The Cult of Self (Part One)

Written By Christina Sestan

Are you tired of hearing the advice to ‘do what you love and the money will follow’? Let’s take a closer look at this sentiment and its flaws. In this episode, I’ll begin to delve into the cultural obsession with the self and explore how we got to where we are today.

Listen in as I explore the history of how the concept of self has evolved in Western culture, from the early days of Christianity after the fall of the Roman Empire, to the rise of Humanism in the 14th century, to the emergence of faith healing in the 19th century. They say that history repeats itself – will this be the case when it comes to our current cultural fixation on the self?

And as with everything I share on the podcast, this is what I believe based on what I’ve read and researched. But please don’t take my word for it. Keep what sticks, discard the rest and for goodness sakes, go out and test drive it!

 

What You’ll Learn In Today’s Episode:

  • Why the belief that you just have to love what you do might actually be damaging.

  • The historical origins of the current obsession with self.

  • Whether it’s possible to elevate the self to a point that puts our well-being at risk.

 

What Was Mentioned:

 

 

Ideas Worth Sharing:

“But what I wanted was, it turns out, was different than what I needed.” – Christina Sestan

“If not for the magical idea that loving a career is a key part of success, I might have allowed the discomfort to actually wake me up.” – Christina Sestan

“What I needed was something a little more practical and down to earth. Someone to tell me to gird my loins, pull up my socks and get ready for a long road of business building ahead of me. Someone to tell me it was going to be hard.” – Christine Sestan

“The age of human perfectionism was neatly swapped out in Christian theology for the age of God’s perfection. What had once been considered good about humans was now attributed to God.” – Christina Sestan

“This journey back through history, as superficial as it may be, is beginning to feel like a great pendulum swinging back and forth between the ideals of the self on one side and denial of self on the other.” – Christina Sestan

“I know, twenty years later, that I am not all things to all people and I have become much better at discerning the value I have to offer, and perhaps more importantly, the situations where I do not have value to add.” – Christina Sestan

 

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  • Speaker 1 0:01

    Hey, it's Christina. Thanks for joining us. And welcome to the Squeeze. I don't know anyone who manifested their success, I I over 20 years ago I was just about to complete my coaching certification, and I was invited to a series of lunch and learn sessions to chat casually about business building with some of the faculty from the program, having absolutely no idea how I was going to go about monetizing coaching, when I was finished, I was keen to attend, and it was during one of those first sessions when I heard one of the instructors use a phrase I'd never heard before, "Just do what you love and the money will follow. I felt a bit like I imagine someone feels when they've just been accepted into a club or a religious community was kind of like manna from heaven, like it was all going to be okay. You see, I'd been out of a job for over a year, and at this point I was well past my severance and outplacement benefits, and I was becoming progressively more financially anxious, so hearing this was the reassurance I needed, and we all ate it up, my classmates and I, as we stood poised to face the real world waiting for us, with almost no business building experience between us. It quickly became the mantra for neutralizing any discouragement or uncertainty that we might feel, and so we applied it lavishly. Of course, reflecting now, I wish I could time travel back to that lunch and learn session and shake the instructor who said it. Okay, I don't really want to shake anyone, and probably the person who said it. I mean, they probably really believe what they were saying, and they sincerely wanted to help us out. It's just that knowing what I now know, it was a ludicrous thing to say. I was already so stretched thin financially, and none of us had any real idea how to go about starting a business. It was, in a word, irresponsible clap trap. And maybe you're listening to this, and you're thinking, but what's wrong with that saying? Isn't it true? No, no, it's not. Not only is it not true, but I think it has the potential to do a lot of damage. Let me see if I can explain. Coaching was the very first thing I'd ever encountered that I truly loved to do. It was the fit I never expected or imagined. While I'd excelled in my previous career, excelling at something and loving it, or at the very least, enjoying it, they're often different things, but coaching was different. I was starstruck, I couldn't believe my luck, and I also had that uneasy feeling that it was just a matter of time before someone was going to knock on my door and tell me the jig was up, I needed to smarten up and get a real job. In other words, I was already pretty susceptible to the reassurance that was implicit in that phrase, but what I wanted it turns out was different than what I needed, and I got trapped in the early days of business building. I ended up in a weird kind of cage match between angst and hope, the angst, or what I'm just going to call common sense. In hindsight, it couldn't help but arise in response to the fact that I wasn't really getting anywhere with my business. Clients were not exactly breaking my door down, but then the hope, or what I'm just going to call magical thinking in hindsight, well, it would show up through either like a bolstering conversation with a colleague or something I read online, and and then my angst would be neutralized, and it's not that I sat around doing nothing, it's just the action I took was inconsequential, it was uncoordinated, and well, it rarely amounted to anything. So the phrase acted like a crutch, and I used it to help me move through my angst to come out the other side, I stubbornly held on to the idea that coaching was my true calling, and I just had to be patient for what I'm not exactly sure, but then inevitably the angst would surface again, because bank accounts don't lie, bills don't stop coming, and so it would go, my angst was kept at bay just long enough to keep me stuck.

