Coaching for Conformity: How Coaches Reinforce Societal Norms

One of the most common challenges in coaching is resisting the temptation to tell your clients what to do. Instead, coaches are trained to support their clients by helping them discover for themselves the right answers and approaches to their situations. A closer look at coaching, however, reveals that it isn’t as straightforward as it seems. In this post, I will apply the classic sociological concept of feeling rules to the practice of coaching, showing how coaches, despite their best efforts, are often helping their clients conform. I will also look at how this is a consequence of clients’ asking for guidance to help manage emotional insecurity. 

As Greco and Stenner (2007) argue, we now live in a time where emotions can be intentionally managed, allowing us to make choices about how and what we are supposed to feel. This both frees and constrains us, as once we have the ability to make choices, we are then judged by our ability to make these decisions. And in making these decisions, we have to be careful to abide by the constraints of the unwritten rules of behaviour that surround us. 

You may not have heard of sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild by name before, but you likely know one of her signature theories–the idea of emotional labour, which she elaborated in her groundbreaking book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983). Hochschild sees emotional labor as the effort required to bridge the gap between internal feelings and the external emotions we are expected to project. The classic example of this is the effort required of flight attendants to act politely and cheerfully, regardless of how rude or unpleasant passengers may be. Hochschild refers to the norms dictating what we’re supposed to feel in a given context as feeling rules. For example, you’re supposed to be happy on your wedding day and sad at funerals, and if you don’t feel those things, you must work to act as if you do. Using examples like these, Hochschild shows how aspects of our emotional reactions to these events are mandated by a social understanding of what the ‘right’ way to feel is (including when, where, and how deeply to feel). 

This dynamic becomes particularly relevant in coaching, where feeling rules are often implicitly and explicitly communicated by coaches to their clients. I know that many of my coach colleagues and friends will bridle at this, but perhaps one of our most important functions, especially for coaches who work with executives, is to help guide and inform them about what they are supposed to feel, and how they are supposed to act, in complex or ambiguous situations. By helping clients navigate workplace challenges, we translate both the relevant feeling rules and how to align with these rules. Even if we leave the choice of whether to conform or not to our clients, we are teaching them how the systems they operate within work, in effect acting as what Hochschild called external rule reminders. 

We also often help our clients develop internal rule reminder structures. By working with clients to understand and identify their emotional reactions to certain situations, and helping them discover tools to manage those reactions, we reinforce their conformity to a pre-established set of rules. Here we are assisting clients with the process of evaluative reflection–guiding them to reflect on what matters most, and how they can use that realization to make intentional choices around which emotional signals to pay more or less attention to. In doing so, we are serving as a tool in what Norbert Elias (1982) called the civilizing process. Elias’s concept of social constraints creating self-constraints is paralleled in the process of coaching, In coaching, clients are helped in the regulation of their emotions and behaviors by our translation of organizational norms. Coaches here serve as guides in a process of internalization of the feeling rules. In this way, coaching can be seen as enforcers of what Hochschild calls the commercialization of emotion. Just as flight attendants perform emotional labour to align with workplace norms, coaching clients are taught to manage their emotions to align with what is expected of them professionally. Again, even if we are being good coaches and not making choices for our clients, by setting out the rules of the game for them, we are helping to reinforce their conformity to those rules.

Particularly fascinating in this context is that coaching clients are usually actively seeking out this guidance on what to feel and how to act. Although this is not a new phenomenon (people have looked to religious texts and leaders for this sort of guidance throughout history), in our late-modern societies, the source of this guidance has shifted. This idea aligns with Valérie De Courville Nicol’s exploration of emotional insecurity in late-modern society. In her recent work, Anxiety in Middle-Class America: Sociology of Emotional Insecurity in Late Modernity (2022a,b), De Courville Nicol looks at the rise of the self-help book industry as a response to a need to understand what we should be feeling and doing. Not only are there interesting parallels between the rise of self-help books and coaching in terms of the timeline (both saw a real acceleration of uptake from the 1970s onward) but they both respond to a need to understand the shifting landscape of what are the right and wrong ways to feel. De Courville Nicol examines how self-help books have proliferated as tools to guide individuals through emotional insecurity. Coaching builds on this trend by providing personalized guidance in navigating and adhering to emotional norms. As De Courville Nicol explains, the rise of self-help culture–and, I would argue, coaching–reflects a shift in late-modern societies. Traditional sources of emotional guidance, such as religion or community, have declined. In this vacuum, coaching fills the role by offering individuals the tools to understand and navigate emotional insecurity in the workplace. Borrowing De Courville Nicol’s typology, coaches are often asked to help their clients work through the social-emotional pain that comes from misalignment, with a focus on helping their clients to understand the underlying codes or feeling rules so that they can better align with these (or intentionally transgress them, which also serves to alleviate the pain to a degree). 

Given this understanding of coaching as a tool of conformity, what does it mean for coaches? Most importantly, coaches should be aware of and watch out for this potential role. Coaches should encourage their clients to identify the feeling rules that they must operate within at work, and empower them to decide how they want to respond to them. Discussing the concept of feeling rules with clients can also be useful, equipping them with a vocabulary to better navigate the challenge of aligning emotions with expectations. Lastly, by considering coaching alongside self-help books as tools for emotional navigation, we can assist our clients in better understanding why they are seeking our help and how that quest fits into a broader shifting of societal norms.  

De Courville Nicol, V. (2022a). Self-help for emotional insecurity. In Anxiety in Middle-Class America: Sociology of Emotional Insecurity in Late Modernity (pp. 3–55). London and New York: Routledge. 

De Courville Nicol, V. (2022b). Performance anxiety. In Anxiety in Middle-Class America: Sociology of Emotional Insecurity in Late Modernity (pp. 248–293). London and New York: Routledge. 

Elias, N. (1982). The social constraint towards self-constraint. In The Civilizing Process: State Formation and Civilization (pp. 229–247). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Greco, M., & Stenner, P. (2008). Introduction: Emotion and social science. In M. Greco & P. Stenner (Eds.), Emotions: A Social Science Reader (pp. 1–21). London: Routledge.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). Feeling rules. In The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (pp. 56–75). Berkeley: University of California Press.