In postmodern terms, the “grand narrative” has collapsed (Bergquist, 1993). Along with this collapse comes the challenge of lost or abandoned spirit. It is not incidental that the field of professional coaching arose at the time when the many challenges of postmodernism emerged (Bergquist, 2022a; Bergquist, 2022b). The widely accepted, abiding truths in our society are no longer viable and there is nothing to replace them. Like Howard Beale, we are all left in a vacuum and look in vain for a solid source of truth. As mature men and women we are particularly vulnerable to this collapse of the grand narrative. We have reached the highest point in our career only to discover, as did Howard Beale, that those truths which do seem to endure are ugly. They are based in ego and greed rather than in any sense of rationality or community welfare.
Later mid-life men and women often discover in addition that they have exchanged their freedom for the achievement of high social status and power. George Orwell (2009) writes of this tradeoff in his short story, Shooting an Elephant. The esteemed and powerful white leader of an Indian village, during the years of the British Empire, must kill a rogue elephant that is threatening the villagers. He hates the idea of killing this magnificent beast. Yet because he is at the top of the social order in this village, he finds himself walking down a path preparing to shoot the elephant. At this moment, the white male leader discovers that he has traded his freedom (to say “no” in this instance) for social status and power.
One of our Sage leaders offers insights about this shift in perspective that results not from serving as the leader in an Indian village, but from recognizing that he finds the greatest generative gratification in engaging activities of a much humbler and less “spirited” nature:
“I have only been on one board here in Nevada County for which I eventually became president. That is Sierra Writers, and I have chaired the non-fiction critique group for about ten years. I also enjoy doing specific projects for a variety of non-profits here: ushering for Music in the Mountains, collecting tickets, writing newspaper articles, painting, or preparing food for workers at Habitat, working at the church fair-booth, and assisting at the Food Bank on occasion. I am also quite involved in the Sage Leadership Project. I like working alongside people now more than heading up any organization, paid or not. I got tired of committee meetings and bureaucracy.”
This may be one of the most important truths that mid-life men and women must confront as they engage in Generativity—and that a professional coach can help their mid-life client address. We gain power in exchange for freedom. We find spirit but it is a constrained spirit. We seek out positions of formal influence, only to find that we aren’t really making much of a difference in the world. Ironically, it seems that we must often defy (or at least step outside of) the system that got us to the top in the first place to confront and alter this truth. This is one of Chayefsky’s most haunting images in Network. We witness Howard Beale, a man in later mid-life, go mad and become “madder than hell,” as a way of discovering his own freedom.
At other times, men and women find in later midlife that they have lost all truths as a result of social revolution or massive technological change. They are left without any foundation. One of us worked in and wrote about women and men living in Estonia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. (Bergquist and Weiss, 1994) Many of the men, and some of the women, seemed to be wandering around in a haze. They lost their ideology or their base of opposition to the dominant ideology. Now what do they do? Where do their abstract thinking and their spirit find a new home?
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