On self-optimization and coaching

When I was in Sri Lanka recently, I found myself surrounded by a lot of lovely young people from many different nations. They were mobile, lightly equipped, working from cafés or beachside guesthouses. I observed a few conversations (I REALLY try to not eavesdrop, but... as a coach... my natural curiosity... let’s say I am trying) and many spoke the language of contemporary self-management: morning routines, authenticity, boundaries, optimization, online businesses, passive income, you get the gist. Freedom (financial, emotional, location) seemed like an important goal.

Nothing about this is inherently wrong. Taking responsibility for one’s body, mind, and livelihood is a good thing. However, I started thinking that if they are successful, their lives would become strangely solitary and isolated. People were sitting together, but many seemed enclosed in their own optimization project.

The myth of freedom through self-optimization

The dominant story probably goes something like this: if you optimize yourself sufficiently, you become free. Free from bosses, from systems, from obligations, from the drag of other people’s expectations. Freedom is framed as independence, self-sufficiency, and frictionless mobility.

In this story, relationships are optional accessories. Nice to have, but not constitutive. Communities are something you might dip into, but not something you rely on.

In my view, this narrative fits with broader cultural phenomena that prize individual performance, self-reliance, and personal responsibility while quietly backgrounding structural conditions. If life is not working, the solution lies in better habits, better boundaries, better mindset.

What disappears in this framing is a basic anthropological fact: humans are not designed for solo existence. We do not merely enjoy relationships; we are formed by them. Language, identity, meaning, resilience, even our sense of self are co-created. We become human with and through others.

When coaching can be detrimental

Coaching, at its best, supports agency, reflection, and choice. It invites people to notice what they want for their lives, experiment with new ways of being, and take responsibility where responsibility genuinely lies. However, it can start supporting unrealistic and individualist narratives when it starts quietly absorbs the logic of individual performance culture without noticing it.

This might manifest when coaches and their clients frame struggles as almost exclusively as personal mindset issues, for example, when exhaustion becomes a question of resilience rather than load or anxiety is treated as a thinking error rather than a reasonable response to uncertainty. Both coach and client can start forgetting that context matters and is not something that needs to be “managed” by an individual.

Coaches are rarely malicious in this. In fact, the intention is often compassionate: to help clients feel less helpless. But there is a fine line between supporting agency and over-individualizing experience. And that line is easy to cross in cultures that already privilege personal performance.

Isolation dressed up as strength

One of the strangest tricks of contemporary self-optimization culture is how convincingly it reframes isolation as strength. If you look at pop-psychological YouTube content, you hear words like: strong boundaries, radical self-responsibility, emotional self-regulation, financial independence, which all are concepts that reduce reliance on others. All of these can be healthy in context. But taken together, and taken to extremes, they create lives with very few places to lean.

What happens when things go wrong? When health falters, money dries up, relationships fracture, or meaning evaporates? Humans do not usually break down because they failed to optimize well enough, in my view, they break down because they are asked to carry life alone. Loneliness cannot be solved through better morning routines.

Freedom as a relational achievement

If freedom is not produced through individual optimization, then where does it come from? If we take away the dominant individualist narrative, we might see that freedom can also emerge through relationships. Belonging to communities and nourishing relationships offers freedom and security. I don’t know from which friend I stole this quote, but in a zombie apocalypse you are better served by knowing who of your neighbours has a flame thrower, than by any individual preparation.

Of course, communities are messy and involve compromise and frustration, and limits. Freedom with others means you do not have to constantly perform competence. It means there are places where you are allowed to allow yourself to be supported. It means your worth is not continuously audited through productivity or self-mastery. It means you can fail without disappearing. In my view community is not the opposite of freedom. It is its precondition.

What this asks of coaching

I think that it is a good idea for coaches to be curious about their client’s implicit world view or narrative. When clients seem to implicitly agree with the dominant individualistic narrative, coaches might enquire curiously how this is serving clients or invite clients to consider alternatives (without, obviously, thinking that the coach knows which is the “right” narrative, but knowing that enlarging choice is always an ethical obligation for a coach).

This does not mean coaches should abandon responsibility, agency, or growth. It means holding them in a wider frame that asks not only “What can you do?” but also “What are you carrying alone that might not have veen meant to be carried alone?” We might treat context not as background noise but as constitutive of experience.

This may mean resisting the temptation to turn every struggle into a self-improvement project. We can allow grief, dependence, and limits to appear without immediately translating them into goals. We could stay curious about systems, histories, and relationships instead of bypassing them in the name of empowerment.

It may also mean tolerating discomfort. Because relational freedom is slower, less clean, and harder to package than optimization hacks. It does not photograph well on social media nor can it be packaged into an online course, but it is more suitable for human beings in my opinion.

When I think back to the young people I observed in Sri Lanka, I do not wish them less ambition or discipline. I wish them thicker lives , people who would notice if they disappeared and communities that would still hold them if their projects failed. (And of course, only if this is what they wanted, but sometimes I cannot suppress my maternal instincts)

And when I think about coaching, I hope we remain vigilant about the cultural currents we swim in and invite our clients to make conscious choices about the narratives that will support them in the kind of life that they want to lead.

If you would like to ponder these and other questions, why not join us in one of our free meetups and exchanges?

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