Abstract
In the global crisis of expertise, experts are often viewed with skepticism. This article zooms in to this crisis to analyze how life coaches seek professional legitimacy and verbally perform their expertise by navigating a tension between asserting their authority and cultivating their clients’ agency. Performances of expertise are a range of verbal practices and rhetorical strategies that are co-produced and shaped through interacting with clients. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at three life coaching training schools in Israel, I show that life coaches perform their expertise through the following strategies: (1) defining the problem that coaching addresses as simple, significant, and mendable; (2) using authoritative charismatic speech to define clients as powerful, independent agents who are their own life experts; and (3) creating reflexive experiences of self-revelation by using semi-intelligible jargon. Finally, the study advances the understanding of expertise as performances inextricable from clients’ sense of agency.
Introduction
Public debates on climate change, fake versus real news, and the efficacy of vaccinations demonstrate the global crisis of expertise (Eyal, 2019). Experts are viewed with great skepticism, making the establishment of professional legitimacy challenging. In order to unravel how the work of experts shapes and is shaped by this crisis, this study pays close attention to nuanced verbal enactments (Carr, 2010) and micro-strategies of expertise (Corsby and Jones, 2020). It views performances of expertise as a range of verbal practices (Carr and Smith, 2014) and rhetorical strategies (Riaz et al., 2016) that are co-produced (Eyal, 2013) and shaped while interacting with clients (Bourgoin and Harvey, 2018; Treem, 2012). Using ethnographic fieldwork that enables the provision of a detailed account of performances of expertise, this article examines life coaching experts to argue that expertise are performances inextricable from clients’ sense of agency. It shows how coaches perform their expertise through three rhetorical strategies: (1) defining problems as natural, simple, significant, and mendable; (2) using authoritative, charismatic speech to define coaching clients as powerful and independent agents; and (3) creating reflexive experiences of self-revelation by using semi-intelligible jargon.
The International Coach Federation (ICF) defines life coaching as: ‘partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential’. Life coaches, therefore, can coach clients who wish to pursue a new career, improve parenting skills, find a spouse, and so on (cf. George, 2013b; Mäkinen, 2014; Pagis, 2016). This nearly unlimited professional mandate blended with the use of vague concepts – like ‘maximizing one’s potential’ – render the understanding of what coaches do and what their unique expertise is especially elusive.
This vagueness also has to do with the emergence of life coaching from sports. Established in the US in the early 1990s, life coaching was inspired by professional sports, where a coach leads athletes to improve their performance. Life coaches help their clients improve aspects of themselves that they wish to alter. Both sports and life coaches involve professional practices with high levels of ambiguity about what their work actually entails (Corsby and Jones, 2020). Despite the vast differences in the social and organizational contexts of sports and life coaching, both include a tense negotiation of their professional authority with different actors in their fields such as trainees and colleagues. Coaches use a variety of rhetorical strategies to assert their expertise; for example, Edwards and Jones (2018) reveal how humor serves as a micro-strategy in sports coaching. Contributing to the literature on verbal enactments of expertise in general and in coaching in particular, this article suggests three rhetorical strategies for performing expertise, ‘doing’ the work of coaching, seeking to expand our understanding of fraught negotiations between coaches and their trainees.
Finally, this article situates life coaching as a technology of self-improvement and part of the flourishing self-help market (cf. McGee, 2005), feeding on the popular neoliberal discourse of self-realization and fulfillment (Illouz, 2008), and on neoliberal agency (Gershon, 2011). The ideal neoliberal self manifests as a glorification of market rationality metaphors – it is profit-driven, calculative, efficient, and an autonomous entrepreneur while neoliberal agency demands a heightened sense of reflexivity in order to successfully manage oneself as a business composed of resources/skills (Gershon, 2011).
Methods and data analysis
This article is based on multi-sited ethnography in the Israeli 1 industry of life coaching conducted between 2010 and 2012. In the tradition of interpretive anthropology, I have created thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) of the occurrences I observed and participated in while incorporating multiple points of view.
