Ableism in Coaching: and the reckless rise of intuitive coaching
If you ever find yourself traveling to Antarctica, or if you spend enough time on TikTok, you will come to know about a part of the world called the Drake Passage. The Drake Passage is located at the point where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet head on - with no influence from any land mass.
Sometimes, these oceans join together seamlessly, and the water is as still as a lake. But other times, the Drake Passage can produce destructively volatile currents that have caused many deaths over the years.
Why am I speaking about the ocean? Well, I think the Drake Passage is a fitting metaphor for the confluence of two sentiments that tend to lead the coaching industry:
Coaching is a skill and the profession of coaching is a skills-based practice.
Coaching is a way of being and the profession of coaching is an intuitive and presence-based practice.
I believe that both of these statements are true, and furthermore, I believe that when both of these thoughts are held with careful and consistent examination, they can produce a style of coaching that is magnificently vast and beautifully centered in stillness.
Unfortunately, the reality is often that these two sentiments are held as separate, opposing truths - each one wielded whenever is most convenient to the coach. For example, a coach may tout coaching as an exclusively skills-based practice when trying to sell a program on skills for other coaches…but will then claim coaching is a purely intuitive process when trying to justify why their fees are so high.
The result of this common see-sawing flip-flopping is an increasingly unsteady, unsafe landscape in which disabled people tend to be on the front lines of the damage caused.
What I want to talk about today is the second point - the point that coaching is a way of being and that the profession of coaching is an intuitive and presence-based practice - and how standing in intuition as the product can overlook and undercut a large subset of our society.
The disabled perspective
In order to understand the shortcomings of glorifying purely intuition-based coaching, especially when it comes to the concept of ableism, I think it’s worth taking a look at some of the common sentiments disabled people express about the realities of moving through our world on an average day.
A behavior that is incredibly common in disabled people - both those with a visible disability and those with an invisible disability - is camouflaging, or masking. We tend to hear the word masking most correlated to those with neurodivergencies, whereas camouflaging tends to embrace the larger disability spectrum, but in both situations, the disabled person is essentially hiding parts of their reality in order to blend in more seamlessly with the surrounding world.
Camouflaging or masking differs from typical ‘people pleasing behavior’ because it stems from the realities of navigating through a primarily ableist world and is built from years of lived experience as to what happens when that camouflage or mask is dropped.
Additionally, a large portion of disabled people may not consciously know that they are camouflaging or masking - and may not consciously be able to stop. This behavior is not something that seems entirely separate from the person displaying it. It is a behavior that has become very closely interwoven with, and may very closely mimic the person themselves.
Finally, and this is a longer conversation for another day, what many disabled people know, along with many marginalized groups, is that authenticity is a privilege in this world. Does this mean that if you are disabled or a member of a traditionally marginalized group that you can’t be authentic? Absolutely not.
But the same way that we acknowledge that being born into financial wealth is a privilege, and that those born into financial poverty can become wealthy later in life but are not playing with the same deck of cards as the person with generational wealth - those who are able-bodied, able-minded, neurotypical, and without substantial trauma naturally experience a greater amount of privilege when it comes to being able to live authentically than those who aren’t.
And while denying that truth is unhelpful, much of the coaching and self-help industries actively ignore or deny the very real, very felt dynamics of the privilege around being yourself.
Back to coaching
So why does this matter to the conversation around intuitive coaching?
Well, if we look at intuitive coaching as a simplistic, all encompassing approach, its success is predicated on the coach’s ability to navigate their own intuition.
But intuition does not exist in a vacuum. Intuition exists cozily alongside a person’s emotions, ego, implicit biases, and general life context.
For example, most coaches are recovering people pleasers. Most people drawn to any industry that sets out to help others are recovering people pleasers. The ego of a people pleaser often asks the question, “Am I doing a good job?”
So, if I’m a coach using only my intuition to guide my craft, and the client in front of me is not visibly responding in the way I had expected to my comment/question/process, my ego might start to puff up and become worried that I’m not doing a good enough job.
But maybe instead of it sounding like that in my head, it sounds more like my intuition is saying that the other person is ‘closed off and unwilling to be their authentic selves.’
That sounds better, doesn’t it? At least for the ego it does. But for the client, not so much.
If that example sounds convoluted to you, I don’t know what to say except that it’s really not. It, and many other examples like it are so incredibly common and the damage that gets done often times remains hidden or comes out many years later in some other therapist or coach’s office.
Tying this all back to ableism
As you can see this conversation around intuitive coaching is hefty enough on its own without the factor of disability. But mix in the different perspectives that disability brings, the extra layer of camouflaging and masking, the implicit biases, and the trauma responses - and haphazardly ‘feeling’ your way into coaching a disabled person will, best case scenario, be off-putting to them. Worst case scenario, you will feed into a trauma loop that they may not even know is there, creating all sorts of issues for both of you down the line.
So, what do we do?
Well, like I said at the beginning, I believe that both of these statements are true:
Coaching is a skill and the profession of coaching is a skills-based practice.
Coaching is a way of being and the profession of coaching is an intuitive and presence-based practice.
I hope that if you are a coach, you learn to find the balance point between these two realities, not only when it is convenient to you as a coach, but also when it is most uncomfortable.
And also, while your ego may not like this, please, please, please understand that your ‘intuition’, no matter how strong, is being filtered through the limitations of your human experience. I say this as someone who fully believes in the power of intuition, and has had experiences both personally and with others that have been mind-blowingly spot on.
Your intuition has limits, and willing those limits to disappear will not work.
Wielding your intuition as the main tool for helping someone else is a huge responsibility to take on. If you wouldn’t just hop in a plane and start flying it because you feel like flying, then I would urge you to consider the implications of whipping your intuition around willy nilly.
And if you are a person who finds yourself being coached by someone’s ‘intuition’, and you feel attacked or uncomfortable, I know it’s hard - but if you can, speak up. How that coach (or honestly, even therapist) responds to you in that moment will tell you everything you need to know about how seriously they are taking the responsibility of using their intuition.