    Speaker 1 4:24

    If not for the magical idea that loving a career is such a key part of success, I might have allowed the discomfort to actually wake me up. I might have reached out for help sooner. I might have had a business plan earlier. Isn't that what discomfort is for to get our attention, but what I needed was something a little more practical and down to earth. Someone to tell me to gird my loins, pull up my socks, and get ready for a long road of business building ahead of me. Someone to tell me it was going to be hard, and all these years later. I know that my success never resulted from simply loving coaching. I love cabins with a view of the sea, but I still don't have one. Sure, love probably helped me weather some of the tougher times, and there were tougher times, let me tell you, but other than that, I don't know where there was anything more to it. Looking back, I succeeded in my business, because I finally got to the point where my angst couldn't be quieted, and I was forced to explore a decidedly unsexy bootstrap method of business building. I engaged very knowledgeable people to help me build a business plan that required a lot of effort on my part and a lot of uncomfortable effort. This is not what they talked about back in those lunch and learn sessions. Let me tell you, and the more we leaned into the notion that our deep love for coaching would ensure success, the more we were bequeathed with a kind of specialness. There was even a bit of martyrdom in our struggles. Look at us, it seemed to say, this is important work, we're going to save the world. Interestingly, there were numerous side hustles adjacent to the coach training industry. They had names like get clients now and how to increase your coaching income in six weeks. Thinking back, there was a lot of magical thinking going on, because in the end, my success came from an entirely different approach that included false starts, good and bad collaborations, costly mistakes, long hours for little pay, lots of rejections, lots of money spent on marketing support and small business courses. Short story, I succeeded based on hard work and a ton of sweat equity, and when I talk to other successful coaches, or even entrepreneurs, for that matter, I hear the same thing. I don't know anyone who manifested their success, and I feel duty bound to report at this moment that my coaching school - it was in no way woo woo or new agey. In fact, it was quite the opposite, because I'd cultivated a very professional career identity up to this point. I'd gone out of my way to track down the most rigorous coaching certification program I could find. I wanted to invest in the most recognized professional coaching credential out there. I came into coaching already alert for the potential conflation between coaching and a host of new fringe wellness practices that were emerging at the time, and I was determined to do whatever I could to present coaching in general and myself in particular as a valid and credible professional. It's fascinating to think that, given all of this, I still fell under the spell of that woo woo phrase, and even if my school had been more typical of its Northern California roots, that is to say, in fact, more West Coast woo woo. I can't really blame the school, because the saying was just a reflection of what was writ large in the culture around it. Remember when The Secret and The Law of Attraction came out? They were huge, and maybe the book, in particular, has faded into obscurity. I have no idea, but the mechanics underpinning its success, it seems to me, are just getting warmed up. So, let me poke a few holes in the saying: just do what you love, and the money will follow. I want to do that, so I can demonstrate my beef with it. Simply put, if this sentiment were in fact true, why isn't every single porta potty overflowing? Why aren't the sewers backing up? Why aren't the slaughterhouses closing? If loving your job is a guarantee of success, then wouldn't everyone do what they love?