The analytical process was based on a qualitative constructivist approach (Charmaz, 2000; Guba and Lincoln, 1998) and included the following steps. First, field notes and interview transcriptions were uploaded to Atlas.ti. Second, the entire corpus was read while marking sections, words, and dialogues and creating initial emic codes. One code was ‘goals’ and another was ‘dreams and fantasies’. After the first reading, I explored the list of initial codes to reorganize them, while also exploring how different codes related. During the second read, I refined the codes, added new codes, and created subcategories for some of the larger codes. Next, I read the data using the codes, created outputs for each code, and read all data associated with it. These multiple readings allowed for new meanings and connections between different events and narratives to emerge. I then created a map that divided the codes into meta-thematic categories that captured how the codes were linked. After this process, these emic codes and categories were paired with etic concepts to generate a specific theory that would explain the findings. Nevertheless, as in qualitative constructivist research the analysis continued throughout the writing process, through reading literature, going back to the raw data, and in ongoing conversations with colleagues.
In this article, I included codes that contained various types of explanations coaches made about what coaching means, what makes a good coach, and the examples they used to demonstrate the boundaries of coaching. These explanations are coaches’ discourse about their expertise. In addition, the data also include coaches’ performance of their expertise in practice, through coaching their trainees. Combining these complementing aspects yielded three central rhetorical strategies.
Training to become a life coach involves undergoing extensive coaching similar to therapeutic professions (e.g. Miller and Rose, 2008). Therefore, I focus on the process of professional coaching training as it reveals coaches’ enactments of expertise in the dual process of coaching and training coaching students. I conducted participant observations at three training programs at three different coaching schools for a period of 7–11 months each. The training programs included the following activities: attending a weekly class of 3–5 hours, answering self-reflexive questions and reading texts before class, being coached in and outside of class, coaching trainees under supervision, attending workshops, and paying a tuition fee of about 11,000 ILS. In addition, I attended six coaching professional conferences and documented the production process of a coaching radio show. The data collected in classes, workshops, and conferences were typed or handwritten by the author and supplemented by transcribed recordings of six formal interviews.
Every training program had one lead coach and two to three supporting coaches who instructed some of the classes and engaged with the trainees’ personal coaching processes. The coaches I observed had been practicing coaching for several years. Two men and one woman were lead coaches, and three women and two men were supporting coaches; they were middle-class Jews who were married and had children. Each program had 15–23 participants, mostly Israeli-Jews and some Israeli Palestinians, in their forties or fifties. Women made up 70% of the trainees. Most participants belonged to the lower-middle to middle class.
Like most of the participants in this study, I am a middle-class Jewish Israeli woman who had little experience with coaching prior to entering the field. Yet I did stand out due to my young age and familial status; I was in my late twenties, newly married, and had no children while most participants were parents. In one class, some participants fondly called me ‘the kid’. I believe that this position helped participants see me in a less threatening light and accept my inquiries as expressions of curiosity. I participated in all class activities and assignments: I was coached in and out of class, I coached other students, and filled out reflexive reports. I am certain that my participation contributed to the building of close relationships and trust with my interlocutors. Finally, all participants knew about the research and expressed their consent to participating in it.
The coaching students gave various answers when their coaches asked them why they joined the class: in order to lead and help others, to better oneself, to build one’s self-confidence, to change careers, or to become a coach. David, 2 a senior coach, told his class that most students seek coaching at a turning point in their lives. Thus, students normally sign-up for coaching training for many reasons, and becoming a coach is only one of them. Although many students play with the idea of pursuing a coaching career, the majority do not practice coaching professionally once the course is over. Therefore, I consider coaching training courses to be mainly a platform for self-transformation utilized by students for self-expression and exploration. Yet, in coaches’ perspectives – the focus of this article – training others to become life coaches is a central site for establishing themselves as experts.
Seeking professional legitimacy
Emerging professions face a shared challenge: legitimacy. In the context of emerging professions, legitimacy is achieved when the work and the product becomes publicly known and culturally accepted as valuable (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994; Sherman, 2010). Professionals use various rhetorical strategies to gain legitimacy; some create a link between the new profession and established occupations. For example, lactation consultants suggest that they fill in a gap in the current medical knowledge of biomedicine (Eden, 2017). Other professions assert uniqueness and legitimacy by stressing ethical values, such as service designers (Fayard et al., 2017). A third rhetorical strategy focuses on the new service or the product itself, rather than the professional providing it, suggesting that the new service addresses new needs, such as personal concierges who market their service as saving time for busy people (Sherman, 2010). Therefore, in order to justify and legitimize their occupations, new professionals employ an array of rhetorical strategies ranging from aligning themselves with institutionalized professions, focusing on the blind spots of competing professions, or addressing new needs following social change (Kilroy-Marac, 2016; Lane, 2015).
