Coaching is the Opiate of the Elite

You’ve likely heard the slogan “Meditation is the opiate of the masses.” This phrase suggests that modern mindfulness and self-care techniques function as tools to calm and pacify modern workers. In today’s increasingly complex and demanding workplaces, individuals are asked to adapt themselves to these challenges through mindful stress reduction and focus techniques, rather than addressing the structural changes needed to improve the underlying conditions creating the stress and distraction in the first place. 

In this post, I will expand on that idea, focusing on the use of coaching as a technology to further the subjectification of modern workers. Building on Nikolas Rose’s (1989a,b) concept of psy-technologies, I argue that coaching represents the latest manifestation of a psy-discipline, especially in the context of coaching for executives. In fact, I assert that coaching goes further than psychotherapy in its encouragement of self-management by individuals, as it does not include any claims of expertise on the part of the coaches. 

But before I discuss Rose, I want to borrow once again from the work of Valérie De Courville Nicol (2022b). In her work, De Courville Nicol traces the rise of new technologies that emerged to fill the void left by the decline of religion and the structural guidance that religion provided as to how to live and act. Coaching, like self-help books (the focus of De Courville Nicol’s analysis), is one of the cultural technologies that arose following this hollowing out of religious belief, especially in the Western world from the 1950s onward. In her chapter on performance anxiety, De Courville Nicol begins by charting the rise of a moral standard based on the responsibilisation of the self for performance and power. This leads to the rise of performance anxiety, the suffering that comes from having responsibility for your own betterment. This suffering is, by definition, suffering. And so we seek ways to alleviate it. Self-medication works in some cases, as does anger, as I will explore in a future post. But for most of us, brought up with a sense of responsibility for our own success, we dive into trying to find solutions, effectively using our need to solve our own problems to solve the fact that we need to solve our own problems. Coaching is one of the solutions that those with the money to afford it turn to. The promise of coaching is that by working with a coach you will “unlock your true potential” or “discover strengths you didn’t know you had.” These promises speak directly to performance anxiety, as they include personal responsibility, performance improvement, and an implied notion that in not doing so, you are somehow not living up to the expectations that society places upon you. 

Going back to Rose, in this way, coaches are working as political technologies of individuality, encouraging self-surveillance and performance optimization. Helping to build the entrepreneurial self which is focused on constant improvement, optimization, and self-management. As we have seen in other posts, on an individual level, coaches help their clients interpret and conform to feeling rules, manage their emotions, and navigate through the choices of working life. But looking at coaching more broadly, we can see it as a structural tool, serving to reinforce power imbalances by individualizing challenges that have their roots in more systemic systems of inequality and exploitation. Coaching even goes beyond psychotherapy in this process of subjectification, as in properly done coaching, the coach is not supposed to take on an expert role at all. As a structural tool, coaching is thus perhaps the most perfect psy-technology. What a well-trained coach is supposed to do is create an environment where the client is given the space to explore and solve their own problems. Psychologists have a framework or structure that they work with, be it Freudian, Jungian, or otherwise, and in using these frameworks they at least provide their patients with the comfort that the process they are going through is somehow certified or expert-led. Coaches have none of these. Coaching training teaches no patterns to look for or set pieces to draw from. In effect, the foundation of coaching training is learning how to ask questions and get out of the way, letting your clients come up with their own answers.  

Rose argues that modern individuals are obliged to be free, bound by a paradox in which freedom itself becomes a form of discipline. Coaching functions as one of the technologies that both reinforces the cage of responsibility and opens the door to self-improvement. We actively encourage our clients to reflect on their decisions and how they might have done things differently, and, by implication, better. Our clients are auto-critiquing themselves with our guidance, reinforcing the subjectivity that defines our modern age. Not only that, but the implicit goal in coaching, and especially executive coaching, is performance improvement. Following Rose, the ideology of coaching reinforces the exploitation of workers by implicitly including underlying normative values of independence, performance, success, and conformity in every session. 

Given this critique, what should coaches do? While it is useful and important to recognize that we play a role in a larger structural game, it is something else to try to change it. We must first start by recognizing our complicity in the system–we are supporting the responsibilization of the individual for their own self-curing. This critical perspective is notably absent from coaching forums and discussion groups. At the same time, on a day to day basis, coaches would rightfully claim to be actively helping the clients that they work with. Helping them to be more productive and happier, better leaders and managers. Perhaps the answer to this challenge lies in coaches being more transparent with their clients around the role of coaches in perpetuating a system that pushes the responsibility for improvement on to the individual. Armed with that knowledge, those clients can make more informed choices around how they want to exercise their freedom.  

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

Rose, N. (1989a). Introduction. In Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (pp. 1–11). London and New York: Routledge.

Rose, N. (1989b). Obliged to be free. In Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (pp. 217–231). London and New York: Routledge.