The Coach
By P.T. Mistlberger
Joe Roach woke up one day from a bad dream. In the dream he had turned into a potato. Oddly, he could still think clearly and, it seemed to him, even speak. But this was an illusion. When speaking, such speech was really occurring only in his head. Or his potato form, at it were.
Joe was a life coach. Therefore this transformation into a potato was distressing. It would jeopardize his ability to work with his clients, for sure. Mercifully, the horrible dream ended just before someone was about to make chips out of him, and Joe awoke, sweating profusely. Turns out he had fallen asleep reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. The irony was frightful.
It was the year 2042, and the global population had reached 9 billion. At that time, approximately 38%, or about 3.4 billion people, had become life coaches. Coaching had become the dominant industry on the planet. The automotive industry had shrunk, and oil and gas had diminished owing the long feared ‘peak oil’ becoming a reality. Farming and agriculture remained ubiquitous, and necessary, to feed the hungry coaches. As it came to pass, everyone was so busy being coached the only viable industry to invest in was coaching itself. To afford your coach, you had to become trained yourself as a life coach and then to attract and prosper from (fleece) your own clients. You then needed to make sure they in turn were trained to become coaches, to ensure their survival and ability to continue to feed you more clients.
The industry became nationalized, and then internationalized. There was a tight pyramidal hierarchy, controlled by the International Ministry of Coaching (IMC). At the top sat the Czar, the Supreme Coach, who spent his day tending to his garden and coaching his vegetables. He was recreating on a mass scale the famous Findhorn experiment in northern Scotland from the 1960s, where a group of New Agers grew giant cabbages and cauliflowers via the power of their intention. Or so it was claimed. They forever cemented the connection between New Agers and cabbages.
Joe Roach lay back in bed and checked his phone. There was nothing on there except for bills and one message from a client who wanted to become a coach.
He thought back wistfully to his early training days. One memory in particular arose. After a training session with his coach-master, Lucy Dividends, they had sat together in a coffee shop. A group of people had walked in and sat at a nearby table. Lucy nodded at one of them. ‘Who are they?’ Joe had asked. ‘Coaches’ replied Lucy.
‘All of them?’ asked Joe.
‘All of them,’ Lucy echoed.
Joe then pivoted to a different topic. ‘Your parents,’ he asked in a low voice. ‘What do or did they do?’
‘Do you need to ask?’ she replied.
‘Are they still together?’
‘No. But they coached each other through the divorce.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘My father is dead. He himself was coached through the dying process by my mother. Sort of like The Tibetan Book of the Dead, that kind of process, where a monk guides the soul to the other side.’
They got up and left the coffee shop. It was a clear sunny day. Outside they joined the throngs walking on the sidewalk toward the central part of town. It was disquieting for Joe to realize that more than a third of these people walking around were life coaches. He imagined that he could pick them out by their furrowed brows, wondering where their next clients could be found.
Client-hunting had become a problem. A type of deviant psychology had to be developed and ratified by the current crop of shrinks responsible for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, to address the issue. Serial-coaches were known to prowl the streets. These were bitter and failed coaches who could no longer support themselves and sought instead to kidnap unwitting people and force them into coaching sessions, extorting funds while they did. A recent scandalous event had occurred when one of the Chief Coaches of the United Coaching Nations had himself held a client at gunpoint demanding five million dollars for a block of 5 sessions. This blockheaded move ended up costing him both his career—he was summarily canceled by the Ministry of General Thought Reform—and his marriage. His wife left him for his coach.
Coaching was expensive, but the supply and demand was shaped rather like the mythic snake that ate its own tail. Coaches could afford pricey coaches because they themselves charged exorbitant fees from their clients. The average coach now charged about $30,000 for a twenty-minute session (sessions had become much shorter in order to accommodate the mass condition of deteriorating attention spans). He or she in turn would funnel the moola up the chain, to their coach, and so on.
Problematic were the ‘poachers’. Poachers were another form of deviant coaches who poached coaches and then used various techniques of blackmail and extortion while demanding their lists of clients. An entire branch of the police, fully funded by the IMC, was developed to deal with the Coach Poachers.
