challenges do these feelings of alienation get alleviated.
Since the coaching context is individual-focused and not community or family focused, the sense of separation naturally increases as a result. One thing family therapists warn about is working with one partner in an intimate relationship and not the other can inadvertently break up a perfectly fine relationship due to the fact that one person now has more resources and sees the other as totally neurotic. Coaches rarely understand or acknowledge this view, as the paradigm of Life Coaching is highly individualistic. In fact, some personal development authors (I’m thinking of Steve Pavlina here) go as far as to state that if family and friends don’t align with your goals anymore, dump ‘em.
Dumping intimate relationships is a great recipe for feeling alone in a meaningless universe. Someone who feels alone in a meaningless universe is a great potential coaching client! Are you starting to see the vicious cycle here, or is it just me?
The Liquidation of Social and Spiritual Capital
When we used to have a problem in our lives, we would share it with friends, family, or our faith community (e.g. our minister). But now that God is dead (thank Nietzsche for pointing out that we killed him), few of us participate in church communities or find them of much relevance. Many of us find that we no longer live in the same town as our families and old friends, so we don’t feel the same kind of closeness (and some conversations just don’t feel right having over the phone). While these trends do not equally affect everyone, they are fairly pervasive, and everywhere increasing due to enormous economic pressures. Remember: if something is freely available, it does not contribute to GDP. Therefore, to increase economic growth, find something available for free, take it away from people, and charge them for it.
Unfortunately, Life Coaching and therapy of all kinds increases this trend. By turning healing into a specialized profession that one must have a degree or certification in, therapeutic conversation is being outsourced from our conversations with friends and family and confined to the narrow domain of coaching calls and therapy offices.
It used to be that everyone was a healer to some extent. In the Kalahari, the illiterate Bushmen gather to dance, sing, shake, and quake whenever they feel like it. Some Bushmen are more powerful in n/om than others, but everyone is understood to be swimming in n/om–the healing spirit of the universe–and everyone knows how to access this for self-healing.
It’s very important to note that no Life Coach wants to make our culture more alienating or take away any individual’s healing power! This is not certainly not the intention of any Life Coach I know–quite the opposite. Most coaches are engaged in coaching conversations with friends and family and even strangers for free and out of the generosity and enthusiasm of their hearts. Most coaches would work for free if they could because coaching itself is intrinsically rewarding, like creating art. It is not a personal issue–it is part of a much larger cultural and economic trend.
All coaches and therapists are attempting to help people to find more meaning and more creativity in their lives, thus working against alienation. But by creating a specialized profession (which our economy demands in order to survive), we are simultaneously fueling alienation by removing therapeutic conversation from our everyday relationships, sucking whatever emotion and depth is left from our friendships and families right out of them.
Why cry with your wife when she might get defensive? Your therapist will be unconditionally supportive and give helpful advice. And once you’ve cried with your therapist or got the support you need from your (relatively anonymous) coach, you won’t need to cry anyway. It’s less messy this way.
Furthermore, by pursuing our own individualistic goals, we contribute to the very problem that has created the sense of meaninglessness in the first place, which is a feeling of separation or disconnection. Our common values have disintegrated, and the anxiety of separation, instability, and meaninglessness is a natural response to this wound. No amount of personal goal achievement will ever make up for a lack of collective coherence.
By saving our intimate relationships from the messiness of life by outsourcing our problems to the coaching relationship, we further sanitize our interactions with our families, friends, lovers, partners, and co-workers. By becoming more integrated, more creative people, we become people who never struggle openly, who never publicly break down and cry, and who never need the support of friends and family because we’ve got it covered on Tuesdays at 1pm. Our personal brands are spotless charactatures, projections of our idealized selves.
Again, this is much more efficient than the old way. As any trained coach will be quick to tell you (including me), your friends are not trained listeners, nor are they 100% focused on you when you are talking, nor do they know a host of powerful techniques to help you make the changes you want. Therefore the healing benefits of a coaching or therapy session are much greater than simply a conversation with your friend, who’s continually interjecting his own experience and bad advice.
So What Can We Do About This? The Million Dollar Question
Honestly, I think that the convergence of crises we are facing which includes the alienation and meaninglessness of modernity are in need of a miracle. I believe that in our lifetimes–specifically in the next 4 to 35 years–either total collapse or radical evolution will occur, and that the best we can do is to surrender through despair to find a deeper hope for a world waiting to be born. I don’t know exactly what role each of us will play in this grand drama that is unfolding, but I do believe that if you listen deeply enough, your heart knows and can lead you there.
Here is an initial brainstorm on the subject to spark your imagination:
Create art with others. Play like you mean it. Participate in the creation of actual communities, not pay-by-the-month clubs controlled by you. Set a reasonable income goal and give pro bono sessions weekly. Structure your coaching or therapy to be more about facilitating self-help, so that the client goes home and does stuff, especially stuff that involves the sharing of vulnerability with intimate partners and friends. Inquire deeply into your motivations for personal development. Year-long coaching contracts are disempowering. Learn NLP and help people fast so that they get back to relating for free with people they will build authentic relationships with instead of renting-a-friend. Give up the addiction to achievement. Participate in activist movements. Instead of opening every conversation with your elevator pitch, open some with political news or literature that inspires you or something else non-commercial and could be a source of collective values. Learn about alternative currencies and accept payment for coaching sessions with them. Stop defending big business and corporate marketing and learn to differentiate small, locally owned business marketing from the 99% of marketing that is ruining our planet. Pray. Feel your own despair and transform it with surrender and compassion. Hope the apocalypse is kind to us….
Feel free to add your ideas for solutions in the comments.
Thanks,
~Duff