The DreamWho becomes a life coach? Jane talks to Patrick Sheehan, a researcher who has found a surprising answer: many coaches couldn’t find success elsewhere. Why do people who can’t do teach? We also learn more about Jane’s life coach, her bona fides, and what sets her apart from the scammers.
Pushkin.
Hey, Dream listeners, if you like this podcast, you're going to love the book. Yeah. I wrote a book. It's called Selling the Dream and it's coming out March twelfth, twenty twenty four, on Atria. It's about all of your favorite characters from MLMs and some that you've never even heard of. I hope check it out. Previously on the Dream, what is neuro linguistic pro program?
Well, neural linguistic program means neuro the mind body connection.
I don't really agree with the advice.
I feel like.
It's teaching people to deny their intuition. Okay, what happens is we come to you with this information and you say, oh, it's something wrong with their mindset, and so I just think, for lack of a better word, it's all bullshit.
Do I have to be doing this all the time? So what is the NLP?
Short?
Jesus, I just want you to give me.
The Let me give you a process.
In retrospect, what I'm about to tell you was super dumb of me. But before we started nosing around in this world, I seriously thought that coaches had to have some sort of expertise in whatever they were coaching people in I'm too old to have assumed this, but like I thought, relationship coaches should be happily coupled up and finance coaches should be set for life. Soccer coaches should know how to play soccer. But as with soccer coaches who don't know how to play soccer, or music critics who can't play an instrument, or therapists who are some of the most Kogoa bananas friends I have yet, No, you don't really need to know anything. All you need to have is gumption and maybe a lack of imposter syndrome. Anyone can do this, which I warned Dan was going to be a problem for me in finding a coach. I want them to be fun and funny. I don't want a whiff of their life being fucked up though, mm hmm, so, which is something that I don't mind in a.
Therapist, right, weirdly right, Okay, Well that's an interesting thing.
I mean to me, that's interesting because that you.
Know, like their lives are fucked up.
There's no one whose life isn't slightly fucked up.
I don't want to know it. I don't want to even be I want to not be able to tell because I want to be like, I want people to not be able to tell that my life's fucked up?
Right, Okay, so I want people.
To look at me after this and just be like, how does she do it? How does she have it all? Meanwhile, nothing fundamentally has changed about my life, right, it's just my attitude. Dan's right, though, everyone is fucked up and hardly coach or coach adjacent person we talked to pass this test. Take doctor John James Santangelo, PhD. That PhD, even according to him, isn't even really that legit.
I just wanted the PhD after my name looks good on the book.
Wait, where'd you get that piece?
It's online university and the only spec they only they're specialists inside NLP CBT and also hypnosis. It's very it's which.
One which which? Which online university?
It's called man University backy somewhere.
Manny Mana Mana.
And that may be wrong, who knows.
I looked it up and there are two Mana universities. One is a Christian college and one was an online university That now takes you to a four oh four error page. What about Jennifer? She was stalled out for years making no money at Arbond when Ray Hogden came along and selected her to become a coach. And Ray Higden, what are his credentials? Well, according to his own biography, he failed at twelve MLMs. Then he joined a coin collecting MLM called Numis and worked his way up the rink so high, and things went so well that he launched an offshoot of the coin collecting company that did travel MLM stuff like a travel agency, but in a pyramid shape. Here's an ad for that.
You know, back in two thousand and nine, I was in foreclosure. I was dead broke, and I was really hungry. If you followed my career in any way, shape or form, what you're about to see will dwarf the last four years. It will make it look like I was in slow motion. Because we are learning directly from the top incomeingers in the company. We're learning directly from multimillion dollar producers. And it is time to put the game on its head. It's time to really really step this thing up. And so we are fired up more than we've ever been fired up. And if you have any interest at all, check out the videos at Rayhaggen dot com. Force Slash travel and for those of you in teams, start living already, get ready to run. It's going to be fun. We're going to do some amazing things and it is about to get crazy. So if you're watching this and you're not yet in teams, start living. Check out Raye Hagden dot com.
