Critical Coaching
I practice critical coaching.* Critical coaching is an approach to the work of supporting your aspirations and goals that takes seriously your social and historical context of marginalization, exclusion and inequality, both as a source of unequally distributed obstacles (and resources) and as a source of mental and emotional suffering (and strength).
Unlike traditional coaching, which starts from an individualized understanding of the person and their obstacles, critical coaching starts from a robust understanding of the political, intersectional context for one’s aspirations and obstacles. In this sense, the purpose of critical coaching is to develop savvy strategies for navigating intersecting social relations as they manifest in the pursuit of your aspirations and goals. But critical coaching is not simply a reversal, locating obstacles outside of the individual. It is also an exploration of how we internalize marginalization, exclusion and inequality so that we also work against ourselves.
Critical coaching is, therefore, dialogic. We move back and forth between 1) clarifying your history and current contexts of exclusion, marginalization and inequality, and 2) developing strategies, practices and habits for pursuing your goals and aspirations within those contexts. We develop clarity for the purpose of more successfully pursuing your goals and aspirations.
Working together, then, we —
Clarify the institutional, social and economic obstacles to, and resources for, your goals and aspirations, so that we can develop clear-sighted, concrete strategies for successfully pursuing your aspirations and goals;
Clarify and understand the ways that specific contexts of relating with others (work, school, family, etc.) replay larger relations of marginalization, exclusion and inequality through everyday, unconscious attacks (“microaggressions”), in order to develop concrete practices and habits for avoiding or addressing those attacks while pursuing your aspirations and goals;
Clarify how you may have internalized your own experience of marginalization, exclusion and inequality in ways that work against your aspirations and goals, in order to discover new ways of relating to your aspirations and goals, to yourself and to others; and
Clarify your authentic goals and aspirations, distinguishing them from goals and aspirations that have been imposed by others, either overtly or implicitly.
Are you looking for a relationship that explores and supports your goals and aspirations, that helps you develop clear-eyed strategies for pursuing them, and that holds you accountable? If so, schedule a free, 60-minute meeting with me to see if my critical coaching is right for you.
Critical Coaching and Critical Psychology
Although coaching is not psychotherapy, all forms of coaching presume models of psychology, either implicitly or explicitly. Most coaching draws from forms of individualist psychology aimed at improving oneself by becoming conscious of individual beliefs and habits that work against one’s goals. This coaching and its psychology isolate obstacles within a normative individual person and work with that person to change.
Critical coaching, on the other hand, draws from critical psychology, which is an extension of the larger field of social psychology. Social psychologies understand individuals within social and cultural contexts: we are shaped by the worlds that we live in as infants, youths and adults, including but not limited to our families and homes. Critical psychology, however, recognizes that society is not a harmonious context for individuals but divided by relations of inequality, exclusion and marginalization – as well as political struggles over those relations – based on economy, race, gender, sexuality, imperialism, ability, and other fundamental social and global relations. These relations, in turn, are intersectional: they exist simultaneously and shape each other. Critical psychology demonstrates that the ways that we come to experience our selves, the reflexes we develop for relating to others, our aspirations and goals, and our insecurities and challenges are shaped within this context of intersecting political relations.
And we experience this psychological reality not simply in ourselves but in our everdays of work, education, family, friends, social interaction, bureaucracy, consumerism, and media. Inequality, marginalization and exclusion are not simply large, impersonal forces (though they are this too); they are acted out in everyday interactions, which is why these everyday contexts are easy or difficult, enabling or frustrating, affirming or dismissive based fundamentally on our assigned social position. This is also why everyday contexts can feel assaulting and insulting, depressing, demoralizing, exhausting. Because they are. We keep bumping into the psychologies of marginalization, exclusion and inequality as they are enacted by others – and ourselves – in our everyday.
Critical coaching, as I understand and practice it, is a process of collaborating with you – within this complex social and psychological reality – to discover your authentic creative, intellectual, professional, and other life aspirations, and to pursue them concretely, step-by-step.
Critical coaching serves authentic human flourishing, not mechanized human optimization or efficiency. Optimization and efficiency are anti-human, anti-life. Life is to be lived, even within social worlds that are hostile to our lives and living.
* To my knowledge, the concept of “critical coaching” that I am developing was first named by Iranian feminist, MahSa Hariri, to whom I am indebted for outlining a field and ethics. There is an alternate (opposite) critical coaching modality that seems to be an even more hyper-masculinist executive coaching than traditional coaching; “critical” can have multiple, even exclusionary, meanings. I also draw the term “critical” from the tradition of “critical theory” associated with The Frankfurt School and its inquiries into the social and psychological bases of twentieth-century European fascism, as well as from the psychoanalysis of racism inspired by the work of Franz Fanon. The Frankfurt School philosophers distinguished critical theory from traditional theory: traditional theory treats our present reality as a set of neutral facts (sometimes called “society” or “culture”) that can be explained, whereas critical theory approaches our present reality as a political accomplishment and structure of domination that demands liberatory transformation. Their research inspired almost all of the post-WWII liberatory movements, including many forms of feminism. Fanon, in turn, taught us that racism exists psychodynamically, for both BIPOC and white people, and not only as external social, economic, and political structures. His work has inspired ongoing investigations into how the social relations of domination are lived psychologically.