On Coaching vs. Culture Work

An exploration of the differences and distinctions between the online coaching industry and local cultural work.

It’s been a while since I’ve written here but more posts are coming over the coming months. I have over 200 drafts I’ve slowly been accumulating for the right time. We’ll start off with this one.

I’ve been a marketing coach since 2001 (full time since 2006). 

And since it’s been a while since I wrote, I suppose it’s proper that I start with all manner of gratitudes and blessings to you for finding your way here and, somehow, against the onslaughts of this modern world, staying on your feet and staying with us one more day.

And a poem is never a bad way to begin (especially when it has so much to say about the business at hand).

Names of the Ancestors

We are moving backward in the granary of our ancestors' names.

When we speak them, wheat fields harvested three thousand years ago

sway again in winds gone on to other galaxies.

Somewhere on that track are all the hands that met mine in the night

and the spoken love word hovering like a hummingbird at the lip of the abundant flower.

The wisdom of sleepers forms a tradition along the arc of generations,

anointing the slippery head of the newborn rising from the sea

and the yellow skull of the corpse set out to dry in the desert.

Now we are touching his twenty layers of embroidered robes.

--from Keeping the Star, New Rivers Press, copyright 1988 Thomas R. Smith

Over the past few years, it’s become apparent to me that coaching work and culture work are two different beasts. It doesn’t mean they’re enemies. It doesn’t mean that they can’t be woven together and braided. But it does mean that there are different types of work. They’re a sort of venn diagram with some overlap but both carrying different goals and ways of being. None of this is to criticize those who’ve laboured hard to build coaching schools or to coach in beautiful ways.

Of course, all of this is just how I see it and you may see it differently.

They both look out onto a troubled world and seek to do something about it. In that they’re aligned, but they also see the troubles and the solutions differently. The differences bear some explanation and the relationship between them some wondering.

For example, does being on the receiving end of personal coaching inevitably lead to cultural transformation? If enough of us got coaches (or became coaches) would this, without fail, lead to a healthy and happy culture? Is the care and feeding of the personal self, the Inner I, the sanctum sanctorum of ‘me’ going to result in a well fed culture? Does the planted seed of archetype inescapably burst into cultural architecture?

It’s something that James Hillman and Michael Ventura wondered about enough to write a book by the title We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy And The World Is Still Getting Worse.

This article is my first crack at articulating what some of those differences might be. I welcome your thoughts on this. 

Coaching is set up around your needs, desires and feelings as the customer. It’s all about customer service.

Coaching rarely has much more than a shallow and indirect lineage. Culture can trace its lineage back to the dawn of time or before.

Culture work is set around the needs of the community and that which sustains the community. In this model, if you are the one learning, you are the guest and they are your host. The protocol is profoundly different here. 

Coaching is about making a living and getting paid. Culture work is about feeding life and everything that sustains us.

Coaching is about helping people learn how to get what they want. 

Cultural work is designed to help us become something beautiful as a gift to the world.

My friend Miki Dedijer put it beautifully when he noted that cultural work is more of an ecology of images rather than a logical sequence of ideas.”

Coaching is about the short story – “getting to the point”. The culture is about the long story and the long story is what keeps you young and alive at heart.

Coaching and the business world focus on abbreviated language and short, efficient messages. We write things to the 12-year-old level so that they are easy to understand so that it will be more likely that people buy. It’s like an Andrew Llyod Webber musical. It goes down easy.

In culture work we are aiming for beauty, deliciousness and depth in language, so that our words feed something bigger than us so that the young ones have to struggle a little bit to listen to understand. Cultural language is not supposed to be easy but beautiful. This is more like a Sondheim musical - you don’t ‘get it’ right away, but once you do…

In coaching, the first session is often very safe and gentle. 

In culture work, the first bit, especially if you’re not from the community, might be the hardest. The teachers or elders might be at their roughest with the most bristling boundaries around protocol upfront to see if you can hack it. If you can make it past that and not collapse into self-pity or bitterness and come back the future sessions or gatherings might be more relaxed.

In coaching, you can often be certified in a weekend or a year at the most (and likely through online classes). In culture work, there is often a rigorous, expected, multi-year, in-person apprenticeship.

Coaching is often charged for with a flat, upfront fee set. Cultural work is often offered on a gift economy basis. And money could be understood as one of the artifacts of the collapse of village life and one of the forces that collapsed it and began to unwind the village-mindedness and kinship systems that sustained it.

Coaching, as a business, is set up to help you, as an individual, solve a problem you have. It’s why you hire a coach. You either have a symptom you want to address (e.g. ‘facing divorce’, ‘bad acne’, ‘stomach issues’, ‘coparenting with a narcissist’) or there’s a result you’re craving (e.g. ‘saved my marriage’, ‘visibly clearer skin’, ‘pain free gut’ or ‘thriving and helping my kids thrive despite the narcissist’). Culture work exists to help the people with their collective troubles and does it in ways that sustain the land and relatives who sustain the culture.

A coaching business can scale but a living culture can’t. A coaching business go grow seemingly indefinitely but culture is known by the limits it obeys and its willingness to obey those limits.

Coaching is scalable as a global endeavour with online programs, DIY courses, Summits based in communities of affinity and identity.

Culture work seems to be inherently local with communities based in geography and kinship..

Coaching is about offering short cuts and making it easy. 

Cultural work is about insisting people take the long road and helping people see the real cost of things that our modern commercial way of being hides.

In Coaching, it’s wise to niche down and identify your ‘ideal clients’ that fit into your ‘customer avatar’. In cultural work, it seems that you working with those in your community who come to you in need of help and that you may not have such freedom to turn people away as long as they follow protocol. 

In coaching, we are selling surgery more than supplements. We tend to address acute issues. In culture work, the focus is on, ongoingly, addressing the chronic issues and feeding the health of the people to prevent long term troubles.

When we look at coaching work, we might think, “I need that” where as with culture work we might think more something like, “that’s needed”.

Coaching makes everything very explicit. It says, “here’s the problem I solve and here is the exact approach I bring to solving it and the precise package (which you can read about in detail) which will solve it.” It’s laid out bare until glaring LED lights in a kind of blazing clarity. 

Culture work is more implicit. It’s often rooted in story telling, getting to know things slowly, being given instructions that might not make any sense to you at all by elders who aren’t telling you much. Culture work can involve laying out breadcrumbs and old stories to see if they can work it out on their own.

Coaching is often about people finding ‘agency’ and selling certainyy in results. But Stephen Jenkinson lifts up the quandary with this approach, 

““The background of ‘agency’: there’s a cabal of bad guys of my demographic, and they’re selling us down the river, one piece of personal information at a time, exerting world domination as they go. The foreground: you know who the bad guys are, you take back your power, you feel yourself at the wheel, you have some working assurance that your ongoing anger has merit, that there has to be a solution, that the reward for seeking it is finding it. You get to be hopeful and you get to be sure about the outcome of that solution at the same time. Who doesn’t want a fix? Completely understandable in a time when the problems are complex and a feeling of personal impotence is ever-rising. And not very likely. You have to simplify things almost to unrecognizability to satisfy that wish list.” 

In coaching, the coach and the client, alone do the work of restoring health. In culture work, the understanding is that our health comes from our relationships and the culture.

In coaching, the help comes from one person who is paid. In culture work, the help comes from being inside of something larger and alive (i.e. the culture)  that metabolizes your troubles on your behalf.

Sadly, so much of the world of coaching is rooted in seduction. Culture work is rooted in courtship.

Coaching is often rooted in being a teacher where the information and wisdom comes, explicitly, from you to the students. In culture work, you more often have practitioners and the learning comes from being in the presence of the one practicing the craft you admire and, occasionally, getting pointers.

Coaching is based in instructions on ‘how to’ but culture work often wonders about ‘how come?’

In coaching, there’s an emphasis on fixing and solving issues but, in culture work, there’s an eye towards ‘how’d it get like this?’ and ‘what befell a people that this seemed like a good idea?’. In culture work, learning and understanding could be the order of the day.

Coaching, like modern therapy, work is often stuck at the level of the individual. It has become the modern monotheism where God has been dethroned and, in God’s place, sits ‘the Self’. But culture work can help peel back the layers to help people see the interpersonal, institutional, intergenerational and infinite levels of the trouble you’re facing. 

