On Life Coaches and Motivational Speakers
The age of the motivational speaker is now eclipsed. What has replaced it remains to be seen. The motivational speaker emerged around the same time in history that we see the emergence of life coaches and other gurus whose function is precisely to anchor the subject to some consistency of knowledge. Yet, it seems to me that the motivational speaker’s function outlasts the life coach. Whereas the life coach is a personal solution designed for individual circumstances, the motivational speaker often speaks for large crowds whose group identification secures for them some semblance of belonging.
The life coach requires the subject to sustain the consistency of knowledge and advice. In other words, the subject must return each week to his coach and reflect upon the consequences of any knowledge he obtained. But the motivation speaker does not require this consistency. Instead, the motivational speaker is him or herself easily replaced the following week by another educator with an entirely different point of view. In this way, the consistency obtained by the motivational speaker’s knowledge is fleeting.
This leads me to presume that the motivational speaker is actually a mutation of the life coach’s function: the life coach is an attempt to externalize the university into para-academic attempts. The life coach offers surplus knowledge, and approaches the status of a mystical guru whose aura captivates the client. In this way, the client is a product of what Lacan named ‘university discourse.’ But the motivational speaker is a product of capitalism, or what Lacan named ‘capitalist discourse.’ There is only one life coach but there are many motivational speakers. And when the knowledge of one loses its lustre, the subject can easily switch to another TED talk and find another.
The problems with both are easily identifiable. Whereas the life coach produces alienation in knowledge by forever propagating a discourse that must account for its own impasses, the motivational speaker produces a subject who constantly burns out and falls into confusion for all of the contradictory messages he or she receives. For an example of the latter just read any Rupi Kaur book: the book is filled with contradictory ‘life lessons’ that are similar to what Slavoj Zizek has named in passing “wisdom.” A “wise man” can within the same breath tell you that “you shouldn’t piss in the wind” (e.g., don’t go against the current) while also affirming a sense that you need to “sometimes take a stand” (e.g., “go against the current”).
A telltale sign of the motivational speaker — unlike the life coach who attempts to sustain a coherent narrative or teaching (but fails) — is that he or she will never produce a sentence that universalizes a dogma. Instead, it is a “sometimes you can …” (a particular affirmative statement) rather than a universal prohibition (“you should never..”) which characterized university discourse for so many years (as a hangover from religious discourse).
Today we should neither seek wisdom from motivational speakers nor therapy from life-coaches. We require an altogether more difficult encounter with the truth. Psychoanalysis alone can provide this.