The literature on rhetorical strategies of seeking professional legitimacy does not address how asserting expertise shapes professional practice, or how these new professionals assert their expertise (but see Bourgoin and Harvey, 2018; Carr, 2010; Carr and Smith, 2014). In an extensive review, anthropologist Summerson Carr (2010) argues for the study of expertise as verbal enactments rather than something an expert intrinsically possesses. Carr divides the semiotics of expertise into four constitutive cultural processes: (1) socialization practices or training; (2) evaluation, validation, and authentication of expertise; (3) institutionalization and gaining authority over of certain ways of seeing and speaking; and (4) naturalization of expert knowledge and actions. At each process, Carr demonstrates how expertise requires mastery of verbal performance and an ability to use a certain register, tone of voice, and language to index existing states of knowledge (Carr, 2010).
For example, therapists studied by Carr and Smith (2014) were trained to use pauses in their speech to create a sense of thoughtfulness, careful listening, and hesitation. After these performances of uncertainty and thoughtfulness, therapists asserted their own professional reflections as a kind of an emergent guess. Carr and Smith claimed that these expressions of professional uncertainty serve as a conversational resource (rather than risk) since they produce a sense of caring and authenticity.
Expertise and the special case of lifestyle work
Lifestyle workers offer their clients guidance on how to improve their relationships, appearance, leisure time, career, and sense of self. Lifestyle work was quite common among the upper classes in premodern times; however, in contemporary society, there has been a resurgence of this line of work (George, 2013a), including life coaches (Mäkinen, 2014), personal organizers (Lane, 2015), personal concierge (Sherman, 2010), and event planners (Hochschild, 2012). Lifestyle workers vary in their educational and training backgrounds. Although many are college educated, they do not enjoy the social recognition of white-collar professionals, such as medical doctors or lawyers.
For lifestyle workers, their own life experiences and personal tastes are central resources for their work (George, 2013a). Therefore, image consultants are expected to physically display their professional skills as much as life coaches are expected to perform success and happiness. In that sense, I suggest lifestyle workers’ enactments of expertise are especially revealing since, given the lack of institutional support, their source of legitimacy greatly depends on their own performance.
Also, lifestyle work includes as element of ‘emotional labor’, or the management and regulation of feelings as part of their work (Hochschild, 2012). For example, in her book Outsourced Self, Arlie Hochschild (2012) depicts the growing phenomenon of middle-class Americans who hire new experts in various domains of the self, such as a dating coach or children’s birthday planner. Hochschild compares this outsourcing to the historical presence of what she calls the ‘village’ in day-to-day life. This new ‘village’ creates a paradox since the new identity of this outsourced self is imagined as individualistic and free from the ‘old village’, or the impact of others.
Michal Pagis (2016) analyzed this paradox in her writing about life coaching clients who felt a neoliberal desire to accomplish things on their own and the need for help. Pagis found three major mechanisms that life coaches utilized to reconcile this paradox: crafting a separate space for the creation of a new identity, deemphasizing the role of the coach, and encouraging clients to root their new identities in their social worlds. In this article, I further develop the implications of de-emphasizing the role of the coach on the formation of expertise and complement the gap in previous studies by focusing on the experts’ performative practices in their effort to gain legitimacy.
Three rhetorical strategies for asserting expertise and claiming professional legitimacy
Defining the problem that coaching solves
Life coaches work to establish their exclusive proficiency in ‘solving’ the gap between desires and the fulfillment of these desires by explaining that the gap is an issue of poor goal setting. They state many people do not understand the meaning of goals, fear failing, and allow others to dictate their goals. Therefore, they suggest that coaching enables individuals to set goals properly and to successfully achieve those goals. For example:
‘How many times have you heard the sentence “everything is possible?” Has this been proven? Did the world prove it already? [. . .] I found out that everything is possible – if a person wants to: fly – he can fly, free dive with no tanks and weights – it is possible; perform on the world’s biggest stage – it is possible. [. . .] Messi was told at the age of 13 that he cannot play soccer because of his bone illness but he said nothing is impossible. But here we need a little addition – I must not sell illusions like: ‘No problem’; ‘It’s easy!’; ‘Let’s do it!’ I must bring it to ground level [. . .]
Sometimes people are afraid of dreaming. [. . .] They do not know how to set goals so they turn to coaching.
We will take a big dream and break it into concrete goals. If my son wants to be Messi – that is great! Perfect! But let me give you some data. You need 10,000 hours of training. It does not matter what you want to be whether it is a composer, a computer programmer or an actor’.
