Life Coaching is Stupid.
Which is not to say that life coaches are stupid. Life coaching is a beautiful calling which generally appeals to beautiful people. Not to mention life coaches come in all shapes and styles and old school apprenticeship is one of the best ways to learn. Experts are wonderful treasures of humanity.
What’s so stupid about life coaching is that it’s a feeble solution to a malicious problem – the fact that humans don’t know how to operate themselves. First and foremost this is the failure of our hallowed institutions – school systems and educational policies, psychiatric models and medical systems – to pass along the fundamental tools that people need to operate themselves effectively.
There is no other species in which this is true! Can you imagine a hyena teaching another hyena how to “be a hyena”? (Let alone doing it wrong.) No! Because that’s insane.
Thought you were going to enjoy all humans? Wrong. “Here’s a confederate flag diaper.” “Also, gay people are going to hell, yelling is how to get what you want, and never compromise.” Have fun!
But humans are always trying to teach other humans how to be human better. And with good cause. Yes, if we get fleas we can get rid of them. But when we get bad beliefs it’s like people think they’re stuck with them forever. That’s ridiculous. Unless you don’t realize that it’s ridiculous. Then it’s just true. And that’s unfortunate.
Is it that hard of a concept to swallow that – since we’re products of our environments – we should optimize our environments to make us more intelligent? To make us funnier, healthier, more satisfied people? To ensure that we know how to update our programming to suit our personal desires when the time comes? Or at least not to retard our massive intelligence as children?
Here’s the thing – our nervous systems expect good input. So we accept any ol’ input we get. And since most of our deep formative learning is done while we’re children – and for a lot of us, a lot of it is bad – we don’t even know we were corrupted. It’s like arriving on the planet and the first thing someone does is give you a wedgie and downgrade your brain capacity.
Thought you were going to enjoy all humans? Wrong. “Here’s a confederate flag diaper.” “Also, gay people are going to hell, yelling is how to get what you want, and never compromise.” Have fun!
So here we are – hundreds of millions of us – and we’re idiots and we don’t even know it, because most of us are idiots. So we don’t know what it looks like to be high functioning. Meanwhile those people who are high functioning are looking at the rest of us like we’re in a zoo, feeling sad for their barely domesticated primate brethren who are having so much trouble just enjoying their first world problems.
So there are people who are amazing; They’ve found their own way through the terrible carnival of our culture and they’ve stabilized themselves. And they are magnificent for it. They have their own systems that work wonderfully to get them whatever it is that they want in their lives. They’re satisfied, happy and effective. But why not learn from these people so this type of life becomes the rule rather than the exception. Why not have established traditions that enable faster, better, more integral sharing of behaviors?
It’s time to put self operation (and the power and integrity that comes with that) at the forefront of our cultural attention.
The idea that you need coaching to be a human is ridiculous. And it’s not ridiculous because we don’t need help – it’s ridiculous because we need so much more than help. We need more than a hobby for hippies. Something fashionable for self help aficionados. We need some core experiences and understandings at the center of our developing lives that teach us that we’re born perfect and then how we can master each of the dimensions of our awareness. And we need contexts that force us to be the best version of ourselves.
So when (themselves broken) Self Help coaches come peddling a repackaged version of Buddhism or Gurdjieff or the Yoga Sutras each year, it’s a disservice to humanity because it further divides us. It teaches everyone a separate system (which makes it hard to collaborate and learn from each other) and reinforces the idea that being good at being human is somehow specialized knowledge.
So it’s really the dis-unity of the life coaching ecosystem that irks me. It’s time to collaborate. It’s time to put self operation (and the power and integrity that comes with that) at the forefront of our cultural attention. It’s time to lift life coaches up out of their own self centered world so that they can work together in creating a system that is constantly improving – a combination of performance technology meets science meets computer software.
It’s time for a new collaborative paradigm. A time in which life coaches and anyone else that wants to be in the people-helping game begin working together to create some beautiful and effective standards. To test and falsify. To find out what works and what belongs in the past. And, since you’re reading this on this blog I’m sure you know, what this means to me is that it’s time for the Human Operating System.