Force sounds to me like raise mostly on expertus sound and like an expert nothing. So at a certain point I had to acknowledge I was living a fantasy. Coaches don't need to have any firsthand experience with the kind of success or happiness or self actualization they're selling. And who's checking anyway? There's no licensing board or anything which begs the question who are coaches really? Who becomes a coach who puts themselves out there as someone who knows how to do life? And why why would you do that? Today we're going to start with an answer based on actual research from an actual expert.
My name is Patrick Shean, and I just completed my PhD in sociology and I'm starting a new job at Stanford as a post doctoral researcher.
In what sociology?
What kind of what do you mean?
Sociology is an expansive discipline. I'm really interested in sort of economic sociology and sort of like the charismatic in the economy, some of these elements that are not rational about what we buy and sell and what we believe in. So I started graduate school to do a PhD in sociology around twenty seventeen, and this was a time when the news was lit up with automation is going to change everyone's jobs, future of work, Everyone's going to need to retrain. I was particularly hooked on this story about truck drivers are going to get put out of jobs and they're going to need to become nurses.
Welly because there's going to be automated automated trucks.
I mean this was yeah sixteen, it was going to be automated trucks next year.
You know how these things go.
And so when I started looking for topics to study, I wanted to see what was gonna happen to people like retraining when they lose their jobs. So I went looking for places that do retraining for unemployed people or dislocated workers. And this is in Austin, Texas, and all I could find were these places that are mostly called job clubs or job search clubs that unemployed people go to once a week and there's a speaker that gives them some kind of advice on the job search or coping with unemployment and all the things that come with that. And it's very much kind of group therapy stuff where everyone's looking at each other and encouraging each other. And most of the places I was is kind of like North Austin. We're all like older unemployed professionals, very kind of white collar. A lot like IBM and Dell have these big places in were they.
It was it like conference rooms in an industrial park, That's what I'm.
It was more like churches. Oh two out of the three big ones I went to were churches. Ranges of secular versus how serious. There were prayers at the beginning, and some were at just community centers, you know, and they were kind of nonprofit groups. And so but you go to these things and I expect that people are going there and getting retrained, and they're going to get and they're going to learn how to code and become a coder or something. And all they really got were these kind of motivational talks. And so the people that come to these things every week are career coaches, and every week there's someone giving a talk about how to improve yourself, improve your resume, change your mindset. Read there you go. At first, I'm just shocked by that because it's just self help, you know, for these poor people who just lost their jobs and they're worried about their mortgages, and they're just like motivational. Like I'm already suspicious about self help as an answer to unemployment, you know, structural problems, and then you're told to like improve your mindset. But then this extra thing where it's like there are everyone's an expert and there are no experts, and we're helping each other. So I sort of pursued that kind of question and trying to the main thing I was trying to figure out is like how do people think these people are experts? And how does one become an expert in career coaching when you're unemployed?
Right?
Well, I think it's probably a prerequisite, honestly, Like I don't have time to become a career coach because I have a job.
Yeah, but you would think, right. The first thing I was trying to figure out is like, what are they telling them? Is the problem here? Like what are they diagnosing as the problem that everyone is because everyone is there is not only losing money or you know, doesn't have a paycheck, but also is like it's a lot of men that had technical jobs for a long time and their identity was really tied to their work, and so there's having a kind of identity collapse.
At the same time.
And so I found there was three different kinds of stories that these coaches would tell. One was that you're unemployed because the problem here is a technical problem. You don't understand how to find a job today. And all of this played on their age often, but it was like getting a job in this era, Yeah, it's like how do you get.
A job today?
When I was young, I used to be a yellow pad and a pencil. Now you need to know how to master LinkedIn networking is more important than ever resume and interviewing, blah blah blah. So one of the diagnoses is like, I'm going to teach you, and this is where they present their expertise. I'm going to teach you how to get a job by teaching you how to master this kind of technical system of getting it job. I'm going to teach you how to network. You get to these really kind of weird like role plays of networking. I'm going to show you how to up your LinkedIn, change your photo, We're going to test different kinds of titles and blah blah blah. So one diagnosis like this technical problem. Second one is this sort of mindset calling problem. Essentially, what they're saying there is that the reason you're unemployed is that you have the wrong sort of orientation towards work. A couple like two sub things in that one is like kind of the mindset problem, which is you can't get a job because you have these limiting beliefs that are holding you back from seeing the opportunities that are in front of you. And you're well aware of that kind of thing. But I can give you example limiting beliefs.
