Lifeless coaching

I was recently in the reception of the local leisure centre waiting for a kid’s swimming lesson to finish and started idly reading the public noticeboard to pass the time. There was a vast number of private adverts from individuals all offering the same sort of service, but I’m not sure what to call it. 

Maybe I should start by giving examples of what sort of problems these individuals solve for their clients. One poster proclaimed, “It’s time to ditch feeling overwhelmed, make space for yourself, be excited for the future, get your motivation and mojo back, and feel energised and active”. OK, sounds good, I thought. I turned to another, but reading it felt like being repeatedly poked in the chest by a bully at school: “Poor sleep? Lack of confidence? Disordered eating? Identity and self-esteem worries?” OK, ok, I thought. Give me a break.

There were promises of wonderful things. “I can help you survive and thrive” said one. “You will rediscover your identity in life”, said another. “Do YOU want a wider, open and more confident perspective in the future?” asked a third. 

How do they pull off such dramatic achievements? I asked myself. “I use a combination of fitness training, hypnotherapy and mindfulness to help you embrace transformation and live life with a renewed vitality” said one. The next said “As a life coach and personal trainer I help people maximise their potential, developing their ability to find the best way forward both physically and mentally”. The next pleaded at me, “Let me give you the energy to live your best life!”. 

Until then I didn’t know what life coaching is. I’ve since found out a life coach is a “wellness professional who helps people make progress in their lives in order to attain greater fulfilment”. As something which initially grew in popularity here in the 2000s, it has become a significantly sized cottage industry. The Life Coach Directory has over 2000 coaches listed — offering a dizzying array of grinning faces caught in professional head shots and promising a world of transformation and self-optimisation. 

I was curious and went on to the directory to take a look. There was a drop down menu for an inquirer to choose what they need coaching with. It goes through the alphabet from A (ADHD, Anxiety), B (Burnout), C (Couples Coaching, Creativity) all the way to W (Work-Life balance, Wellness). Maybe I was just a bit knackered that morning, but I clicked under E, on “Energy”. 

There were hundreds of people pledging to give me Energy, for a fee. “I will increase your energy, your self-worth AND your net worth”, said a woman based in Walton-on-Thames. “I energise you by creating a warm and gentle environment” said a creepy-looking man based in Surbiton. “Together, we will find clarity, joy and boost your energy” claimed a young lady with a Battersea postcode. 

I’m all in favour of people doing what they need to do in order to survive or thrive or be their best selves or boost their joy or whatever. I just find myself wondering why it is that this cottage industry has exploded in recent years, and what this tells us about the culture we’re living in. Why is it that thousands of people are making an income from addressing problems like “Energy” (or the lack thereof) and many more are paying good money to receive things like “Energy” from them?  

In the first place, these people seem to inhabit a hinterland between psychotherapy/psychiatry and personal training. The concept of “life coaching” would not have made much sense a few decades ago, because mental health was understood in terms of addressing specific pathologies like hearing voices or feeling suicidal. 

We live in the wake of the psychiatrist R. D. Laing’s push toward a “spectrum of mental health” which we are said all to inhabit. Now everyone has the job of trying to maximise their mental health (sorry, “wellbeing”), not only those who have specific and identifiably abnormal mental experiences. You can’t go to a psychiatrist and say you’re having problems with “Energy”. Hence you must seek a maniacally grinning wellness professional in Surrey to sort you out.

Secondly, there’s a telling interplay between the mental and the physical with many of these coaches. Coaching has clearly developed in tandem with the normalisation of personal training, and it seems many personal trainers have found themselves offering “holistic wellness services” along with getting people to do star-jumps and push-ups. One of those posters in the leisure centre was from someone who combined the roles of “Life coach and paddleboard instructor” in one integrated path along which you can paddle your way to a mindblowing climax of best-self reveal. 

Whatever wellness and wellbeing are, and however closely linked to the physical realm they are, they are not purely physical — and this means they may well be impervious to being “trained” or “coached” at all. Undertaking physical exercise is very different from undertaking to feel “well”. The first has clear, achievable, and measurable goals. The second is notoriously murky, unending, and impossible to quantify with lasting certainty. As Philip Rieff expressed it brilliantly, the only effective means of attaining wellbeing are those which grant “freedom from that single criterion”.

The reality is that you can’t ever be “winning at life”, because life isn’t a win-lose game at all

Lastly, there’s a sportification of everything at work here as well. With sport becoming by far the most popular and commonly viewed collective activity in recent decades, its norms now seep unseen into everything else. “Coaching”, a specific activity once only found in sport, is now a generic activity promising to enable people to flourish at life itself. The blokes who used to stand with a bucket and sponge on the side of the pitch are now proffering to unlock our hidden potential and bring psycho-spiritual realisation. 

The truth about feeling “well” is much more difficult for people to accept than all this, however. 

The reality is that you can’t ever be “winning at life”, because life isn’t a win-lose game at all. The reality is that you’re only “well” if you’ve long-since forgotten to ask yourself if you feel well. The reality is that gaining clarity, feeling encouraged, and having a sense of direction are things once provided organically via stable networks of association, without charge. Most unpalatably of all, perhaps, when Philip Rieff described what can bring relief from the “single criterion” of wellbeing — he said it can be found in one form of activity alone: religion.