    Speaker 1 8:36

    But as far as I know, people keep showing up to their jobs to empty those porta potties and hack away at those sewer fat bergs, those non-biodegradable nasties that are made up of lots of wet wipes, and they're still showing up to clean up the atrocities on the slaughterhouse floor. Are you actually going to try to tell me that they're doing it for love? Of course, not. They're doing it to survive. What was preached to me is a sentiment that very few people can afford to believe, which makes it all the more perplexing that it went mainstream. I have a theory about how and why it gained traction, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with a rather over-inflated obsession with the self these days, and that's what this podcast is going to explore, not only about how fixated we are on the individual over the community, but how we got that way, and for many people these days, what I'm pointing to might actually be invisible in much the way the goldfish doesn't see the water it's swimming in, it's ubiquitous, it's just the way it is, and I think our current narcissistic world on social media is both connected to and a later and more extreme iteration of the saying, "just do what you love and the money will follow. There's a particular Instagram account that I follow, and I follow it both for the entertainment, but also because I think it exemplifies what I'm. Talking about it's called Influencers in the Wild. Now I've just scrolled through a few, and I've landed on this one. It's filmed on a beach. There are three separate pairs, all filming one another within 15 or 20 feet of one another. The people doing the filming are low on the sand, and they're sort of like contorting into these weird angles, trying to film the other person from what one must presume is the most instagrammable angle. The women being filmed are on the wet sand, right on the edge of the surf, and partially in the water. They're all wearing bikinis. One woman is twerking with sand all over her bum, at least I think that's what she's doing. Another woman is attempting to lie on her stomach on the sand, and just gets into a casual-looking position, but a wave knocks her cowboy hat right off her head, and the third woman is posing like super awkwardly. She's got both hands on her right hip, and her butt is, of course, sticking out towards the camera. What is it with a butt obsession these days? The caption reads Navy Seal training for influencers, but all of this isn't some random phenomenon, it's just the next stage of a fascinating journey through history that started a long time ago. So, if you, like me, feel a little like demoralized, maybe saddened, even perhaps embarrassed by these ever increasing moves towards what looks like narcissistic behavior on Instagram, TikTok, reality, TV, et cetera, et cetera. It may lend some insight to understand a bit more about the origins of this cultural manifestation. And if you, like me, have some concerns and questions about how far this is all going to go and where we're headed, this conversation is probably something you want to tune into, as I've said. What you see today didn't just materialize overnight, and to understand it's both useful and fascinating to explore what came before and what was that. Well, where to begin? We need to go all the way back to classical antiquity and ancient Greece. If you're anything like me, it might have been a while since you had anything to do with this period in history, high school perhaps, or maybe you were strong-armed into watching the movie Troy. I mean, who can resist Brad Pitt? Actually, I can, or maybe it was the movie 300 or God help you, Alexander, and perhaps that's where you get your ideas about antiquity from. Well, I'm not going to go into a big movie critique here, except to say that Colin Farrell playing Alexander the Great feels like a pretty big insult to one of my favorite people in history, but I digress. I do want to make a point here.

    Speaker 1 12:36

    In spite of Hollywood's love of action and violence, much of what made the Greek stamp so indelible over all the millennia, it wasn't, of course, just limited to their military prowess. Ah, philosophy, or philosophia, which translates into lover of wisdom. But just a quick disclaimer before we move on, I am not a historian, and this next part will reflect that I'm merely someone who gets a B in my bonnet about something, and then dives deeply into subjects endlessly, reading books and articles online in an attempt to understand a bigger and more nuanced picture of what I'm thinking of. I may sound like I know the way things are, but please just chalk that up to my enthusiasm. I have a hypothesis here about the development of the self, but I won't claim I have nearly enough evidence to either land solidly in defense of my hypothesis or against it. And so maybe you're wondering, well, why bother? Because I'm hopeful that this approach will encourage people to be more open to the question and less quick to land on a position, this podcast is not meant to be an academic paper, and if you spot gaping holes, by all means, I want to hear from you, because ultimately, if it helps to color in the picture for me, I'm all for it. When it comes to the notion of self-focus, how we think about ourselves and see ourselves, and even represent ourselves, the Greek philosophers were all over it. Socrates, in particular, his words "Know thyself" were after all carved into the rock at the Oracle at Apollo's Temple in Delphi, echoing the famous Socratic dictum, "Knowing what is right is doing what is right. What he also said was that the unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates believed that when we turn inward in search of self-knowledge, we will eventually find our true self, or the soul, not to be confused with the Christian soul that would come later in history. He believed in seeking and taking care of the essence of the human to attain the good life, which is perhaps the ultimate goal of Socrates' philosophy, but even though Socrates stressed that the true self should not be identified with what one owns or one's social status or reputation or one's body, you might not know it looking around Greek society. According to Will Storr in his fascinating book Selfie, which I've relied heavily. On for this part of the podcast, he writes, "Here it was the age of perfectionism in its emerging form, a culture of veneration and pursuit of the perfect human self. He goes on to point out that Greek statues depicted ideal masculine and feminine forms, and of course everyone knows that the ultimate competition for fame and glory originated in ancient Greece, and of course I'm talking about the Olympic Games, but the Greeks were also famous for their cautionary myths. Probably there were some pretty incredible people walking around Athens in all their finery, but where do you think the word narcissism comes from in the first place, it was an ancient Greek myth about a hunter known for his beauty, who saw his reflection in a pool, fell deeply in love, but then died of despair when he realized it was his own reflection. The hunter's name was, of course, Narcissus, and the Greeks were eventually defeated, like so many empires before and after becoming absorbed by the growing Roman Republic, but Greek culture endured heavily, influencing Roman styles of literature and philosophy, and what of the self? Well, it's hard to say exactly what was same and different within Roman society, because there were so many moving pieces. Christianity, for one, was growing in popularity with its own distinct theology around denial of the self. The Roman persecution of Christianity, which you may recall if you have any familiarity with the New Testament, was pretty hardcore, but that changed, and in the curious way that newer cultures consume older cultures without entirely replacing them, it seems to me, and this is clearly my superficial opinion, so do not quote me. The age of human perfection was neatly swapped out in the Christian theology for the age of God's perfection. What had once been considered good about humans was now attributed to God.