I just immediately think of nexium.
Yes, yeah, yeah, and NLP and really weird a lot of NLP and a bunch of practices that they would lead us in the group of like power poses and power poses.
Power poses are a big one. What to do one stand up? And yeah, my favorite.
My favorite is hands, you know, fists at the hit.
You can also cross your arms.
I do that just naturally because you're a but you know about those It's like, okay, this this arch her from Harvard said that if you do these things and raise your confidence and you perform your hands up one is like a triumphant.
V Yes, I would never do that.
You're supposed to do this thing in the bathroom before your interview, okay, like stand in the mirror and cross your arms and be kind of badass in order to prove your confidence. This is like one of the solutions their suggestions to this diagnosis of a mindset problem. Other ones that we had was like visualization. You know, the one I'm remembering now is like, visualize yourself getting this job. Close your eyes, see it in a picture frame in front of you.
You getting that job.
Go out and grab that picture frame with your two hands, raise it above your head, plunge your body into that vision so that you can feel all of the good stuff about succeeding. Then we scrunched it down into a ring and put on our fingers to carry with us or whatever. But these are the kind of these are the kind of solutions that they offer for a problem of limiting beliefs, you know, not believing in yourself unemployed people listen to one of those talks, and then they'll tell me like, yeah, I think the problem is My problem is that I'm an I and FJ and my boss was an e NTG or whatever. A lot of personality tests. But people will say, like, the reason I can't get a job is because I'm a sensing intuitive. But they'll tell me that that's the problem. They lost their job. That's why they lost their job and why they can't get a new one. And then I talked to them a while for a while, and then I learned that they actually lost their job in a reorganization, you know, the jobs were sent to India.
Or they shut down the division.
Yeah.
And then I say what's what and they're like, well, you know, yeah, but.
It's magical thinking.
Yeah, but personality test is something that you can focus on. Mindset is something that you can do yourself. But then the weird thing that happens is after a few weeks, I start to notice that the people, let me say it through one person. There's a woman I met named I think I call her Diane. I change all the names for my research sits at the back of the thing with me used to work at Dell got laid off twice, two or three times, maybe early fifties, and I just chat with people. I'm doing ethnographic research right and taking notes and observing everything, and I get to know her. She's, you know, looking for a job, trying to figure it out, and totally normal like everyone else they talk to. And then I go back the next week and she looks a little bit more dressed up and she's wearing a blazer, and instead of sitting down next to me, she walks to the front of the room and she's this week's guest speaker, and she introduces herself as a life coach and expert motivational guru.
And one week after you were sitting in the back.
I mean I had got to know her over three weeks maybe, and she'd never mentioned this, you know, not too deep. But and then all of a sudden, she's at the front the room. It's like she put on a blazer and she they have a parking spot for like this week's guest speaker. She parks there, and all of a sudden, she's an expert, you know, in the room, even though I know she's looking for a job, but she's helping other people, and she gives a talk that's called like how to improve yourself to get your dream job or something like that. And at that moment, I was like, what is going on here? You know, I already could see the group therapy stuff going on, but here is like very clearly, and not only does she go to the front of the room, everyone's taking notes, you know, people take notes, and she now has status. The pitch that you're going to come to know and that you're gonna take up if you want to coach is kind of like this hero's journey kind of conversion narrative, which maybe I'll say, which is just what all these coaches say at the front of the room, which I'm sure you're familiar with, which is I worked at Dell for fifteen years, and they can relate to everyone in the room and they're doing eye contact and tapping people and saying, I see you Jim in the back. We used to work on both. I worked at Dell for fifteen years and then out of the blue, I was laid off. I didn't see it coming. I was maybe in a stupor of you know, corporate drone work, and I was immediately crushed and I was in the dark, and I was depressed, and everything was falling apart.
