60. Enlightenment and ancestral coaching frameworks

If you've ever sat in a coaching session and felt like the framework was useful but somehow too small, too constricting, like something essential was being left out... I'm inviting you to find out what that something is, and where it went.

Listen to hear more about:

• The centuries-old philosophical tradition that every life coach is operating inside of without knowing it — and the specific blind spots it created
• What European philosophers actually encountered in the Americas that catalyzed their most famous ideas (and why that history was deliberately suppressed)
• Why "What do you want?" might be the most loaded question in coaching — and what it assumes about who you are
• What a coaching practice rooted in ancestral wisdom could look like, and why the coming world is going to demand it

If you've been sensing that the relentless focus on individual goals, linear progress, and mindset isn't quite enough — that something older and deeper is asking to be honored in your work — this episode is my attempt to give you the language and the lineage for what you already know.

Transcript

Welcome to another episode of Liberatory Business. I am your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.

Okay, so today's episode is a little different from what I usually do. It's a little longer, it's a bit more unapologetically intellectual, and it might require a little bit of patience from you. There's some history, there's some philosophy in here that might be like, oh my God, where are we going? But I promise I'm gonna take you somewhere that's worth it.

And here's why I think this matters, whether you are a coach, a practitioner, a healer, or someone who's on the receiving end of some of these things. If you've ever sat in a coaching session and felt like something was missing — like the framework is useful but somehow too small, too constricting — this episode might explain why. If you've ever felt like the relentless focus on individual goals and individual accumulation and mindset and "what do you want?" and "go after it" was leaving something out, but you couldn't quite name what — this is my attempt to articulate it. And if you're someone like me who carries ancestral wisdom, who comes from a lineage outside of Europe, and you've been trying to figure out how to practice in a way that honors that, I want this episode to give you language and grounding for what you might already be sensing.

My thesis today is this: life coaching as we know it is built on a specific philosophical tradition that I think most coaches don't know about. They don't know that they're operating inside of it. And that tradition is failing in being of use to the rapidly changing world. The way forward requires us to look at what that tradition left behind, what its gaps are.

So let's get into it.

Life coaching is enlightenment philosophy in casual clothes

When you think of life coaching, you can envision Instagram reels of people giving advice and inspirational slogans, vision boards, the invitations to "design your life." It all feels very modern, right? It feels like a product of our times, of social media and self-help culture, the wellness industry.

But the thing is, what's underneath all of that is actually a surprisingly old and serious set of ideas. Ideas that trace a direct line back to the intellectual revolution that remade Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. I'm talking about the European Enlightenment.

Now some of you might be familiar with this and others might be like, wait, what? So let me give you the quick rundown. The European Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that reshaped how Western civilization thinks about everything in a really dramatic way. It's how we went from a world where the Christian Church was at the center of everything to the basically secular and materialist world that we live in today.

Enlightenment philosophers shifted the center of authority from God — which had always been the center of authority since the medieval times, and before that in the Roman times there was a pantheon of gods — to the self. From theology to reason, to rationality. From the church to the individual. They went against the entire institutional, moral, and even political order of medieval Europe — the monarchy, the church, and the entire doctrine that says your place in society, your place in the world, is fixed by God.

And a lot of the ideas that we now take for granted, that feel like they're common sense and like they were always here, are actually artifacts of the Enlightenment. The separation of church and state — that's an Enlightenment idea. Individual human rights — that didn't always exist, it's only a few centuries old, comes from the Enlightenment. Freedom of speech, same thing. Constitutional democracy, same thing. The scientific method, same thing. The entire scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, could not have taken place without the Enlightenment preceding it. The very idea that a government has to answer to its people and not the other way around — another Enlightenment idea.

So these are most of the bedrock assumptions of modern, secular, liberal society. They can all be essentially traced back to this movement. It was a really, really big deal, and it's hard to overstate how different and subversive and heretical these ideas were at the time. You're challenging God, you're challenging the church, the monarchy — this is a really big deal.

