LESTER, DR PHILIP (1959 - ) So-Called ‘Life Coach' - Some people are doomed to failure from the outset. They can't help themselves. It's not a question of bad posture or incorrect breathing. There are no night classes for such people. They can trawl the self-development sections of bookshops for solutions to whatever impediment they imagine is holding them back. They can visit psychotherapists and hypnotists, allow themselves to be fleeced by cults and peddlers of whatever transcendental nuttiness is currently in vogue. They can pay good money to be thrashed, pierced or smothered in blankets. They can buy semi-precious stones and tape them to the appropriate parts of their anatomies while chanting secret words purchased from bald-headed men with stalls at music festivals. It makes no difference. No-one will ever refer to such a person in terms other than those of disparagement or condescension. Nor will anyone ever gaze into their eyes with mad abandon or think of their sad, silly faces as they sit alone listening to the same song over and over, heartsick and pleading for God or whomever to miraculously transport that particular sad, silly face into the immediate vicinity. “Do you think of me at all?” they might ask plaintively, a demand that elicits a bland reassurance. “Well of course I think of you! I'm always thinking of you!” The people they most want to yearn for them, in fact, are guaranteed to be yearning for someone else. Someone so appalling it causes actual pain just to think of them. Some shallow, self-confident dolt with nothing to recommend him other than the conviction that he will prevail. Not only are they thinking of them. They're meeting up, eating out, going to nightclubs and then going home together. Our heroes, meanwhile, sit at home, opening their second or third bottle of wine, listening to their special records, muttering their mantras of self-affirmation: “I am a valuable person! I am a loving person! I deserve to valued and loved!”

In the latter part of the 20th century, an industry evolved through which unscrupulous individuals preyed on the guilt ridden, underachieving and gullible. The ‘Life Coach' is this phenomenon's most recent evolution. I leave it to the reader to decide who is more culpable, the man presumptuous enough as to offer advice for profit or the man who seeks it.

 

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