My wife was going to leave me.
And then I had this realization that I shouldn't give you know, control of my income to one person. I should strike out on my own. Or I realized that I never really wanted to be a software engineer. I wanted to be a fashion designer. I wanted to be an artist. And they read like The Artist's Way or something like that. There's a moment where they have this sort of moment of conversion and epiphany that they've been doing it all wrong. And then they change their attitude. They realize that this layoff is not a loss, but it's actually an opportunity that's like a key crucial thing. It's like you change your mindset about like this is not the end of your career, this is the beginning of something new. And then through that they trek through the dark, they learn things about themselves. They realize what their true passion is. Once they have the courage and right mindset to throw themselves at their true passion.
They have made it all click.
And then the thing is, their true passion always happens to be coaching other people. To find their true passion. That's like the really weird thing these professionals who tie their identity so closely to their work. It's a very American thing. When you lose that, it is really really hard. And I want to look at that and say it was just a paycheck, dude, like you'll get another job.
It It'll be fine.
People take it really really hard and being able to turn around and pick up a new professional identity. Stop introducing yourself as I'm out of work and start saying I'm an entrepreneur. I'm CEO of Career Navigation two thousand and five or whatever.
You know.
That is huge and they change it on their LinkedIn and they say, I'm actually I'm not looking for work with you know, the Searching for Work Climate panel. I'm CEO of Transitions Incorporated. That is a reparation of their like identity that is really important to them, even more than the money. Because I interviewed a ton of these people, most of them don't hardly make anything.
I was going to ask, is there what does that look like?
My impression of the coaching world, like money wise, is that it's very highly concentrated, so there's very few people that make a lot of money and it sort of compounds, and these are like the Tony Robbins at the peak of it. And there's a lot of people faking it until they never make it. Okay, okay, until they can get their own job, because oftentimes they're pursuing this coaching thing while also looking for a job.
Okay.
So so Diana, well just go back to her is. I followed her for about three months and while she was doing this trying to get this coaching stuff's going and trying to find a job, and she wasn't able to land another job. And I had a last interview with her at a diner where I was asking her how it was going, and then she's you know, she's says coaching's going great and doesn't really have any clients, but you know, she's convincing herself that the coaching is going great. And at the end of the conversation she mentioned that she's been watching YouTube videos of how people live out of their cars and kind of make it work.
What.
Yeah, So this is like this quiet slowly going into the night of like precarty economic precarity from like a Dell employee, which is a good deal in Austin, Texas down to like, maybe I need to live out of my van because my mortgage payments are really I'm running out of savings.
Here, but spending that as a positive. No one can see you nodding on them.
Yeah, I mean, it's this weird kind of in interviewing people, there's this weird kind of like self gaslighting thing going on. It feels like where all you can see the only problems that you can see are within you. The larger thing that coaches are doing is they're trying to tell you that your problems are not about power struggles or not about politics.
They're about personality essentially.
Right.
These are things you can do that sort of validate that diagnosis, and they're endless things you can turn up, turn up to explain why your personality is the problem in your career. And so they'll take you through endless of the endless things like this until you feel like you've found the golden nugget that explains why you can't get a job.
Does it feel good? Did you notice? Does it feel good for people to be told that their personality needs to change?
