The End of Coaching
A new & ancient paradigm for sharing the gifts of our being and becoming.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” -Buckminster Fuller
The other day I was at a meetup for coaches in Boulder. It dawned on me that one of my life purposes is to make coaching obsolete.
Coaching, in the context of our modern society, is a vocation that enables guides to be paid in order to help others through the journey of life. You pay me money. I give you my time, presence and wisdom. It’s a win-win!
Or is it?
Win-wins are often defined in the context in which we’re forced (or chose) to operate in. In the context of our metacrisis-wriden late-stage capitalistic society, we most often parallel play in a hyper-individualized survival of the fittest dance. It can be a fun game. I’ve played it well. I got to the top. I burnt it all to the ground. And I came through my dark night passage wiser and stronger than ever.
So now it’s my turn to cash in and get to the top again by selling you my soul’s learnings! The more I charge you, the more value you’ll likely imagine I offer.
If you really want to change, send me $20,000, and I’ll guide you to your own innate wisdom via my wisdom, which is ultimately God’s wisdom. It’ll be the most transformative six months of your life. Trust me. You know you need this. You know you want this. I can give you what you desire, if you show me that you really care about your own becoming by investing in yourself via your PayPal transfer to me.
Look out for my Zoom link in your inbox…
On the surface, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this model. It works. For some. For now.
But maybe there’s another way. A more beautiful way. A more delicious way.
Imagine you live in a village with a few hundred community members. Every single person there — including you — has a unique, exquisitely vital gift to offer.
This gift, at its core, has little to nothing to do with a particular offering or service. It’s simply a way of being. A way of showing up in the world. A unique essence that is part of the wholeness of the world, and a whole world in itself.
The purpose of the village is to help you discover, activate and celebrate the extraordinary, ever-emerging unfolding of You.
You are the seeds. The village is the soil. When your community members water your potential and allow sunlight to shine on your becoming, a blossoming of life takes shape. It’s not guaranteed, just like if you plant a tomato seed it’s not a sure fact that it will sprout. But there’s new and ancient technologies for gardening, and wisdom from nearly every lineage on the planet.
Over time, the community refines their uniquely tailored systems for human flourishing. They’re anti-fragile, adapting and learning in a continual process of artistry.
When you, Tomato Seed, blossom, a gift grows in you, as you. The gift of the tomato is not separate from the tomato — it is the tomato. How it looks, tastes and is cooked by the community become added delights in the already inherent perfection of the tomato itself.
Now imagine each human in the community — from the newborn baby to the dying elder — from the unborn future children to the ancient ancestors who came before — are all simultaneously seeds of potential, fully blossomed fruits, and members of a larger garden.
The community who grew you with love, care and wisdom celebrates the maturity of your ripeness, wanting nothing for you other than what you were here to become. There’s an inherent trust in life, which trusts in you.
Each seed in the village, already always ripe and always further ripening, gets fed to the garden as a gift, in the form of a sacred soul-infused offering. Just like our physical bodies require a diversity of food in order to maintain health and balance, the body of our community requires each seed to provide unique forms of nutrients, while never separate from the source of the soil in which all arises from.
One of those tomatoes-filled-with-seeds is a Coach. In the context of a village, this might take on a different name: a shaman, a teacher, a healer, a friend, an elder. The community, like life itself, is also the coach. All that really exists are holons of coaches coaching seeds of potential that are nourishing the garden from which they grow.
From a certain vantage point, this is already always what’s happening. The garden is earth. The village is life. The sunshine is spirit. And the water is soul.
In the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible, we who desire can return forward to metamodern land-based intentional villages while maintaining the awareness and accessibility to the global and even inter-planetary village that is always already here.
On the path of classical enlightenment, we can enter a transpersonal state of awareness of Awareness, resting in and as the boundless, timeless ocean. Similarly, we can rest in and as the planetary village in which we’re all already infinitely interconnected with. And, just like many nondual traditions call for, we can return to our physical bodies and unique personalities, or in this case, to our local land-based intentional communities, integrating the two into a divine union that is always already whole and an ever-evolving Kosmic dance.
God itself is but a garden in which new fruits are continuously growing the community of Life.
When we live side-by-side with a hundred or more soul seed-activated humans flourishing in their becoming, offering their gifts back to the gardens from which they grow, the need to implement a capitalism-based system as a primary vehicle for sharing our gifts becomes mostly obsolete.
The diversity of the village ensures there’s more often than not enough gifts to go around and meet the needs of the villagers, and the village as a whole. Just like a biological traditional family unit doesn’t charge each member of the household before sharing their love, wisdom and unique gifts with each other, neither does the village. Our being is simply a gift. And our receiving is a gift in exchange for the gift. There is an often unbreakable reciprocity of interdependence.
Some communities, particularly those at larger scales, will likely still require some form of tracking, accountability and management of the villagers’ availability and energetic resources. New systems will emerge and evolve with time and experimentation, and those systems are beyond the scope of this article.
When we zoom out, each village becomes a growing seed in the garden of villages around the globe, aware of its evolving wholeness as well as its gift as an interconnected part of an even larger whole, and of The Whole.
When enough village seeds grow new systems for sharing the gifts of our uniquely flavored love, the larger societal systems and the games they’ve designed us to play begin to mutate. Evolution loves to devour obsolescence.
The Modern Coaching Paradigm, as we’ve come to celebrate it, will die on the vine of history, composting into new forms of liberation for the feasts of our potential.
May it be delicious!
To read more community visions, see my other essays below:
