It’s time to burst the authentic-self coaching bubble
“I am only the person the greatest number of people think I am.”
David Bowie
Discovery calls. Intro sessions. Exploratories. Call them what you will, but the first interaction between a coach or consultant and their client is a moment of incredible significance. I often leave them with a really heightened sense of something or other … my imagination might be firing off in all directions, or I might feel that I desperately need a nap. I’m quite sure it’s just the same for all but the most guarded and hesitant clients. Once the initial sizing up is done, which can be momentary, there’s often a sudden release of pressure - in my mind’s eye (or ear), I hear it … pssssshhhhhhh - and then the work starts.
What’s revealed in the first few minutes very often - more often than not, actually - sets the scene for the programme ahead. As in Freytag’s pyramid of dramatic structure (remember that, fellow Shakespeare students?), the exposition introduces vital thematic and plot information to the audience, and ‘clues’ them into the world of the play and the rising action to follow. It’s a privilege for me to be there.
I left a recent exposition with a feeling of hollowness after my client had asked me to help her find what she called her ‘authentic self’. Actually, my first emotion was more like elation (“Ah”, my mind said. “I’ve been reading about this and can help”), but my default inner academic was soon pushed aside as she played out her experience of believing quite sincerely that she was without an authentic self. What I was left with was more visceral. What must it be like to be given the impression by her former coach that she lacked a self, or at least presented the wrong one? That she wasn’t being authentic? How must it feel to be told you’re missing something - like an unconscious limb or vital organ - that’s presented these days as being of such fundamental importance?
Type ‘authentic self’ into Google and you get 414 million hits. There’s Ted talk after Ted talk, hundreds of books and thousands of bullshit websites exalting strategies for finding your authentic self and being true to it. Atop it all, you get the following definition served up:
“It is who you are at your deepest core. It is about being true to yourself through your thoughts, words, and actions, and having these three areas match each other.”
The trouble is, there’s no such thing. It’s a chimera … a delusion; a fabrication of the mind; an unrealisable dream; Shangri-la-la Land. It’s a fantasy. And so the search for it is futile, and consumes a mass of energy that could be used more constructively to turn outward and face the world as we really are.
The only self you have is the one that is present right now, wherever you are in this moment. It is the culmination of all that has gone before for you, good and bad, some of which you will be aware of, but most of which you will not. It will just be there, swilling around, driving your behaviour. It will be different next time you think about it. And it is kaleidoscopic. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, you are large; you contain multitudes.
Our personalities are a dynamic accumulation of experiences from a constantly evolving social context. No matter how inflated or avoidant we are, we are destined to spend most of our lives navigating relationship; influencing and being influenced by those around us. Our mind is populated by figures from the past and present who have helped create the narratives that define us. Consciously or unconsciously, real or in mind, there is always another to whom we are telling our stories.
The idea that there’s a constant version of you at your ‘core’ is nonsense, as is the idea that you might attain some kind of ultimate and actionable knowledge of that singularity. In fact, the conviction that a single aspect of our identity is an ‘authentic’ and complete representation of our ‘true’ essence, and that we have full awareness of it, is more common in psychosis than in balanced states of mental wellbeing.
But still it compels, because it perfectly fits into the prevailing (and psychotic) western cultural narrative that our social and economic value is defined almost exclusively by our unique identity as individuals; a narrative that Christopher Lasch famously describes in The Culture of Narcissism as “therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.”
In this context, for Barrett again, the idea of the ‘authentic self’ “perfectly embodies the heroic entitlement that permeates every corner of popular psychology and social media. It is a wonderful thing to imagine that if we only look hard enough we will find that single truth that will define us forever and set us apart from everyone that we have known and will know. It is an archetypal promise of redemption and perfection.” (op cit)
And people will pay good money for redemption and perfection, so it’s not tricky to find a coach who will sell it to you.
Less cynically, it’s also quite a natural focus for a coach who locates their work within what Simon Western identifies as the ‘Soul Guide’ coaching discourse (Western 2012), where the focus of their attention is the client’s inner self, and their aim is to heal it. As I wrote here in the Chartered College of Teaching’s journal Impact in 2021, the discourse:
“… was forged in the era of individualism that dominated Western cultures in the second half of the 20th century, and which encouraged us to view the self as a ‘project’ and life as something to be ‘lived subjectively’ through experience. This shift also influenced the concept of leadership and, during the 1960s, the predominant discourse shifted from that of leader as ‘controller’ (with a focus on efficiency, productivity and ‘human resources’) to leader as ‘therapist’. […] These therapist leaders required therapist coaches and so, drawing on the traditions of counselling and, more recently, the happiness and positive psychology movements, coaching has been commissioned as a way of either repairing an individual’s ‘wounded self’ or realising the potential of the ‘celebrated self’.”
So, back to my client; that beautiful kaleidoscope of multitudes, impermanence and potential that I had with me in my coaching space, and yet who felt incomplete and was searching for a way to reduce herself down to something singular, permanent and binary.
Well, I’m sorry Mr Supervisor but there was a bit of teaching … I just couldn’t help myself!
Both of us worked through the Jungian concept of individuation, as presented with wonderful clarity by Barrett in chapter 3 of ‘A Jungian Approach to Coaching: the theory and practice of turning leaders into people’. We then went on to learn that her goal was perhaps not to reach a conclusion about who she was at her core, but rather to come to an understanding that a conclusion about that is unattainable. We found that the magic she sought was to be found in an awareness that her ‘self’ - her psyche - was dynamic, constantly renewing, and alive with emergent possibility, and to feel not just settled with that, but empowered. We looked for clues in her past that might show us what experiences and aspects of her ‘self’ were propelling her in certain directions now, and what aspects might be anchoring her in both useful and less useful ways. We looked at the rich array of people and relationships and books and delights and pains (etc) that had coalesced in her formation to date, and how she might have some (but not total) choice about where to get the next ones. We even began to explore whether the deep empty sadness she had felt at the thought of lacking an ‘authentic self’ - which had gotten into me too and which provided the wash for the painting that was to emerge - reflected some earlier experience, or was mirrored in other aspects of her professional life, or was just a response to external pressures she could now name and manage. Or all three.
But her programme ended with that enquiry only half begun, and she left to continue the journey of self-discovery on her own. Which feels about right.
“There is no such thing as a self, no absolute, permanent entity to be found in the element we call ‘body’. In our ignorance we believe that there is a permanent entity in us, and our pain and suffering manifest on the basis of that ignorance. […]
“Have you ever played with a kaleidoscope? Just a small movement is enough to make something miraculous appear. A tableau of colours and forms is presented to you, a manifestation. You keep this view for a few seconds, then you turn the kaleidoscope and another manifestation appears. Should we cry every time one of these manifestations comes to an end? A flower manifests, then disappears, then manifests, then disappears - thousands upon thousands of times. If you look deeply at things, you will see this reality. We manifest, then disappear. […]
“Impermanence and selflessness are not negative aspects of life, but the very foundations on which life is built. Impermanence is the constant transformation of things. Without impermanence, there can be no life. Selflessness is the interdependent nature of all things. Without interdependence, nothing could exist.”
Thích Nhất Hạnh