That's an interesting one because I found that people were bizarrely open to these kind of critiques in a kind of vulnerable spot, and particularly in these kind of group therapeutic vibe. Maybe it's the people that select into these places that are more open to that. Even tough guy IBM dudes or you know, they think of themselves as engineers, yeah, would break down into some of these personality things and really say, yeah, you know, I didn't realize I'm so intuitive. And these coaches also like step into and leverage this larger sort of declining trust in institutions and sort of expert authority, expert systems. More generally, we see it in health, we see it in science stuff of all kinds. We can go into it if you want, but there's this general sense, and there's a bunch of sociological reasons behind it, that the experts are out of touch. They are not taking care of us anymore. We're in charge of our own careers, our own health, our own marriage is all individuated. And coaches come in and they go and critique those official experts that are far away in those organizations with acronyms. They'll say things like that and say that I'm I'm like you, and let me let me get this this sociology thing that I like Max Weber, famous sociologists, had this typology of experts and their authority. And two of the things he positioned were he used the examples of the divine religious authorities, the priests and the prophets. The priests are the institutional, credentialed experts in salvation goods. And the reason people believe in the priests is because they wear the robe and they have that big church behind them. But the priests, particularly in uncertain times, are in danger of losing their grasp over the laity by looking to out of touch. And at these times, these prophets can come up from the laity. They know the people very well, they know what they're thinking, what they're feeling, how uncertain they are, and what they need at that time, and they stand on a little soap box, not at the front of the pew, and they say, this is what you need.
You know, the end is nigh. I'll take you.
The beginning of life of Brian.
That's right, that's right.
But there's always this tension between like types of experts in how they gained credibility and legitimacy.
And one way is credentials.
And one way is I know you so well, I am you and I have experienced exactly what you're doing. And which part of the way you get credibility as a prophet is you critique the priest and you say they don't haven't listened to you, they haven't been there for you. Things are crazy, the things they've been teaching don't work. And so the same thing I think happens with career coaches. But all these other coaches, I mean, health coaches will say Big Pharma doesn't care about you. They just want to pump you full of blah blah blah. Finance coaches will say financial systems rigged against you, it's a rat race. Career coaches will say the old forty year career.
Is a sham.
And I have a different way, and I've been there and I've failed with you. I used to be in the red, I used to not know who I was. I failed, and then I learned something and then I escaped. And that has something to it. There's a way that that critiquing the official experts brings more credibility to this person.
Turns out that been there, done that quality was absolutely what I needed from a coach. I didn't need perfection. I didn't need someone so unrelatable and so put together that i'd kind of hate her. I did, after a long search, actually find a coach, and my coach Jesse. She's a regular person with a difficult life, just like you and me. The thing that makes her special is that she uses those difficulties that she's still going through as an inspiration for helping others. Like she doesn't pretend it's in her past. That's less cheesy to me. Coming up, we're going to get to know my coach Jesse, who I think is more qualified for the difficult task of coaching me. Ladies and gentlemen, My coach Jesse, like I say, I like her because she's a real person and she doesn't hide any of it.
I'll tell you a little bit about I want to hear all about you about me.
Yeah.
So, I will be fifty years old this year. I have three children that I gave birth to and one adopted child, my oldest child. And that's not the first child that I adopt and grows out and leaves, but this one stayed and I love her. If he says, I have two girls, two boys, anyway, I am a very high functioning, depressed woman. Me too, very high functioning and the fact that and very codependent.
You know.
It's like my kids need me, my husband needs me, people need me. And the minute that I don't feel that way, I have my sad days.
So I'm an immigrant.
I was born and raised in Mexico City, but my parents are from all of you know, Central America.
Her parents came to the US illegally when Jesse was just eight years old and left her behind in Mexico with an aunt for years, and eventually she applied to college in Los Angele, near her parents, but then she lost her visa.
You know, a lot of things happened.
You know.
I had to lie a lot to come to United States, fake paperwork to get here because my parents came to United States illegally and they immigrated me with that amnesty you know paperwork back then, I mean too much to go into, but they lied about my age. I had fake documents just to come to the United States. But in Mexico a lot of things could be just paid for, not really legal. You know, someone's just a side eye to get me out here. Anyway, I stayed here illegally and the rest is history.
Right.
Yeah, When I described Jesse to people, I always start with how hot she is, Like a total jerk. I didn't realize it when we met up to start this coaching thing, but I'd actually seen her in my neighborhood before, like at the grocery store and stuff. You guys, you guys, she looks like a fly girl. And if you aren't old enough to know that is, get with it, nerds. When she was still at college, she started doing really cheap fitness classes in the park near school, just walking up to ladies who look like they could use a little help. That went great, and she began incorporating some of her spiritual beliefs, which I don't totally understand, but she does, like full moon fasting and stuff. And she puts meal plans together for people and life plans. And she says that a big part of why she loves her job and why she's good at it is because she gets to live vicariously through the clients she works with. She gets to encourage them to do things she can't.