Barry was a lead coach at a coaching training school I named Target. He was a Jewish man in his mid-thirties who had been working as a life and business coach for a decade. In this excerpt, he presented one of the fundamental principles of life coaching: everything is possible. He provided the class with examples of what ‘everything’ includes, namely, people who overcame illnesses or physical boundaries. His second example for ‘everything’ stressed the possibility of being experts in a variety of professional fields. For this type of ‘everything’, he mentioned the ‘10,000-hours rule’, a myth 3 according to which anyone could be a world-class professional if they practice for 10,000 hours. Other coaches I met during fieldwork followed the same notion – that everything is possible – and also provided stories about people who single-handedly became tycoons or cured themselves from various illnesses. Indeed, the most common illustration of ‘everything is possible’ was about becoming wealthy.
‘Everything is possible’ stresses the abilities of individuals and the effectiveness of their actions. Everything is possible means that boundaries – physical, social, or cultural – cannot stop one from achieving great things. According to this view, every person has unlimited agentic capacities; the resulting underlying assumption is that people should also have grandiose aspirations. Coaches spend a great deal of time and effort in delivering this message to their trainees. In their speeches, failing to have grand aspirations is depicted as people’s main challenge in life, and therefore, coaching helps trainees to overcome it.
In this dialogue, which occurred at the same meeting as the previous excerpt, Barry coached Sarit, a 35-year-old Jewish woman who marketed insurance policies. While helping her to properly define a goal, he used her answers to demonstrate the importance of setting grandiose objectives:
‘A realistic goal is achievable according to the perception of the trainee and that is derived from his previous experience. Sarit set a goal of [a monthly salary] of 15,000 ILS so if I do not meet these goals, I will not sleep, I will not see my kids, I will bust my ass over it, I will have ulcers and I will have 15,000 ILS. I will say pshshshsh because that was achievable according to Sarit’s experience.
This is not accurate because I did not set my goals, my boss did it.
When I talk about a goal in coaching, that is an ambitious process, there is a realistic goal and an ambitious one. [. . .]
Why do people refrain from setting goals?
Fear of failure and disappointment.
Absolutely. Who sets the goals for salespersons [. . .]? The boss, and if you did not meet them you are not worthy, that is the lowest bar for love. Then I come as a coach and say, ‘What are you dreaming of?’ ‘Talk to me about a dream’ and they find it difficult. At the end one of them says 30,000 [ILS per month]. So I ask: Can I write it down? [He answers] ‘No’. Why? ‘No’. Why?
Because it is a commitment.
Because they live in fear that if they don’t meet the goal of 30,000 they are worthless. Like when I was a kid, every time I got an A I was an amazing boy the whole town came to see the wonder. But if I got an F, I failed I am not an amazing boy whatsoever. If I do not meet my goals over and over again and think that goals define ME, that’s so narrow and unintelligent.
Wait, I have a question.
No, one second. That is a whole different conversation, way out of your boxes. When I talk with my trainees about ambitiousness, because I coach for achievements, I tell them ‘come and choose what you want’. They checked it in the U.S., what does every person that graduates from college want? A million dollars in the first year. What is the Israeli dream? [Said with contempt] a cottage, Mazda 2007 and 12,500 ILS? What kind of goal is that? Where does it lead? [. . .] How much do you want to earn so your life would be good?
That is not measurable.
It is always measurable.
I believe in rewards.
It is simple. Would you like to make 30,000?
Yes, a million as well.
Really?
Yes, that would be a dream, a bad dream because it has a price.
Okay, drop it, how much do you want?
35,000.
Sarit just made her breakthrough because she allowed herself to enter fantasyland’.
In this dialogue, coaching students were encouraged to fantasize about the best life they would like to live. These dreams were immediately spoken of in monetary terms and translated into monthly salaries, cars, and houses. This act of talking about dreams in economic terms is incredibly common as I witnessed in multiple, similar conversations throughout my fieldwork. These fantasies are effective apparatuses of neoliberal ideology as they ‘fill in where ideology leaves off, but it fills in in such a way as to support the ideological’ (Ormrod, 2014: 125).
This is not to say that coaches talk solely about money, but it is the most common example they use to teach and discuss the importance of dreaming and later, goal setting. Goal setting is a fundamental component of coaching; some schools incorporate the word ‘goals’ into their names. Coaches encourage their trainees to imagine an optimal future for themselves and then outline this dream through a measurable set of goals.