Joe Roach, life coach, had had his own problems with the Coach Poachers. One of them had messed so badly with his mind that he had been forced to enter into a deeper form of life coaching, called death coaching. In death coaching, you had pass through a process where you were led to believe that your coach saw you as nothing more than a dollar sign. The death coach was supposed to pretend that they believed this and would conduct sessions accordingly. It was meant as a type of reverse psychology. Death coaching ultimately failed because it was revealed that too many of the death coaches really did see their clients as mainly dollar signs. One them, later diagnosed as clinically depressed, had even shown up for one of his sessions with his client wearing a t-shirt that said,
Sit still, shut up, pay, get out.
It included a background image of the occultist Aleister Crowley wearing a life-coach ballcap over his shaven dome.
Joe brought up the topic with Lucy while the two of them later on sat in an ice cream parlor.
‘Death coaching was not good for me,’ he ventured.
‘How do you know?’ replied Lucy. ‘How do you know it wasn’t necessary to get you where you are now?’
‘And where is that? A struggling life coach who has nightmares about turning into a potato?’
‘There is a process we’re all engaged in,’ she continued, thoughtfully (she imagined). ‘Each step begets another step. You can’t live your life questioning everything.’
Roach frowned. His ice cream was melting too fast in the summer heat.
He was about to answer her when a notification came up on his geniusphone. A client was having a crisis. The client in question was, of course, a life-coach. Turns out they were dealing with a problematic client themselves that they were having difficulty handling.
Roach excused himself and took his leave from Lucy. A few hours later the client was sitting in Roach’s office unburdening himself. In the course of doing so, he blurted out the name of his difficult client. It was Lucy Dividends.
‘Wait a minute’ Joe Roach exclaimed in surprise. ‘She’s my coach.’
The client looked bored—or more probably, absorbed in his private world-building. ‘What do I care? She’s a client and she pays well.’
Roach stared at him. ‘I’m not sure about the ethics of this. You end up telling me stuff about your client who is my coach. It doesn’t sit well.’
The client rolled his eyes. ‘Whatever. I’ll pay you fifty percent more. I’ve become attached to you. Initiating transference all over again with another coach is a dreadful thing to consider.’
Roach was about to heroically end the coach-client relationship then and there, but this sudden monetary infusion gave him pause. He had many payments owing on many things. Nothing was ever paid off. The Ministry of Lending had him locked in. Fuck it, he’d take the deal.
‘All right, fifty percent increase retroactive to your previous block.’
The client sneered. He knew a mountebank when he saw one. He was one himself.
‘That block was fifty sessions.’
‘Too bad. Take it or leave it. Now what was it you wanted to tell me about Ms. Dividends?’ Roach had steeled himself, ready to have his transference onto Lucy rocked.
‘She’s a kleptomaniac. She steals jewelry.’
Roach stared at him. ‘What jewelry? Fifty-Dollar Store fake beads?’
The client smiled thinly. ‘I’ve been to the Fifty-Dollar Store recently myself, and I assure you, she has her klepto sights set higher. She aims big, that one.’
Roach knew that to be true. Lucy had many big-name clients, including one of the chief administrators of the Cancel Ministry. That was a coveted client.
‘No, she specializes in high end stuff,’ the client went on. ‘She targets secured stores in densely populated urban centres. I don’t know all her tricks. But once she has succeeded in her pilfer, she then approaches the owners of the shop and tries to recruit them as coaching clients.’
Roach had to let that sink it. His coach not only ripped off shopkeepers, she then recruited them as clients to help them deal with their feelings around being ripped off.
For a brief moment Roach was dazzled. The sheer genius of it all. Then he caught himself in his vacuous look. He also, at that moment while gazing at his client, temporarily forgot who was coach and who was client. That was alarming.
The confusion around who was coach and who was client had come to be a recognized mental disorder, included in the latest DSM. It was called Coaching Identity Disorder. This condition had gradually arisen in proportion to the exponentially growing number of life coaches. It had become increasingly easy to blur boundaries and forget roles, especially so when it was not uncommon to find out that your coach’s coach was one of your clients.
As Roach had found out.