    Speaker 1 16:58

    This could be a pretty deep rabbit hole here, but it's also fascinating to read about the fusion of Platonic and Aristotle in theology with Christianity, and then around 313 CE, the persecution of Christianity ended, and less than a century later it was actually adopted by the Romans as the state religion, and that in itself is incredible, because once Romans had worshiped many gods, and of course Christianity had one, and the adoption of the faith, it had to have undermined so many things about the Roman world, including the original belief that the emperor was a god, because, of course, that couldn't be the case anymore. The shift couldn't help but weaken the Romans' authority, making them a little bit more susceptible to defeat by their enemies, and defeated they were. The ancient world fell away, and Christianity stepped more fully onto the scene, stressing redemption and a need to be saved, both of which endures to this day. According to Will Storr in the book Selfie, that I've already mentioned, the Western move towards Christianity was a sharp turn away from the individual and towards an interest in self denial, temperance, and purity of the soul. The culture moved then from knowing thyself to knowing God. I grew up in a Christian household, and I can personally attest to the staying power of those centuries old beliefs, and it was in full transparency not that fun to grow up in a Christian household, particularly because I was someone who was so darned observant, introspective, and curious about how people think. What might have seemed charming, if not a little precocious in my questions, challenges, and debating when I was young was decidedly not so as I got older, and I think in the church's culture of self denial I was probably deemed headstrong and disrespectful. The fact is, I lost track of how many times I was told that there were simply mysteries that we would never understand, and with all due respect, this fried my noodle and impacted my self-esteem, which was only just being embraced as a concept at the time. I was born in the 60s, and even though the real engine of the human potential movement didn't really get cooking until the 70s, I guess I was lucky because my mom already had an interest in the burgeoning psychological movement of the time, and, and that probably helped me understand and validate the dilemma I found myself in, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So, Christianity had found a solid foothold in the Western world during and after the fall of the Roman Empire, and religion would have dominated likely any study of the mind. The ideal of the self as central had for the most part been uprooted from the cultural landscape over the next 1300 years, and it was likely replaced with a lot of superstition and fear. It was, after all, a time of lots of war, religious wars, famine, disease, political upheaval, and all of. That would have likely restricted scientific inquiry, but there were scholars during this time, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon. They probably provided a foundation for what was to come, but they were also theologians, which meant they were guided by biblical scripture. This was not the case in other areas of the world, however, it was quite fascinating, actually, to read that Islamic scholars between 750 and 1250 CE were the first to propose that mental illness, they were diseases and not evil spirits. India, China, and Persia were all actively studying the relationship of the mind of the self during this period, and, of course, and this is the, you know, all of this is the grossest of generalizations, and there will be exceptions, and I apologize if my historical summarization acts like, you know, fingernails on a chalkboard or anything, for the more historically detailed among you. Of course, there were many incredible and important decisive periods in Western culture since Christianity came on the scene, but I'm sifting for the periods that seem to bear the greatest influence on Western culture in the direction or away from the individual and the importance of the self. Hey, you're listening to the Squeeze, and if you like what you're hearing, there's a whole world of citrus couching to discover.

