When one considers of the concept of a “life-coach,” it is perhaps easy to conjure up images of cunning grifters with soft voices peddling McMindfulness to the wounded in search of mending. I’ll fully admit as a hospital chaplain and spiritual director – two fields not entirely unrelated to life coaching – this is a common stereotype amongst the more skeptical of the spiritual-but-not-religious consumers. Modernity has a wicked way of reducing all experience to an individualistic level, trapping us in our own little bubbles and selling us on escape plans. The life coach, at worst, exploits our lack of self-confidence in a world where self is the only god. But, at their best, they are a helping hand in a world where community is hard to come by, gently encouraging that Divine spark out from under the weight of our trauma and into the light.
Anne St. Pierre’s masterful documentary Your Higher Self holds this absurdity and beauty in perfect tension, inviting the viewer’s critiques of the coaches to be confronted by their empathy for the coached. She accomplishes this by refusing to flinch, allowing the camera to linger at length upon each subject as they explore exercises that range from taking a cold plunge to reenacting their birth trauma. Following 15 different coaches in a wild variety of settings, the film offers very little in the way of explanation instead opting to plop the viewer in media res. The effect of this is a sort of hypnotic disorientation where we move from one setting to another without warning. It becomes apparent, however, that the director is, in a way, honoring the sacredness of life coaching – these are highly individualistic experiences, it is not for us to know their unique details.
Without interviews or information cards, the only real framing device is found in a training program for life coaches that’s revisited more than any other setting. Behind a two way mirror, students observe their classmates meeting with clients, offering reflections on their techniques. This serves to contextualize every scene that plays around it – there’s a real earnestness to their learning, their reflecting. These do not feel like exploitative capitalists – they too are burdened by their own unique wounds, searching for a way to heal as they become healer. In a pivotal scene towards the start of the film, an instructor asks his students “what is life coaching?” They answer variously: “a coach creates a safe space,” “they are not a counselor,” and – most importantly – “a coach does not explore the past, they are focused on the present and the future.” And so the viewer is invited into the present – to listen to groups role play generational trauma, to watch a timid dominatrix offer her first spanks, to listen to all manner of self-doubt met with confrontation and encouragement.
But as endearing as many of these scenes are, they are balanced by ones that shock the viewer back into the reality of this racket. Scenes where life couches film their self-aggrandizing promotional videos, billboards promising the secret to unlocking the “true you,” seemingly AI powered VR coaches who threaten a dystopian future where computers tell us what it means to be human. The viewer is asked with every new scene, is this bullshit or is this beautiful?
I can’t say I’m any clearer on my opinion after watching this film but I can say that I loved every mesmerizing second of it. The way the director utilizes long shots of individual faces in moments of unguarded vulnerability only to cut to either the profound or confounding statements of the coaches serves to challenge one’s assumptions time and time again. It’s honestly masterful. The coached are seemingly benefitting from their experience, surrendering themselves and laying claim to their inner power – so who am I to judge that someone’s getting paid to get them there?