In his explanation of the importance of setting high enough goals, Barry recounted the reasons for which people normally set poor goals: they are unaware of the fact that everything is possible since they only rely on their own past achievements. In addition, they misunderstand the purpose of goals, and hence, they fear failing. According to Barry, people tend to think that their goals define their entire identity, and that evokes fear because failing to meet the goal would mean that they become failures. To address this fear, he suggested a narrative in which people take ownership of their goals. This narrative is spoken of as resistance to allowing others, such as parents or bosses, to dictate one’s goals by praising or expressing disappointment with one’s achievements. He phrased it this way: ‘I’ define the goal versus the goal defines ‘me’. Then, once people realize that they are the governor of their dreams, they will become liberated from potentially oppressing others as well as from the fear of failing. In other words, echoing many coaches I observed, Barry suggested turning one’s gaze inwards, to one’s great fantasies – with the assistance of a coach – to become free from oppressing individuals.
Neoliberal ideology conceptualizes subjects as free and autonomous agents who operate strategically and rationally in a free and enabling realm in order to maximize their profits (Bauman, 2000; Illouz, 2008). The dialogues above demonstrate how life coaches teach their trainees to become neoliberal agents by reaching their dreams. They use ‘everything is possible’ to create an obligation to set grandiose, measurable personal goals. In the context of asserting professional legitimacy and expertise, I suggest that this tie between coaching and neoliberal subjectivity and agency is effective in several ways. First, it assists coaches in gaining their trainees’ cooperation with the process of coaching. Second, it contributes to the naturalization of coaches’ professional knowledge as a mirror of the capitalistic reality, since ‘everything is possible’ is presented as a fact rather than an idea.
Defining coaching clients
I love myself; the most important thing is to love myself.
Yes, but it is not necessary to state that outwardly.
That’s arrogance.
It is important to say that. [. . .] there is nothing to be shy of. [. . .] And I work on that very hard! Fuck all! I will not tell myself ‘you are screwed up’, ‘you are an idiot’ anymore, I do not care! I discovered that if I spread love I get more – that is amazing!
In the process of teaching trainees to become free individuals, Barry, like other coaches I met, expressed charismatic power. Barry spoke intensely and assertively; he was loud and fast while expressing a wide array of emotions. For example, he spoke about the importance of self-love with exploding enthusiasm, cursing and stressing his awe; he showed anger toward oppressing bosses or parents who put conditions on their love or appreciation. He expressed empathetic caring with a culturally unique type of urgent concern (Kaneh-Shalit, 2017) to salespersons who fear failing as he compared their condition with an experience from his childhood. At the same time, he showed disappointment and ridiculed Israelis’ allegedly mediocre aspirations. In his fast-paced speech, he hardly allowed trainees to stop him for questions or comments; he even stopped Sarit from interrupting despite coaching her at that time.
I consider this combination of intense speech, which evoked a mix of emotions, as a charismatic performance (cf. Csordas, 1994; Lindholm, 1990) of a coach’s authority. This case demonstrates what I witnessed repeatedly throughout my fieldwork: many times coaches constituted their expertise via powerful charismatic performances. I explain elsewhere (Kaneh-Shalit, 2017) that life coaching includes considerably blunt expressions of power and authority focusing on the coaches’ displays of authenticity rather than the feelings of the trainees; this differs greatly from other therapeutic practices (e.g. Miller and Rose, 2008). Therefore, I suggest that the charismatic performances are an integral part of coaches’ verbal enactment of their expertise.
These charismatic performances and assertions of authority occur in the context of cultivating trainees as neoliberal agents with grand dreams and measurable goals that are accomplished single-handedly. To negotiate this tension between coaches’ charismatic power and trainees’ sense of agency, some coaching schools define trainees as ‘experts in their own lives’. Other schools define them as ‘possessing all the necessary knowledge in their magnificent unconscious for success’. A school I refer to as ProCoach follows the ICF definition: ‘Coaches honor the client as the expert in his or her life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful and whole’ (International Coach Federation, 2020). However, Israeli coaches rarely use the word ‘clients’; they prefer using the word ‘mita’mnim’ (literally, trainees). ‘Mita’mnim’ is a verb, as opposed to the noun ‘client’; it translates as ‘people who are training’. Thus, the term ‘trainees’ further stresses their active and ongoing role in their coaching as agents and as their own life experts.
David, a Jewish man in his late-sixties and the head coach at ProCoach, presented the above definition on the first meeting of training, and then asked the following question:
If he [the trainee] is an expert, why would he need a coach? This statement is didactic, the expert is the coach [. . .] this statement is a point of departure, the trainee is not always aware of his expertise, so we lead him to discover his expertise and realize it. Therefore, Alon Gal [a famous TV coach] does not coach because he tells [trainees] what to do.