Days after this, Roach decided to join a local chapter of Coaching Identity Disorder Anonymous. CIDA, as it came to be known, was a sincere organization run by two recovering life coaches. They had gotten out of the biz when it had become clear to them that shouting at clients over Boom—the future version of Zoom, so called because 84% of it was now used by coaches—did little other than wear out their vocal cords. It just wasn’t worth getting rich over. Pounding principles of life coaching into onscreen skulls was hard work and prime material for a coach’s slide into burn out and depression when faced with the inevitable realization that the coach didn’t really live the principles they shouted about.
Roach attended his first CIDA meeting the following week. He managed to get rid of his coaching clients that day by feigning illness. This was problematic when one of those clients turned up at the same CIDA meeting that Roach was attending. After the meeting he approached Roach and shook his hand.
‘Thought you were sick,’ the client winked.
Fortunately, he was an old guy, washed up and didn’t give a shit about most things anymore. Roach thanked his stars to be spared the shame. He offered him a fifty percent discount on his next session. The old guy shrugged.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Most days I don’t recall my wife’s middle name. Don’t feel bad if occasionally you forget who is coach and who is client.’
As for the meeting itself, Roach gave it a mixed review. On the one hand, the information about the new levels of co-dependency running through society, owing largely to the excess number of life coaches, was eye-opening. Some of the more extreme cases of this relatively new pathology were also discussed, including the case of a life coach who killed one of their clients in a fit of rage after the client insidiously maneuvered their way into the coach’s last will and testament. It was like something out of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Worse yet was the story of a client who disowned her son because the client claimed that they had been replaced by the soul of an advanced extraterrestrial, known as a ‘Walk-in’. The soul that ‘walked in’ to the woman’s body apparently wanted nothing to do with the son languishing in a prison in Washington state.
‘Fuck that shit, baby, I’m E.T., and I’ve got more important work to do. Your planet needs me!’ she had apparently proclaimed. That was the client’s story. But the real problem happened when her life coach forgot that she was her coach and decided that she wanted to become a disciple of the E.T. This in turn caused her to lose her mind and murder her client and then kill herself also, in the hopes that they could both return to their native solar system.
Fortunately, these ghastly tales were relatively rare. Far more common was the general malaise that set in for many life coaches, upon realizing that their profession had become a type of religion overseen by fat cats driving gleaming cars and involved in shady affairs. The corruption that set in was unavoidable. Life coaching had become a type of fundamentalism in which people began to believe that their life had no purpose if they couldn’t control both it and the clients who paid their bills, to such an extent that all worry would be vanquished. In short, people came to believe that the only answer to life, and the only workable profession, was to be a coach.
Of course they all sooner or later found out, and as Roach was becoming increasingly cognizant of, that this was based on a giant illusion. The increasing disillusionment with coaching was growing in the public eye but difficult to address, now that so many relied on their coaching clients for their livelihood. Coaching had become baked into the economy, as it had become baked into the brains of billions of people.
The problem only deepened when life coaches began invading other cultures. They fanned out in waves, like colonial missionaries, to spread the Good Word of Coaching. The Great Coaching Wars of the late 2030s had occurred in such unlikely places as China and India, where the state ministries were involved in losing battles with the coaching phenomenon, which spread almost as quickly, and just as irrevocably, as a virus.
Things had come to a head when waves of coaches sat in Tiananmen Square, in a re-enactment of the 1989 so-called democratic uprising. Southeast Asia experienced veritable floods of Theravadin Buddhist monks converting to life coaching. The Zen monasteries, what was left of them in Japan, were overrun. The Pope himself ignited a firestorm of controversy when it was revealed that in a moment of exhaustion, he fell down in the Vatican and hit his head, and that he was overheard in his recovery mumbling about Jesus coaching Peter.
***
Joe Roach rolled over in bed, sweating profusely. What a horrible nightmare! It had all been just a dream within a dream. In fact it was the year 2020. He recounted some basic details from his life, just to confirm his sanity. All was relatively normal. Coaches were not thundering on the plains like the bison of last century. Not yet, anyway.
Still, the dream troubled him greatly. He considered what he should do.
He emailed his coach.