Happy International Worker’s Day from Global Focus Coaching! This year we are reflecting on the meaning of May Day, a labor holiday celebrated around the world that commemorates unions protests in the United States, specifically the Chicago Haymarket Tragedy of 1886, where a bomb exploded in a crowd of civilians.
Eight people were accused of setting off the bomb, and seven sentenced to death, despite some of them not being present at the riot that day. Their trial was widely criticized as unfair and politically motivated— those accused of the bombing all held similar political beliefs that the capitalism system exploits workers and should be dismantled.
Their main demand? An eight-hour work day.
To this day, the Haymarket Tragedy is commemorated with the May 1 celebration of International Worker’s Day and is a time for expressions of global solidarity and labor rights. Ironically, this holiday is no longer officially celebrated in the United States because of public perceptions that labor organizers were dangerous radicals. During the Second Red Scare at the height of McCarthyism in the United States in the 1940’s and 1950’s, the US government created a new Labor Day in September to detach the holiday from its leftist origins as a part of the idealogical project of containing communism to combat the Soviet Union.
Does any of this sound familiar? What does this have to do with you, or with the coaching industry?
For one thing, most of us are coaching within a global capitalist context. Although coaching has many cultural origins (check out our Re-telling the History of Coaching post), much of the coaching industry is embedded in the modern workplace. In many cases, coaching is offered as a benefit to employees to improve their experiences. As the coaching industry rapidly expands, we also see more people portraying coaching as a shortcut that shields you from the capitalist context, offering snake oil promises of four-hour work weeks and six-figure monthly incomes (skip to minute 8:52 of this interview with Jenny to hear our thoughts on this).
For us, coaching isn’t a secret workaround to escape from wage capitalism. We’re not interested in protecting ourselves from unjust systems while everyone else continues to be crushed by them. Many of the coaches who learn with us work with clients who are directly tackling the issue of social and labor rights. We view coaching a much-needed human skill that has been co-opted by the capitalist system but doesn’t belong to it. As Briana loves to note, many of the “ills” that clients bring into coaching sessions are connected to the basic struggles of existing within a modern capitalist system and the values inherent to that system. As we continue to grow our understand of the facets of the human experience that can benefit from coaching, understanding our relationship to labor and our inherent human rights is essential.
As professionals, how do we offer coaching in a values-aligned manner while also acknowledging our real material needs for our livelihood? It’s important to us that we equip our coaches-in-training with more than just small business skills. A lot of business advice for new coaches advises you what to believe, and what not to feel. Don’t feel awkward talking about yourself. Don’t undervalue your services. Believe in your worth.
Both of us remember feeling frustrated with this type of advice. When we launched our first individual coaching practices, we had no idea how to run a business (spoiler alert: we’re still learning), and a lot of the advice out there felt inauthentic to who we were and how we wanted to show up in the world. For us, that process has been a long one, and at times, a messy and uncomfortable one. One of the most important ingredients for us in finding our voice has been time. The more we practice telling our own story, the more we understand the core of our message and the more people we find who resonate with it. Real talk, though: it’s been hard work.
Coaches who are launching their own practices navigate their own relationship to labor, money, and time as they run small businesses and find other ways to incorporate coaching professionally. During our coaching program, we dive into the deep feelings around our time, labor, and money, including fear, resentment, identity, and sense of worth— not as business liabilities to gloss over or “fix but as feelings to acknowledge and be deeply present with. It’s important to us that you walk away from our programs with the tools they need for deep inquiry about your own relationship to labor.
Wishing you all a happy May Day!
In solidarity,
Briana & Jenny