David playfully used the term ‘expert’ to describe both the trainee and the coach. At the same time, he claimed that the coach is the expert who helps trainees discover their own expertise via coaching.
As David framed it, defining the trainee as an expert is an educational tool, and coaches are to teach trainees about their supposedly pre-existing expertise. The language David used here implies that trainees are sometimes unaware of their expertise and the process of coaching can unravel, as well as assist, in actualizing it. David also briefly mentioned a fundamental guideline in life coaching: coaches should beware of imposing their personal views, consulting and offering solutions to trainees’ problems. All the coaches I met throughout fieldwork subscribed to this ideal. They often used this rule to draw boundaries between professional life coaches and charlatans. Putting these definitions together, I consider the no-advising rule and the definition of clients as experts as manifestations of the same effort to establish trainees as neoliberal agents who are independent and free. Paradoxically, these rhetorical strategies are often practiced through powerful charismatic performances.
Enactments of expertise: equivocal jargon and the creation of reflexive experiences
A third rhetorical strategy that coaches utilize to establish professional legitimacy and authority is using equivocal jargon that is only partially intelligible, such as the words ‘client/trainee’ and ‘expert’. I suggest that they do so to manifest their knowledge superiority alongside promoting their clients’ reflexive experiences of self-revelation. Using the following dialogue, I unpack some of the qualities of trainees’ ‘expertise’ – which is in and of itself an example of coaches’ use of jargon – and show how coaches work to construct these qualities while constituting their own expertise.
ProCoach instructs its students and trainees to ask close family members and friends what they gain from their relationship with the trainee. Answers to this question are analyzed in order to determine the trainee’s ‘external value’ 4 – or as David framed it, what one ‘sells’ in his or her relationships. In this example, David coached Ravit in order to define her external value. Ravit was a 35-year-old Jewish woman who was a high-ranking manager at a government office, married, and the mother of two children. Ravit asked her spouse and friends and colleagues to tell her what they gained from their relationship with her. First, is her spouse’s response:
‘[I] gained a new perspective, developed an ability to understand situations differently from my own instinctive view. . . and developed emotional intelligence, [to] see shades of the spectrum I could not see before. [. . .]
In a nutshell improvement in emotional intelligence.
Why emotional?
That is what he said, improvement of his relationship skills, right?
Yes.
So this is emotional intelligence, I address it as a code. Now the question is what happens as a result of this improvement in emotional intelligence?
He said he sees more colors on the spectrum that he would not have seen had it not been for the relationship.
What does that enable him? Look at ‘broadening the spectrum’ as a means, what does he gain from that? What would he tell me?
[To] Succeed more; get more out of every situation and every relationship.
Nice. So he gains the ability to gain more out of every relationship he has. [. . .]
He succeeds in gaining more out of every relationship.
So this is it.
Even from his relationship with himself’.
This conversation continued as Ravit described her colleague’s response, which indicated Ravit granted her the ability to share things confidentially and receive empathy. David asked Ravit the same line of questions, ‘consider those things as a means, what would she gain from that’. Eventually Ravit said she granted her friend the ability to effectively handle difficulties.
Then David went on to refine the definition of her external value:
‘How would you define it? What do you actually sell? The main profit of people you engage with is that you help them . . .
I look at what I wrote – a positive perspective, insights . . .
The common thread is that as a result of what you provide people with, they better handle and gain more out of every situation.
Empowerment.
That is the input. Let us say you were empowered, now what would you do? What more would you successfully achieve?
It clears their energy; they can better channel their energy.
These are very general descriptions. Think of all of them, can I say they turn to you with some kind of problem?
Yes, they are facing some difficulty.
And at the end of the conversation they know what they should do and they sometimes do that?
Yes.
[To the class] Do you notice how difficult it is for her to connect to this? She does not see it in her head.
Because it is a generalization, I am not sure it is so, they do not necessarily . . .
Now you are nitpicking the process
Because sometimes I bring myself to problems, people do not always turn to me.
That is alright, that is the process. When we buy things, most of us are unaware of everything that the product provides us with [. . .]; there is a psychological dimension [. . .]
I was not sure that this is the right definition . . . I chose these people under the circumstances of time limitations and convenience. There were also people I did not want to share this with. . . so is this a representative sample? But I do connect with the final outcome.