    Speaker 1 21:16

    We've got an online leadership program, it's called Citrus You, and it features those three key tools you need to be a better leader. Well, to be a better human, we also have a number of mini learning bundles that you can get into, and there's plenty more. If you're interested, you can follow us on Instagram, or check out our website@www.citruscoaching.com and the show resumes now. This journey back through history, as superficial as it may be, is beginning to feel like one of those big pendulums swinging back and forth between the ideals of the self on one side and the denial of self on the other, and after a particularly long swing in the direction of denial of self, the pendulum starts to swing back the other way. Florence, Italy, and the 14th century, this was the epicenter of the Renaissance, that's a French word meaning rebirth. During this time, scholars became fascinated with the ancient texts of Greeks and Romans, and at the patronage of wealthy elites, scholars traveled all around Italy, studying ancient ruins and rediscovering the Greek and Roman texts. They absorbed the Greek and Latin classics, believing that they contained all of the lessons that one needed to lead a moral and effective life. The previous centuries of hardship under the medieval church began to be questioned, and people wondered if perhaps life didn't have to be so hard after all. The study and reflection by those 14th-century philosophers gave rise to a new concept that was called humanism. One of the central tenets of humanism was that man was the center of his own universe. Sound familiar? I don't know, it's all Greek to me. This is where I wish I had a laugh track. Anyway, people were encouraged to question and experiment within the framework of human goodness, and that moral values are founded on human nature and experience. This really had to fly in the face of relying on God for goodness. And then a century later the printing press, that little invention, was invented in Germany, and ideas began spreading faster and further as a result. Knowledge about humanism was suddenly more widely available, and there was a lot of uptake, but as I mentioned, not everyone was celebrating. Humanism went against the grain of Orthodox Christian theology, and by the end of the 15th century, the Inquisition defined humanism as heresy, in spite of the fact that many at the top of the church hierarchy allegedly supported it. Probably one of the better known Inquisition trials of this time was for Galileo in 1633 Remember him? He was the guy who attempted to prove that the earth rotated around the sun and not the other way around? That was not a popular idea with the church, who believed the opposite was true and was in fact unshakable scripture. Galileo ended up spending the rest of his life under house arrest, and it took another 300 years for the church to admit they were wrong, and I thought I took a long time to apologize. Okay, in spite of the church's pushback, the next two centuries were abuzz with philosophers exploring the topic of the self. John Locke, you've probably heard of him. His work influenced the Declaration of the Independence in the US. He argued that all persons are endowed with natural rights to life. Rene Descartes, perhaps best known for his famous quote, "I think, therefore I am, believed that all humans are born with knowledge through the higher power of God. Voltaire, the author of the famous satirical novel Candide, took a dim view of something called hagiography, that was an idealized biography of saints, and converted. Firstly, he took a strong position for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. These positions must have rattled the church something fierce in those early days. Later in the 19th century, I discovered an optimistic, eye-centered faith emerging from within Christianity in the West. I didn't discover it, I discovered the writing about it. This new movement was called faith healing, was also known as the divine healing movement, or mind cure movement. The assertion was that a person's capacity to be healed depended upon their having the quote unquote right beliefs, and was a noticeable step away from the belief that God had ultimate authority in matters of healing the sick.