And you might have heard of the names of some of these thinkers. Kant, Descartes, John Locke, Montesquieu. Immanuel Kant said one of the Enlightenment era's most famous slogans — sapere aude — which means "dare to know." This is an invitation to stop outsourcing your thinking. Be the author of your own understanding, right? Because we used to just delegate our thinking to the church. But now — no, take back your own thinking.

And I'm sure you've heard Descartes' maybe even more famous cogito ergo sum — "I think, therefore I am." The thinking mind becomes the very proof of existence, as opposed to God. Again, very revolutionary idea at the time.

So between these ideas, what got built was the idea of this autonomous self. And that is what the coaching world is selling today — a rational, autonomous intellect that knows itself through its own cognition, through rational thinking alone.

These thinkers argued for the sovereign individual, the primacy of reason over religion, and faith in linear progress. From these premises, a whole worldview emerged — the ones that are everywhere today in coaching worlds. One that says you can change your beliefs. You can change who you are. You know best what's good for you. You set a goal, you go after it. You can achieve what you want through strategy and intention and effort, and you can have the life that you design on your own terms.

These are not neutral, universal human ideas. They are the core tenets of a particular movement that comes from a particular time in European history.

And by the way, the history and philosophy nerd inside me is freaking out because I'm so happy to be talking about this. This is my entire obsession since I was in high school and college and beyond. So the humanities major part of me is really happy right now.

The part they didn't teach me in philosophy class

So life coaching takes these premises and runs them into every corner of existence, right? You are not merely the author of your own understanding, but of your life — every part of it. Your career, your relationships, your emotional patterns. The entire method presupposes what we might call a Lockean self — a rational agent capable of examining its own experience, identifying what's working, what's not working, and then redesigning it from first principles.

The trouble is, these ideas that we might take for granted come from a specific time and place in Europe. Which is another way of saying this is actually not how most human cultures have understood a person's relationship to their own life, their place in the world. This is a distinctly post-Enlightenment posture. You can say without much of a stretch that life coaching is Enlightenment philosophy in casual, practical, modern clothes — and it carries all the promise of that philosophy and all the blind spots of that tradition.

Now here's another layer to the story that actually wasn't taught to me in philosophy class. That should have been. I had to find out through my own self-study later, because the European intellectual tradition has spent centuries suppressing this knowledge.

This movement did not emerge from a vacuum. It was catalyzed — in ways that were documented and deliberately obscured — by Europe's encounter with the indigenous people of the Americas, the so-called "New World."

There is a persistent assumption that ideas like liberty, equality, and rational self-governance came from European minds. That people like Locke and Rousseau and Descartes were just thinking so hard, thinking harder than everybody else, and — oh, I got it. That's not actually how things worked. These ideas didn't spring from a European vacuum.

For a thousand years, European political thought circled around the same assumptions — monarchy, hierarchy, divine right of kings. A thousand years of essentially the same ideas. And then Europeans crossed oceans and encountered societies organized by entirely different principles. And within a generation or two, their philosophers are writing about liberty, equality, social contract, as if they invented these ideas.

The timing maps out like this: they encountered indigenous peoples of the Americas, and then they're like, oh wait, we have these new ideas. Because what Europeans found in the Americas was something that was genuinely fascinating and shocking to them — people living without kings. Without hereditary aristocracy. Without class-based destitution. Without the coercive and often violent apparatus of the European state.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy — also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, which is an inaccurate name — had something called the Great Law of Peace and a system of consensus governance. A council of clan mothers who held the power to appoint and remove leaders. And the Europeans saw that this was not a primitive arrangement that could just be improved by applying more European civilization. That's definitely what they went in expecting to see. But what they actually found was, to their own admission, a mature and sophisticated political technology, applied to consistent success, centuries old, operating on principles that European thinkers couldn't even imagine before.