You did not connect with the definition, it is a code word . . . so in your language, what would be the central external value?
One of my inner values 5 is excellence in the sense of getting the most out of me and [. . .] out of others too.
So you are saying you want to switch the word effectiveness with fulfillment?
Maybe . . . I want to get the maximum out of every situation, not necessarily out of people but from any given situation using minimum resources.
Oh . . . [To the class] Can you see how it is born? What would be the right phrase for you?
Excellence but not in the classic sense of it.
That is the external value’.
In this dialogue David led Ravit to define her external value. The process of extracting the external value from the text provided by family members and friends involves a performance of the coach’s expertise; however, the success of the coach’s interpretation is dependent on the trainees’ acceptance of the new narrative. Since coaches strive to stress their trainees’ sense of independence and agency, this process of suggestion is especially intricate. To put it differently, in coaching, trainees must become convinced that their coaches’ interpretation is accurate but also that it is minimal, that it is a mere reflection, rather than a creation, of their reality. The coaches work to persuade their trainees of their interpretation while prompting an experience of authentic self-revelation.
After Ravit described her spouse’s response, David summarized it as emotional intelligence. Ravit did not follow his thought process, but he explained it and she accepted. Then David asked a type of question that is central at ProCoach: ‘What does having X enable?’ David refers to this coaching method as result-oriented thinking, and he claimed it is inspired by the 1950s famous managerial theory established by Peter Drucker – Management by Objectives (MBO). ProCoach assumes that people always operate in order to achieve a certain outcome as demonstrated in the previous discussion about goals. However, here this idea was used in reverse. Indeed, ProCoach coaches frequently ask their trainees to consider outcomes as means to unravel hidden desires. In this case, David asked Ravit to answer this question for her spouse: what did he gain from the emotional intelligence that she inspires in him? Ravit answered that it allows him to gain more out of every relationship he has. David did not ask for further clarification and moved on to ask about other responses Ravit gathered for this exercise. After listening to each response, David asked the same type of question by saying, consider that having X were the means, what is the outcome?
Once all of the responses had been revealed, it was time to bring them all together and define Ravit’s external value. David asked Ravit to use her own words to describe what profit people gained from engaging with her. She answered that people got positive perspectives and insights. Yet this was not the right answer in David’s mind, as he replied and phrased her value as an ability to better handle and gain more out of every situation. From this point until the end the conversation, David worked to convince Ravit that this was indeed her value, despite her multiple challenges of his interpretation. He used several rhetorical tactics to assert his authority; one was to directly state his knowledge superiority by telling the classroom that he knows things that Ravit and other participants do not yet realize. He turned to the class and mentioned this explicitly: ‘she does not see it’ and ‘can you see how (an external value) is born?’
A second technique he used was to lead Ravit to agree with his interpretation through open-ended sentences, phrasing his assertions as statements she needed to fill in, and he went on until she finished them according to his vision. When Ravit gave other answers, he invalidated them as being too vague, and when Ravit was not convinced that the method provided reliable data, he voided her statement by calling it nitpicking. Finally, he asked Ravit to use her own words to describe her external value in order to ultimately authenticate his interpretation and validate his expertise.
This negotiation was even more nuanced than it may appear. Throughout the long discussion, a student in class asked David for clarification on some parts of this coaching conversation, so David asked Ravit to explain it for him and she did. David also used another question brought up by a participant, who was in close relationship with Ravit, to reframe her external value. Therefore, David continuously tried to bring her closer to his frame of mind by cultivating her cooperation in the coaching process.
I suggest that David asserted his professional authority, like many other coaches I observed, by using a professional jargon. Coaches redefine colloquial words, like values and outcomes, to create a partially intelligible professional language. Coaches also create new concepts, like ‘external value’, or ‘values profile’, which they define and use when coaching. A significant part of being coached is learning these familiar but newly meaningful, terms. In addition, coaches use these concepts to ask questions such as David kept asking, ‘If you consider this as means – what would be the final outcome?’ to generate and shape new knowledge about their trainees. Therefore, coaches spend a great deal of time teaching their trainees the coaching language, which asserts their own expert positions.
Finally, the coaching jargon is infused with capitalist ideas and metaphors. This conversation also reveals the cultivation of trainees as neoliberal agents through creating a specific type of reflexivity via the creation of their interpersonal capital or ‘external value’. Furthermore, by asking trainees’ friends and family members to talk about their relationships in terms of gains or profits, coaches reframe and redefine relationships via capitalistic lenses as contractual forms of transaction.