Coaching lays out crystal clear core principles whereas culture work is often more “prismatic” in that it takes the dominant society, refracts it and helps you see the constituent parts. Those who have been eclipsed by Empire almost always see and comprehend Empire better than those who are in it. Culture work often requires an education and clarification to those in the community about the difference between their folk culture and civilization.

Coaching is often a “culture-free” experience that is ‘unburdened by what has been’, not tethered to any particular tradition but deeply agnostic, practical and unaligned to anything outside itself be that religion, politics, or the wider society. Of course, in doing so, it is a direct expression and product of modern society. Culture work is culture-bound. It is bound and bonded to the place it’s in. Culture work comes from the land and is a set of instructions on how to live well on that piece of land. Coaching doesn’t often tell us much about that.

Coaching often heralds clarity while culture work makes a seat at the table of mystery.

In coaching work, if you’re lucky, you find someone who will help you hone and polish your unique point of view - the thing that makes you stand out in the market place. You get to zone in on your ‘hot take’ on the issue. In culture work, this would be seen as a sign of unspeakable poverty. You could never create your own worldview, you would inherit it from the elders amongst you and be entrusted to translate it to the next generation.

Coaching, requiring marketing as it does, is often focused on making it easier and less risky to get access to you. In culture work, this may not be the case. As Brontë Velez asked one time: “what rites of passage does someone have to go through to have access to me?”

Coaching (like microdosing shrooms) is often focused on helping people be more successful in the system that exists. Culture work is about changing or building alternatives to that system. As Krishnamurti put it, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

This may all sound like I’m making the case for culture work and not coaching, for the collective not the personal, but it’s not quite that.

Of course, there are different kinds of coaches. A ‘grief coach’ is likely more aligned with culture work than a ‘business coach’. It’s also possible to do one’s coaching work in a more cultured way (a topic for another article).

But is a ‘death conversation cafe’ culture work? It depends on what the conversation is. Is it possible to get people together and talk about death in a way that the dominant society’s death-phobic take on death doesn’t get challenged (or even noticed)? It is.

A colleague of mine wrote me and said, “The skillful asking of questions to make visible blind spots I think is essential within culture work, and that there are coaching skills that would never be called that before the coaching industry appeared, that are inherent, I believe, in culture work.”

I would only say that it depends on the questions that are asked and the blindspots that are seen. If the coach has never lifted their head from the spell-casting architecture human-supremacy that is the concrete-covered, blue screen lit modern world, then it’s worth wondering what blindspots they could point out that might help their clients life become a more cultured expression of life.

Can the skills of coaching be used in service to life? Of course.

Are coaching skills synonymous with decolonizing? That would be a hard case to make.

I know some coaches who are doing culture work and I’m sure there are some people branding themselves as culture workers who are really only doing coaching.

The lable is not the thing.

That’s why I’ve been working on this piece, to see if I could lay out the difference between one and the other.

And, in laying out the differences, it’s important to look at this all not only through on own eyes but the eyes of our clients. It might be that you see your work as culture work but do they? Is that why they’re hiring you? Almost certainly, they are hiring you to help them get a self-serving goal. It doesn’t mean that there might not be an alignment between that goal and a larger restoration of culture but it does mean they’re not necessarily the same thing. They see it as ‘coaching’. If you try to push it too far into culture work, you can lose people.

Coaching asks a lot of the coach. You are paying them after all. The expectation is on them to, through their skilled capacity for listening, questioning and reflecting and their assorted saddlebag of experiences, help you get from Island A to B.

Ah… But in culture work, if you go to an elder who is holding a much larger picture, much may be asked of you. Even to ask them, much may be asked in terms of protocol. And what they offer might not make sense. It might be very hard.

Mainstream coaching is often made simpler, more palatable and easier to digest and do. It’s one of the pains I see in many coaches; the level to which they need to simplify their work and ask less of their clients than they know is needed and how much they need to cater to their client’ woundedness instead of asking more of the wound.