And the influence was not subtle. Benjamin Franklin spent years negotiating with the Haudenosaunee and explicitly cited their confederacy as a model that he was promoting. The Jesuit missionaries who lived among the Wendat wrote extensively about societies organized around personal freedom, communal responsibility, and decision-making by communal deliberation. Their reports were widely read across France. These texts became bestsellers. They were talked about in different salons in intellectual society. They shaped Enlightenment thought directly.

The original distortion

And you're probably expecting something like this by now, but the Enlightenment did something else with this encounter with the people of the Americas. It took their political insights — kind of pretending like, "Oh, what if we do this thing that has my name on it but actually comes from this whole other place?" — and discarded the entire cosmology that those insights were rooted in.

It adopted the idea of governance by reason and consent — which sounds great, right, we want governance by reason and consent — while rejecting the relational worldview, the understanding that humans are embedded in kinship and can only understand ourselves that way. It extracted those principles and threw away the soil they grew in.

And that is the original distortion of the Enlightenment. And that is what the field of life coaching has exactly inherited.

When the Enlightenment abstracted indigenous political wisdom into European philosophical language, many things were lost. And these losses didn't just impoverish European thought — they created very specific pathologies that life coaching now reproduces at the individual level. Let me walk you through a few of them.

The self, severed from relationship. Indigenous governance was grounded in kinship — not just among humans, but with land, water, animals, plants, insects, ancestors, future generations. Decision-making was always relational. The question was always, whatever it's about — how does this affect the web of life I'm part of? The Enlightenment kept the idea of rational self-governance but relocated it to the isolated individual. And I think it's not unfair to say life coaching has perfected that isolation. "What do you want?" is treated as such a basic, foundational question — as though desire could be meaningfully understood outside of relationship and obligation.

Linear progress replaced cycles. Most ancestral wisdom traditions, including mine, understand time as cyclical or spiral. There are seasons and generations — birth and death, seasons of growth and seasons of decay, planting and harvest. The Enlightenment flattened this into a straight line pointing upward with no end. Up and up and up. Progress, improvement, growth, on and on. Life coaching has absorbed this so completely that it literally can't conceptualize a path, a life, that isn't going up. What about the person who wants to compost rather than advance? What about the person who wants to return to where they come from rather than progress? What about someone who understands that sometimes the wisest move is to let break, to let die, to grieve, to lie fallow — not as a means to some later productivity and growth, like "oh, if you just sit this period out, there's some lessons in it that's gonna make you grow faster later" — not as a means to an end, but as meaningful experiences in themselves that are necessary for the attainment of wisdom, for a holistic view of what it means to live a good life? These ideas don't have a home in conventional coaching models.

The rational mind as the only way of knowing. In indigenous epistemologies, some things can be known through thinking, yes. But they acknowledge that certain other things can only be known through the body, through ceremony, through relationship with place and lineage. Coaching has inherited what the Enlightenment did, which is privileging a single channel — reason — and demoting everything else. I think even somatic coaching and embodiment practices, as they appear in mainstream coaching, tend to still instrumentalize the body. Making it just another tool for the goal that the mind has decided, rather than recognizing it as a form of intelligence in its own right, rooted in a specific place and lineage. Somatic and embodiment practice in coaching becomes something very potentially dangerous when it's unmoored from place and lineage. And that's most of what I see in conventional spaces.

Accountability, individualized. In many, if not all, indigenous governance systems that I have studied, accountability flows in all directions — to ancestors, to descendants, to land, to the entire community of human and non-human living beings. The Enlightenment collapsed this into individual responsibility. You are responsible for your choices and your consequences. And when it comes to coaching, it's like — you're responsible not only for that, but for your own beliefs and emotions. All of it is yours to own, yours to manage, yours to change if you don't like it. And look, this idea can be incredibly useful and powerful in certain limited contexts. But as a complete worldview, it is devastatingly inadequate. It fails when it systematically erases the structural, the collective, the spiritual, the ancestral dimensions of human suffering and flourishing.

Where does this leave us?