Coaches maintain that their role is to raise their trainees’ awareness of their ‘external value’ to help trainees make better use of their interpersonal capital so that they can realize their grandiose goals. The notion of having a set of skills and traits that needs to be revealed and self-managed in order to accumulate capital efficiently is key to the concept of neoliberal agency (Gershon, 2011, 2017; Urciuoli, 2008). Ravit’s personal external value is a fine realization of both material and immaterial profitability and efficiency orientation. Through her coaching, she discovered that her personal ‘value’ is to help people in getting and making the most of every situation. Ravit’s coaching unfolds how the notion of success and gaining capital shaped Ravit’s narrative about herself.
Conclusion
Liquid modernity is an individualized version of modernity haunted by a quest for freedom from the chains of the state, religions, ideologies, and authorities of all kinds and in which the burden of pattern-weaving and the responsibility for failure fall mainly on the shoulders of individuals (Bauman, 2000). Under the continually changing state of liquidity, expertise is deemed suspicious (Eyal, 2019). At the same time, performances of powerful personal charisma and bluntness hold legitimacy and popularity among new experts and public figures alike (e.g. Tony Robbins, the famous Israeli coach Alon Gal, etc.). I do not argue that charisma replaces, or will replace, expertise and expert knowledge. However, I maintain that in the study of expertise as verbal enactment, we should pay attention to this tension as it may signify a shift in the politics of knowledge and expertise.
Life coaches, like other lifestyle professionals and identity production experts, strive to establish their expertise and gain legitimacy. I showed that life coaches preform their expertise while cultivating their trainees’ sense of agency through three main rhetorical strategies: (1) defining problems as natural, simple, significant and mendable; (2) using authoritative charismatic speech to define coaching clients as powerful, independent agents; and (3) creating reflexive experiences of self-revelation for clients by using specialized jargon.
Taking Carr’s (2010) suggestion and examining expertise as verbal enactments that include a certain speech style and a particular language, I maintain that charismatic, enthusiastic, loud, and fast-paced speech is a key enactment of life coaches’ expertise. Interestingly, this enactment of expertise is strikingly different from other therapeutic practices (Carr and Smith, 2014; Miller and Rose, 2008). However, coaches’ performance of expertise is an array of verbal practices. Some practices rhetorically downplay the coach’s role, for instance, by using the definitions of the client as the expert and the ‘no advising rule’ that warns coaches about the risk of imposing their personal views. Also, the coaches’ claim that ‘everything is possible’ serves both to cultivate trainees as subjects with grand agentic capacities as well as to naturalize coaches’ expert knowledge wherein their professional vision is the sole reflection of reality. Furthermore, by stressing proper goal setting as a key feature for success, coaches perform expert knowledge generosity – they share their expert knowledge – as opposed to knowledge superiority (Eyal, 2013).
Life coaches use specialized professional jargon to constitute their expertise. Since they use colloquial words that they charge with new meanings, their use of jargon does not immediately stand out as a display of knowledge superiority. This jargon creates some level of confusion among trainees, which then creates a new type of conversation and a space for an experience of self-revelation. By being partially intelligible, coaches urge their trainees to think and speak – a practice that assists them in exposing and framing new information about their trainees. There are several manners in which coaches use professional language to produce this reframing: using open-ended sentences, turning to the classroom in framing the process, canceling trainees’ responses, and recruiting other members of trainees’ families and friends into the process of coaching. These rhetorical tactics contribute to the experience of self-revelation among trainees. This experience is necessary for the success of the coaching process; therefore, coaches rely on trainees’ acceptance of their experience as authentic, thereby co-producing their expertise and establishing professional legitimacy.
This article contributes to the literature on expertise as discursive (see Coen et al., 2020), communicative performances by projecting a light on how expertise is performed through language in a specific context. To establish their expert legitimacy, life coaches, like other lifestyle workers, skillfully negotiate their clients’ sense of agency. These negotiations are enactments of expertise. I propose that future studies of expertise as communicative verbal performances explores how other professionals and service providers manage the tension of constituting their expertise while cultivating their clients’ sense of agency, and how, in turn, these negotiations shape the work of experts.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks all the readers of this article who made helpful suggestions along the writing process: SRO reviewers and editor, Tamar Katriel, Amalia Sa’ar, Julia Lerner, Carry Lane, Dan Kotliar, Rafi Grosglik, Asaf Darr, Li Zhang, and Joseph Dumit.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.