When I told friends I was pivoting from marketing and communications into coaching, they paused, took a minute before responding, as if to rehearse what to say. Their response was always some version of the same thing: yeah, mmm.. okay, could work, but be careful not to fall into the trope of the “positiveness guru”.
That pause and the warning that followed stayed with me, always accompanied by Abdelhai Ahmed’s infamous comment on the folks of personal development “بتوع التنمية البشرية”, “close your eyes and imagine you’re a lion and you’ll become a lion. No, you won’t become a lion, you’ll become someone with their eyes closed. Nothing more”.
Moving through this industry and attempting to apply its frameworks produced a continuous pressure of adaptation that relocated every structural condition I moved through to the inside of me. After a lifetime of internalizing those conditions, the industry asked me to internalize the solution too. And when I named the systems of power I was navigating, it questioned my reading of those systems, telling me I had chosen the costs of resistance, of political awareness.
My friends’ warning became an anchor I kept revisiting as I went deeper into the industry, its logics, its knowledge base, its assumptions, and then its discourse about the self, growth, healing, and development, and then its marketing: the tropes, the promises, the selling of transformation.
Across all of it, questions started to emerge. Questions that led to more questions. And the more I sat with them, the more a pattern became visible about the core assumptions shaping the industry: the self it presumes, the systems it reproduces, and the discourse that naturalizes both.
Does coaching presume a universal self and attempt to move us all toward it? And why is that self always buffered from the conditions it operates in? Or is it the self that conditions were built for and around? And if this is the self it assumes, how does it examine the systems it inhabits?
Does it assume the systems are fair, or does it assume them to be rigid and unchangeable? Or does it protect the systems by shifting the responsibility to change on us, by bypassing the examination of conditions and treating the uneven costs they produce as a mindset issue rather than a structural one?
What about the context? And why is it often missing in the discourse which is abundant in taxonomy that pathologizes behaviors void of the context? And can behaviors be diagnosed without the conditions that produced them? And when did behaviors become synonymous with the self?
When a self that is abstracted from power, history, and consequence, and addressed as if its primary task was internal calibration, is treated as universal, curated in the image of the heteronormative white man, other realities become legible only through distortion. Political struggle becomes “reactivity.” Refusal becomes “resistance to growth.” Strategic caution becomes “limiting belief.” Clarity about constraints becomes “negativity.”
That distortion doesn’t only mislabel. It severs. It creates a managed distance between the person and their own accurate read of their conditions, a distance the industry then sells tools to maintain. This is the logic of the visualization exercise Abdelhai critiques. It fails people who have spent their lives developing a precise and accurate read on conditions they move through, and the demand to close their eyes to their own interpretation lands as violence that is made ordinary: that conditions are primarily a product of how we think about them, and therefore changeable through thought alone.
The issue, then, is that coaching addresses certain experiences incorrectly, by universalizing a self whose form of agency already aligns with liberal, patriarchal and capitalist authority, and claiming that alignment as “neutrality”.
And this universalizing and forced alignment produce yet another form of violence: the cruelty of a promise that is structurally designed to be unattainable for anyone who doesn’t identify with that self. The promise of “become this self and you’ll have the access, the recognition, the legitimacy and the worth”. But nothing can close the gap between the universal self and anyone approximating it. No matter how hard I’d try to “optimize” myself, the system would never recognize me as that self, cause I am not a man, nor am I white. Which is rather obvious, I know. And that is both the cruelty and the absurdity of that promise.
And the cruelty doesn’t stop at the impossibility of closing the gap. It lives and thrives on it.
The promise has to remain just out of reach. The person who keeps striving, adjusting, approximating, optimizing, and producing in pursuit of a legitimacy the system will never fully grant, is the system’s most reliable resource. And when that pursuit “breaks” them, coaching is there to “fix” them and return them to the productivity wheel.
And if the universal self was never designed to include us, why are we being measured against it?
