I’m Not Sorry About Being a Coach

Photo by Taylor Deas-Melesh

A middle-aged woman being a life coach is a laughingstock.

I know it. We all know it. “What’s Denise up to these days, do you hear from her?” “Last I heard she was a life coach!” *eyeroll* *snort*

But I'm not going to be embarrassed about coaching, even though it didn't work out as a business. (At least, not this time around — I'm not ruling it out.)

For one thing, I stand by coaching as a skillset. It's a valuable and non-trivial set of techniques that helps people understand themselves and take action towards what they want. Becoming a coach made me a better listener, a more incisive thinker, and a more supportive person.

But the main reason I refuse to be embarrassed about coaching is that embarrassment is a tool of the patriarchy. It’s how the rules are enforced from within us.

Starting with elementary school dress codes and on until the grave, women are taught to think about our choices primarily based on how we appear to other people. Before we act, we learn to ask ourselves what teachers will think, what boys will think, what the neighbours will think.

This is an energy-saving move for patriarchy. If women can be made to police ourselves, and to police each other, then we'll behave — without any effort being spent by the state or the system. There will be no need to try and pass awkward laws about sexuality and reproduction if women are so accustomed to staying in line that we don't even dress the way we want to.

In truth, there's not much you can do as a middle-aged women that doesn't open you up to mockery and scorn. Wear a long skirt and you're frumpy; wear a short skirt and you're a cougar. Get fatter and you're letting yourself go; get thinner and you're trying too hard. Stay in a job you like and you're stagnating; change careers and you're grasping and desperate.

Mocking middle-aged women for becoming coaches is just another arrow in that quiver.

Coaching takes skills which are coded as feminine — listening, presence, trust, intimacy, curiosity about people — and commodifies them, making them profitable (for some) and therefore powerful. Coaching poses a threat because patriarchy abhors power in the hands of women, and so the verbal missiles of patriarchy — mockery, scorn, snide commentary — are deployed against it.

This is all very familiar from another role where women threaten to have too much power: motherhood. In motherhood there are no choices available that don't open you up to criticism: breastfeeding or formula, co-sleeping or crib, daycare or staying home.

That's because the choices aren't the point; the criticism is the point. Those critiques are the first line of offense in the ongoing attack on women's choices.

So no, I'm not ashamed of being a coach. I'm proud of the skills I honed, the hours of study and effort I put in, and the lives I touched. I'll take the skills and experience I gained as a coach into my next job, and I'll be better at it, whatever it is, because of them.