Doing the work on your own issues through therapy, coaching, a private practice, your local minister, reading books or good friends is vital. Unhealed wounds and reactivity destroy most of the well-intentioned, beautifully imagined culture-making endeavours I’ve heard of and, god knows, there are many culture workers who could use some therapy and coaching and whose predatory or reactive patterns themselves undermine all their better intentions.

But no amount of personal healing has ever resulted in wide-spread or sustained culture work. Individual change doesn’t seem to unavoidably lead to institutional change. Feeding ourselves doesn’t necessarily end up feeding culture.

And culture is what feeds us all.

Perhaps this the best way to say it: if your work generates and feeds culture, then it’s culture work. If it doesn’t it isn’t. And, of course, this lifts up the immense conversation as to what culture is and isn’t.

I suppose what I’m trying to do in this piece is to make the case for the need for culture-work. I don’t want to denigrate coaching but lift up what I see as missing in the field and what could be woven in.

I see many coaches who are culturally informed. They weave in ceremony, folk tales, ancestral wisdom and traditions.

I see many people who call themselves coaches who are also culture workers.

Traditional cultures had no coaches because the culture kept people healthy.

And this is a point to be drilled home: we don’t, most of us, live in a culture anymore. We live in a civilization. It’s not a living culture. It’s an antibiotic force. It’s so desperately anti-life. To the extent that you align with or do not challenge the constant spell casting of Empire, you will be financially rewarded. To the extent that you question and oppose Empire, you will be punished or crushed.

It’s important not to be naive about that.

What I mean is that, the more you are working for culture the more you are opposing or side stepping civilization. The less appealing it will be to the masses (who have absolutely zero interest in your ideas about decolonization and would fight you on this).

If you want to coach people on how to improve their performance in the machine, they will pay you handsomely but if you question what it is they are performing and why and ask them to question the machine itself, you won’t be.

If you want to help people achieve their goals (that aren’t theirs at all but were planted in them by this misery-making factory of dominion and domination) they’ll pay you well. If you ask them to question those goals, don’t be surprised by how quickly the door shuts.

Coaching can help us make our way through the modern world but cultural work can help us realize we’re not crazy for struggling in it and plant the seeds of a saner world for those to come.

Coaching can help you get results within the constraints of the system. Cultural work isn’t as persuaded by or obedient to those constraints.

I’m a fan of coaches who can help us sustain ourselves in a world gone mad. Most of my clients are such coaches. The work is deeply needed. And could it be that the appearance of the coaching industrial complex testifies not to our cultural wealth but to the utter goneness of our cultural patrimony? Not to how deeply we ‘get’ it but how deeply we’ve ‘lost’ it? Could it be that coaching has become a coping mechanism to deal with what we’ve lost (and forgotten that we’ve lost)?

The world doesn’t need more coaches but it desperately needs more culture. If I had to choose between a world where everybody had multiple, beautiful, skilled coaches versus the world in which there was thriving, local culture again, that would be an easy choice for me.

It’s hard to articulate all of this better than Wendell Berry when he wrote, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

If your work helps people to live as creatures I call it culture work. If it doesn’t, I don’t.

And so a final blessings to you:

May your work move backwards in the granary of your ancestors’ names and make wheat fields harvested three thousands years ago sway again, may it align you with all those hands that have met yours in the night so that you might become one of those hands to those yet to come.

May your labours become the spoken love word hovering like a hummingbird at the lip of the abundant flower that is our world and pour out the wisdom of sleepers.

May your efforts somehow annoint the slippery head of the next generations rising from the sea of their mothers’ wombs and the yellow skulls of all those who got you here.

Even without you knowing you are doing so, may it be so for you.

May all that fed you today be fed.

I welcome your thoughts and reflections in the comments below to help flesh out the rest of the story and everything I missed.

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For more thoughts on this, please check out the following to conversations I recorded with Stephen Jenkinson:

• On Elderhood

• Am I Ready To Teach?

Also the article The Poor Man’s Architecture.

These three articles on Culture Making:

• On Making Culture

• Culture Makes Food

• The Origin of All Culture

And my eBook, Who am I to Teach and Charge for it?

If you’d like help digging into the deeper, cultural levels of your point of view, I recommend my Point Of View - Advanced webinars.  

And my On Coaching & Culture Work playlist on YouTube.