    Speaker 1 25:40

    Christian Science, not to be confused with Scientology, arrived in 1866 led by Mary Baker Eddy, who felt that the source of all sickness and misery is in the mind, and all you have to do is believe. This approach neatly shoe horned in a little bit of self-agency into an otherwise God-dependent theology. Mary Baker Eddy's book, Science and Health with Keys to the Scripture, was written in 1875 and also, interestingly, rejects the use of medicine. Wouldn't want to be living at that time. Psychology, of course, was heavily influenced by the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and it was not refined as a science until 1879 in Germany, when soul in philosophy was replaced with mind in psychology. Sigmund Freud, most notable perhaps for his introduction of psychoanalysis and the id, the ego and the super ego, based many of his theories on the unconscious motivations of the self. Carl Jung, a follower of Freud's pioneered the idea of a collective unconscious. He's also credited with personality theory, and pretty much every personality assessment I'm familiar with today, except perhaps for the Enneagram, was based on Young's personality archetypes. The MBTI, which you may have heard of, is an incredibly well-known personality assessment instrument commonly used in many of the organizations that I work with, so cultivation of the belief in an even more important self seems to have begun in earnest in the mid 20th century with books you've probably heard of, but may not realize how old they are. How about this one, Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, that was written 1936 and the Reverend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's book, The Power of Positive Thinking, that was 1952 and around the same time Ayn Rand started gaining notoriety in the New York intellectual scene with her philosophy of objectivism and many books, including The Virtue of Selfishness, she was followed closely by her protege Nathaniel Brandon and his self-esteem movement. I first encountered Ayn Rand 30 years ago, starting with her debut novel, We the Living. I suspect it was somewhat autobiographical, given her own history, living through the Russian Revolution. When I remember that book, I always think of that pivotal scene near the end of the novel, where the heroine Kira was attempting to escape Russia alone and on foot during the winter, wearing a white fur coat, one of the last possessions of her bourgeoisie lifestyle. Spoiler alert, a lone soldier on patrol mistook her for a rabbit and shot her, and in the last moments before she died, she contemplated the idea that a life that meant everything to her would never mean as much to anyone else. At least that's what I took it to mean, for whatever reason. And you got to remember, at that time I was barely in my 20s, that interpretation sat well with me. I felt I could relate. And then I went on to read The Fountainhead, and not a bad screen rendition, if you're interested in the movie version, and then, of course, Atlas Shrugged, but you know, beware of the 95 page monolog by the novel's protagonist, John Galt, that was a long one. I'm pretty sure I was ripe for Rand's philosophies, because I think they were counterpoints to my own sort of self-denying Christian upbringing. Rand, of course, was a fierce supporter of the importance of the individual, and I would like to point out, for the record, I no longer hold those views of Rand's work. I can't imagine how perhaps my outlook would be different had I lived through revolutionary upheaval as she did, but clearly from where I sit today, I don't happen to believe that altruism is immoral, and that's just the tip of the iceberg of my critique, but that's not what this podcast is about. A bit of a longer tangent than intended, but by this point you can probably start to feel the importance of the self growing. Now enter stage left post modernism with its hallmarks of skepticism and suspicion of reason, it all took hold towards the latter part of the 20th century, and it challenged the belief that scientific, philosophical, or religious truth is going to explain everything for everyone, and I suppose this is what laid the foundation for the attitude that is so frustratingly prevalent today that. Everyone's perspective is valid, no matter what the context.

    Speaker 1 30:04

    We only need to look back now 60 years to Esalon Institute in Big Sur, California, when that was the birth of the human potential movement, and it really took shape thanks to the culmination of radical ideas of people like Carl Rogers and Aldous Huxley, Will Schultz, Fritz Perl, just to name a few. Carl Rogers coined the term humanistic psychology, and he believed that humans naturally move towards perfection. Aldous Huxley, the well-known author of the book The Doors of Perception, which was also the inspiration for Jim Morrison's band name, by the way, he promoted the well-known but now debunked assertion that humans only use about 10% of their neurons, and he was consumed with the idea of harnessing all of it. Will Schultz, best known for his book Joy, believed that every horrible thing that happened to us was invited by us, but on the plus side, we also had within us the capacity to power and heal ourselves. Sounds like a throwback to Mary Baker Eddy in the 19th century. Fritz Perl, he was an early resident and influencer of the human potential movement. He held radical gestalt group therapy sessions for breaking down people's defense mechanisms that, from some accounts, and you might want to check this out, it's pretty interesting that they were downright dangerous, actually. All in all, many of the practices that are commonplace today, things like yoga, meditation, massage, they all likely benefited from the pipeline between East and West via Esalon. Esalon promoted a unity between Eastern and Western thought in pursuit of healing and consciousness, and of course the overarching premise was the omnipresent focus on the self, so it's interesting for me to take a beat here and consider that my own profession of coaching might never have come into existence had it not been for the foundations of the human potential movement to build on, coaching is all about authenticity, being real, mindfulness and wellness, and the power of the individual with unlimited capacity to transform into better and better versions of ourselves. I say that slightly tongue in cheek. My coaching school's mantra was everyone is creative, resourceful, and whole. It's hard for me to imagine something like coaching existing much before the 20th century. Obviously, I am a fan of coaching. Wouldn't it be just a little bit silly if I weren't? And I believe it has made a tremendous difference for a lot of people, but not everyone. You see, back when I started, I used to believe I could coach anyone, and thinking back on my early zealotry, it makes me cringe a little. I know now, 20 years later, that I am not all things to all people, and I've become much better at discerning the value I have to offer, and perhaps more importantly, the situations where I do not have value to add. It's all about understanding my actual capabilities. Clearly, coaching is a profession where it's not too hard to imagine some magical thinking flourishing. I know from my travels over the last two decades that there have been and probably still are many people out there using the term coaching as a way to over promise and under deliver, probably there are coaches out there who heartily believe in just do what you love and the money will follow, and that right there is one of the main critiques of this industry, and why I cleave so closely to our overseeing ethical body, the International Coaching Federation, and why I work so tirelessly to educate my clients and would-be clients about what I can and cannot do for them. So, have I made it all the way to present day yet? I hope that I've at least managed to hit some of the defining periods that have shaped our Western relationship to the self in what has turned out to be a rather high level and incredibly abbreviated encapsulation, probably I haven't done it 100% but what is clear to me after doing all this research is that I'm starting to understand more clearly how the original phrase I used at the beginning of the podcast, just do what you love and the money will follow. How it could have taken root, and in spite of the lack of logic that I demonstrated earlier, the soil in which it grew was rich with a kind of limitless possibilities mindset for what we were capable of.