I've never been able to travel.
I mean, I hear about a tear up. I have a few minutes.
I am going to tear up because some people are just so blessed. I have never been able to take a vacation outside of this country with my children. My children cannot travel unless unless they go with a different family. I can't show my kids. I can't go to Old Salvador. I can't go to Mexico, can't show my kids my history.
Where I come from, where I used to play. And that's why I sacrifice everything so I can live in a neighborhood where my children grew up and go to school because it's so important for them. And if I can just give them that for right now and know that, and that's the only thing that hurts me, Like believe me, I didn't give a shit about what my parents did to me, because I'm overcoming that and every day in a different way, it's going to affect me, or every year, whatever it is, it's going to affect me. But what's affected me more is the fact that they didn't help me. They're American citizens, for God's sake, they travel everywhere. They didn't help me, And that is one thing that I can't forget. I'll forgive them poor things like who knows where they were going to maybe they didn't have money and whatnot.
But I can't forget that, and I feel trapped in the United States. That's not my country, but this is all I know. I pay higher Texas and everyone my APR and everything is huge if I can't even get finance. But I live in a pretty badass apartment. You know, I have two teslas. I mean, you know, I'm extremely blessed. I'm extremely blessed.
Jesse and I have been meeting twice a week now for months. We work out together, or actually she just watches me work out and yells at me for an hour at seven o'clock in the morning twice a week, which I do not like at all, But I'm doing it because I'm trying to follow through for both this fucking podcast, but also because I was so miserable when I met her and she promised this would help. She begs me not to eat fast food, which echoes in my head head when I'm in my car and I'm hungry. Sometimes it actually stops me from going to Taco Bell. Jesse encouraged me to have surgery on a big uterine fibroid I've been ignoring on the advice of my doctor. My doctor literally said just ignore it, and dear listener, I had the surgery in April, and I have only bled once since then. Mildly turns out I may have been a menopause for way longer than I thought, and the fibroid might have been doing all the bleeding. Anyway, that's a huge deal. I'm on hormone replacement therapy now. And I wouldn't have figured it out if Jesse hadn't sort of bullied me into getting it taken care of, even though her reasons were a little whacky.
This fibroid which we're going to magically remove, Like, we're going to remove it, and we're going to figure it and we're going to because what so right now, you're just staying alive. You're just staying you know, You're just like I'm doing the best that I can with what I have. Let's just take that element that shouldn't be in you. Let's just remove it because it's sucking the life at you.
Let's remove that. And once we remove that.
Let's give your body all that it's lost emotionally physically. We want to keep you at your highest level of consciousness and at your most optimized health with this inside you.
I want to show you a picture of it. Let me see if I can find not to be crazy looking.
It's that.
Oh my god, here's the thing. I just like her. I wouldn't have liked her if she were quote unquote perfect, and we've gotten really close. I consider her a friend, an eighty five dollars an hour friend. But still, I mean is that that's not more expensive than my actual friends, because like I buy dinner, you know.
Uh.
Anyway, she doesn't make me do the fasting thing or ayahuasca, but she does make me slow down and think about my choices, move my body, respect my body and my mind. And I'm super privileged to have in my life. I totally recognize that from Jesse. I welcome all the ooey guey mindset talk, and it's actually doing something. So take that science coming up on the dream.
So I'm Jesse Lee Ward.
Some people know me as Bossley or the People's mentor, you know. But at any rate, so I do a lot of things, sure, but I am the number one network marketer in the world.
I also have an education. The Dream is written, hosted, and executive produced by me Jane Marie. Our producer is Mike Richter, with help from Nancy Golumbiski and Joy Sandford. Our editor is Peter Clowney. The Dream is a co production of Little Everywhere in Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content, exclusive binge opportunities, and ad free listening across our network for just six ninety nine a month. Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, and while you're there, please sign up for our newsletter. To find more Pushkin podcasts, Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your shows.
