Leigh finally came up with a discovery, whose sharp insight accompanied her professional career ever since: “we as women get to create ourselves”. As a self-image coach, Leigh coaches how to create a female self-image that brings more status and money, simply by “elevating” three fundamental pillars of female identity—“mindset, style, and surroundings” (Castillo, 2022c).
The rise of life coaching into a multi-billion-dollar industry and mass phenomenon, as a potential profession and therapy technique, follows the decades-long impetus of “psychologizing” social, political, and economic problems, a rationality first appearing in Western societies and then spreading and adapting throughout the globe (Nehring et al., 2020: 4). Psychologization means simply to “make something psychological”, a discursive maneuver which involves the reduction of “moral, political, or social categories” to a “question of psychology” (Nehring et al., 2020: 4). While traditionally the question of psychology was encountered by a certified expert, such as an academically trained psychologist, a psychoanalyst, or a psychiatrist, life coaches rely on a version of therapeutic credibility that is very loosely regulated, if not occurring in a legislative vacuum (Aboujaoude, 2020: 3). The rise of platforms deepens the deregulation of the industry as it ofers unparalleled promotional, educational, and networking opportunities to aspiring and professional life coaches; coaches can embody their inspirational personas in a variety of formats, including in videos, podcasts, seminars, photos, and personal accounts. In this expanded terrain of struggle for institutional recognition, the capitalization of a previous feeling, most preferably referring to unease and sufering (and their overcoming), such as dificulty in getting out of bed, a painful break-up, or troubled self-image are key in proving the credentials of expertise.
In this chapter, I look at the online manifestations of life coaching as a professional practice and general inspirational difusion pervading platform societies. I am interested in how the coaches curate themselves in social media accounts, seminars, and other performances of the self as well as on the social constructions they advocate when they curate others. The coach needs to live a stimulating life that inspires and thus guides by example and, as such, there is a constitutive link between self-curation and curating others: to guide others one needs to first showcase a convincingly inspiring life story. Inspiration, of course, as a tool for raising publicity, is not just specific to life coaches but is employed by various actors, including politicians, celebrities, and everyday users. As internet fame appears to have become “increasingly accessible and practiced by or bestowed upon ordinary people from all walks of life” (Abidin, 2018: xiv), everyone with a social media account is interpellated as a potentially inspirational actor. It is in the practice of a life coach that the inspirational ethos finds its full purpose, as the successful management of inspiration and the generation of what we can call “inspirational capital” can be significant gateways for self-gurufication.
In the scholarly literature, the figure of the life coach rests on the terrain of the “therapeutic” (Nehring et al., 2020: 6), an umbrella term that consists of the modern disciplines purporting to “saving the self” (Illouz, 2008: 41), and histories ranging from Freud and self-help to psychoanalysis and popular psychology. The spread of psychology in particular consolidated the idea that “emotions were entities which should be managed and manipulated, that they needed to be expertly managed for healthy and authentic selfhood to be achieved” (Illouz, 2017: 15), which is a key discursive construction in therapeutic cultures. Accordingly, as Illouz argues elsewhere (2013: 45), any obstacle impeding the realization of a healthy and authentic selfhood and of reaching our full potential became a potential pathology to be confronted. Thus, from the 1960s onward, with the growth of the so-called humanistic psychology and figures like Abraham Maslow, the idea “that health and selfrealization is the same” and that people who had “unrealized lives where in the need of care and therapy” entered the lexicon of psychological discourse in the United States (Illouz, 2013: 45). For Maslow, for instance, the highest principle in the pursuit of emotional well-being is self-actualization and the unearthing of the inner potential of the self. The non-actualized and unfulfilled selves—the selves which are not reaching their full potential—are, according to this view, problematic if not outright sick. This concept enlarges the psychological pathologies in need of treatment; any obstacle to self-realization is a problem that drags us down the path of misery. A more recent instantiation of this discourse in the domain of psychology is positive psychology with figures like Martin Seligman who extend Maslow’s thought for eliminating any negativity that holds the soul hostage (Illouz, 2020). Coaching is a branch of the therapeutic; with its premises in the world of sports, it suggests that the self can reach its full potential in career, family, relationships, body, and all spheres pertaining to life with the proper and continuous training.
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Cultures of Platform Capitalism