    Speaker 1 34:13

    I could have said it was also rich in fertilizer, and that's probably true too. It could only have emerged with the unlimited potential so prevalent in the days of Will Schultz, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Aldous Huxley, and maybe even Socrates. No, no, I take that back, not Socrates. So maybe it goes like this: know thyself, then we swing to know God, and then we swing all the way back to God of the self, that's one heck of a big swing, and I can't help but feel that while the exploration and discovery of the Esalen community in the 70s was fascinating and pivotal, and likely led to many more important inquiries into human nature, not to mention a healthy self-esteem, for whatever that was worth, it was perhaps also a time. When the pendulum had swung the furthest in the direction of the self, and I don't think that has really slowed or reversed yet, making me wonder, can too much emphasis on the self be a detrimental thing? It's not that there wasn't any fallout after the human potential days of Esalen, as Storr explains, Maslow had been carrying out some tests on high-esteeming people that had been causing him some concern, high scorers in my test of dominance, feeling or self-esteem were more apt to come late to appointments with the experimenter, and to be less respectful, more casual, more forward, more condescending, less tense, anxious, and worried, more apt to accept an offered cigarette, much more apt to make themselves comfortable without bidding or invitation, Storr goes on, Maslow wasn't the only human potential guru who'd apparently come to a place of doubt late in life. He goes on to explain that Carl Rogers had become so tired of people just showing up at his door that he sent out a letter that read, in part, quote, "Less self-esteem, please more self-discipline. End quote. It makes me wonder, is it possible to elevate the self so far above everything else that we actually put our overall well-being at risk? And is that what we're seeing now on social media? In his book, Lost Connections, Johann Hari writes, it made me realize we haven't just started doing things alone more in every decade since the 1930s we've started to believe that doing things alone is the natural state of human beings, and it's the only way to advance. We've begun to think, I will look after myself, and everybody else should look after themselves as individuals. Nobody can help you but you, nobody can help me but me. He goes on to write, this is a denial of human history and a denial of human nature. It leads us to misunderstand our most basic instincts, and this approach to life makes us feel terrible. Even given Hari's controversial path as a writer, I do align with this premise. Okay, but let's take a beat here. The historical journey we've taken is just the beginning, and in part two of this episode, we're going to look more deeply at our current culture, the gains and the losses of living at a time in the West when the pendulum has swung perhaps farther than it ever has in the direction of the self. You won't want to miss this, and until next time, you So you've been listening to The Squeeze. Thanks for joining us today. If you want to continue tuning in, don't forget to click subscribe. And, as always, we want to hear your thoughts, your comments, your feedback, and challenges. If there's anything you don't agree with, thanks for joining us. And see you next time

    Unknown Speaker 37:41

    you.

Christina Sestan
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