Who benefits from a standard that was built to keep us striving but never arriving?
And what happens to the selves that refuse the strive and the standard?
How does the system cater for those?
If the self is already presumed, then what of the systems it inhabits? Does coaching examine them or does it take them as the ground on which all work happens?
If coaching assumes the systems as untouchable, the work, then, is to help the self move through them more effectively, efficiently, and seamlessly.
This is the second presumption of the industry: The systems are the given. The self is the variable.
Across methodologies and schools, a consistent orientation emerges: how to navigate the systems better. But is navigating these systems our only option? And does navigating these systems successfully produce the same results for everyone across class, race, gender, nationality, ability, and proximity to power?
When the issue and the responsibility of resolving it are relocated away from the systems, structural pressures are reframed as personal challenges. And this relocation produces uneven demands on those who are already dealing with the uneven costs that the conditions of these systems generate.
So when a woman in a workplace is repeatedly and continuously dismissed, unheard, or having her words validated only when repeated by a male colleague, is that an issue with her executive presence and visibility or a systematic erasure of her authority in the room?
Or when a Palestinian consultant with a PhD, years of rigorous work, and “expert” in his title, walks into a meeting and is met with slight distrust and irony: “When we learned HQ was sending us an expert, we expected a blonde man with blue eyes.” Is that about developing his personal brand or is it the colonial inheritance that located legitimate knowledge in specific geographies and specific bodies?
In each relocation, the structure remains intact and the person becomes the site of both the problem and the solution. One framing could be: coaching rarely asks whether those systems should be navigated at all. But a more revealing framing opens different questions:
What conditions, and at what cost, do these systems demand navigation?
Are these systems fair in the ways they claim? Or do they flatten difference and erase context under the proposition of “culture” or “professionalism”?
And what happens to the person who navigated successfully for years, took on the legibility labor, did the cultural and professional translation and arrived at exhaustion or burnout instead of the promised land of abundance?
Now, if the self is presumed and the systems are untouchable, what about the context that demanded the translation labor? Why is it often missing in the discourse?
For a discourse that is abundant in vocabulary, elaboration, and diagnoses it always feels vague, offering eloquent labels for the description of a bunch of behaviors and symptoms, but not really offering clarity. What is missing in that discourse? Why is it heavy on responsibilizing the self? Why is it heavy on the diagnosis of behaviors, then prescribing lists of demands on an already burdened self, without asking about the contexts in which these behaviors are exacerbated? Or about the conditions that produced them in the first place?
But that’s it, right?
The discourse doesn’t ask. It diagnoses. And in diagnosing, it does what the previous two presumptions required, set, and reproduced. It removes the conditions from view, locates the problem inside the person, and generates a market around correcting what it named, while placing the responsibility of that correction and the accountability on the person.
And that’s the third presumption. The discourse treats behaviors as properties of the self and thus can be diagnosed, named, and treated independently of the conditions that produced them.
Take this behavior for instance: Reading the room, adjusting accordingly, managing how one is received, softening of one’s own needs in the presence of others’ demands. Is it emotional intelligence or people pleasing? You need the context don’t you?
And what about the conditions that made that behavior the safest available response? When pleasing was the price of belonging, of safety, of continued employment, of not being read as difficult or aggressive or too much. Was the behavior a deficit? Or was it an accurate reading of a situation that punished non-compliance?
And how come the same behavior is diagnosed once as a deficit, a wound, a pattern to correct and once as a capacity, a strength, a leadership competency?
Who decides which name applies and on whose authority?
The behavior is identical. The conditions that produced it are never examined in either case. What changes is only whether the system finds it convenient.
And what about the more menacing discourse? The one that creates monsters and cages?
The empath and narcissist discourse excels at this.