So where does this leave us? I strongly advocate for the rerooting of coaching in ancestral wisdom traditions. And I wanna be very clear — I'm not saying let's throw Enlightenment ideas out the window and return to some kind of idealized, romanticized, pre-modern ancient past. I don't think that's real.

What I do think is real is that we can recognize that the global majority — the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the African diaspora, Aboriginal Australians, cultures of Asia, Pacific Islanders, countless others — have developed sophisticated, time-tested, coherent practices for the cultivation of human beings and flourishing communities. Practices that operate on fundamentally different premises than the relatively recent European Enlightenment. And these premises may be exactly what humanity needs right now.

And I'm actually going to say — I strongly assert that these premises are exactly what we need. Because the coming world is shaped by ecological crisis, the rising dominance of AI, mass displacement, the unraveling of institutions, a global reckoning with colonial legacies at a depth and level that I don't think we have seen before. That's what I see happening, and that's what I'm predicting more of. The Enlightenment operating system is not gonna get us through it. It's already visibly failing.

Coaching, as currently practiced, is well suited to helping people succeed within the existing system — and in my opinion, extremely poorly suited to helping people navigate the transition to whatever comes next. For that, we need deeper root systems.

I wanna be double clear here. This does not mean let's throw everything the Enlightenment contributed out the window. The commitment to critical thinking, the refusal to accept authority uncritically, the insistence on human dignity — these are valuable. I hope we can agree. These are genuine achievements, even if they were borrowed from the very people that Europe subjugated. But these achievements need to be placed back into the larger context, the original context, that they were extracted from. Reason is a gift. Rationality is a gift. But it's not the only gift. The individual absolutely matters — and the individual is not all that matters.

What coaching rooted in ancestral wisdom might look like

So what might this look like? Imagine a coaching practice rooted in ancestral wisdom. One that cultivates the individual not for achieving individual goals and individual accumulation, but to strengthen their capacity to serve the web they belong to — understanding that the two were never separate to begin with. There is no such thing as a separated self.

Such a practice would treat the client as a node in a living web — accountable to ancestors, to community, to the land they live on, to future generations — rather than as an autonomous agent optimizing for individual outcomes.

It would work in cyclical time, helping clients identify what season they're in and what that season is asking of them, rather than relentlessly pushing towards growth and forward progress as conceived by the mind alone. And that personally has been one of the most profound things — but I'll talk about that in a different episode.

It would honor multiple ways of knowing — somatic, intuitive, ecological, dream-based, ancestral, ceremonial — and recognize all of these as legitimate and central and essential, not as interesting supplements to the "real work."

It would have a coherent framework for more than endless growth. One that makes space for decay, for not knowing, for mystery and paradox, for death, for the dissolution of identity — who you think you are.

It would understand that many of the problems that clients bring are not individual pains and failures, but symptoms of collective and intergenerational wounds that require collective and intergenerational responses.

And it would do all of this with intellectual rigor and with clear awareness and naming of lineage. We're gonna think critically, but we're gonna layer critical thinking on top of lineage.

A different question

I'm not saying let's replace Enlightenment rationality. I'm saying let's put rationality back in its proper place — as part of a system, part of a web of body, relationship, land, ancestors, and the future.

So I'll leave you with this. The next time you ask someone, as a coach, "What do you want?" — or the next time a coach asks you, "What do you want?" — notice the hundreds of years of European philosophy embedded in that question. Get curious about what it assumes and what it leaves out. I'm not saying discard that question and condemn it. I'm not saying it's a bad question. It can be a very useful question. But I'm saying get honest about what else is there.

And then we can ask a different question: What does it mean to practice coaching in a framework with lineage and roots? Roots that never forgot that you're not just a separated self, but a relative, an elder in training, an ancestor-to-be, and a node in a web of life that preceded you and will outlive you?

I think nothing short of a coherent answer to this question — it's not an easy question, but it's an important one — is gonna be good enough for the world that we're about to meet.

Thank you for listening, and I'll talk to you another time.