“Narcissists target…” the discourse loves this construction. It creates a predator specific enough to be frightening and vague enough to be everywhere. And the description of who narcissists target is always women, always the ones who learned to give at a young age, who are empathetic, who are conditioned toward accommodation. Description that applies to almost anyone socialized as a woman, in societies that can’t afford to lose its grip on its favorite mode of control: the binary gendered roles. And the targeting logic does what the discourse always does: it locates the vulnerability inside the person being targeted.
“IF YoU wEreN’T As yOu aRE, YoU wOuLdN’t hAvE bEeN tArGeTeD.”
And the predator arrives without a history. No conditions are named. No examination of what produces people who relate to others primarily as resources. The narcissist is a type. Fully formed. Dangerous. A category to identify and exit. The discourse doesn’t ask what produced them, because asking would require the same examination of conditions it has dismissed throughout.
What remains is the empath. And here the discourse performs its most precise violence: it turns the self against itself, by locating the problem inside the empath’s qualities: the empathy itself, and what it produces in generosity, forgiveness, responsiveness, accommodation, etc.
Every act of care becomes suspect. Every impulse toward generosity becomes evidence of the wound. Every moment of forgiveness becomes a pattern to interrogate.
The hypervigilance that was developed as an accurate instrument for reading power, sensing danger, navigating conditions that punished, is now directed inward as well as outward. And because what is being interrogated is precisely what constitutes the self, the surveillance compounds with each repetition. The person who was already carrying the accumulated cost of conditions that dismissed their authority now carries additionally the cost of having been told that what made them themselves is what made them a vulnerable target.
The discourse produces the wound and the cure simultaneously. The pathology and its correction. The diagnosis and the market. And in both directions the conditions are never named and the site of labor is: the continuous interrogation of the self.
The self in survival, the self with imposter syndrome, the self with unhealed attachment wounds. Counter that with self-love, self-care, self-respect, and the discourse favorite: the authentic self. As if the self can ever be defined in void, independently from the context, the conditions, the other, the communities, and all the physical and emotional spaces we inhabit and allow to inhabit us.
And what happens when the person refuses the label, or questions the conditions instead? The discourse is ready with the response: “you’re in denial, not ready to heal”. The refusal becomes evidence of the same pathology, the problem, the solution, the responsibility, the accountability, and the fault are all inside the person.
The loop is closed before it can be examined. The discourse protects itself from critique by converting critique into diagnosis.
And what happens to the person if they accept the label as an interpretation of their experiences?
What conditions do these labels normalize by converting them into symptoms?
And if these labels secure the system and its reproduction, what kind of self do they produce? And what does that self become unable to see, name, or refuse?
Taken together, tensions emerge across all three presumptions:
- A self is assumed: liberal, individualized, future-oriented, choice-rich, then treated as universal and everything that doesn’t resemble it gets translated into a deficiency to correct.
- Systems are taken as given; their uneven conditions and costs are relocated onto the person to carry.
- And a discourse that secures both, diagnosing behaviors as properties of the self, producing the wound and the cure, while the conditions remain entirely out of view.
I paused at these tensions for a long time in my coaching journey, in a way that brought back that skeptic pause my friends responded with more than 3 years ago. More than once, I found myself at what felt like a dead end, with the only option being to dismiss coaching altogether. But I had already invested too much in it, so I treated it as a contested site, looking at how it can be refunctioned once its hidden assumptions are made visible.
That refunctioning required two things simultaneously: a practice that works with people from the inside of their actual conditions and a writing that names those conditions from the orientation of the selves the industry misaddresses.
- How does a coaching that doesn’t universalize a single form of agency and doesn’t pretend that neutrality is possible, look like?
- What becomes possible and visible when it engages selves as already situated within histories and power rather than abstracted from them?
- And can it create space that allows people to trust their own interpretation of their experiences and interrogate the systems they move through as one whole process?
If the industry’s assumptions serve systems of power and secure the reproduction of the conditions that produce our need for coaching, what becomes possible with a practice that centers the person’s interpretive authority and their lived realities without erasure, abstraction, or reduction?
RADICAL COACHING 