Why Coaching Is Being Replaced by Initiation: The End of Improvement Culture and the Return of Thresholds
- Christopher Shaw
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Founder, Merkaba Temple & Merkaba Retreats
Co-Founder, ArcherShaw
Coaching is not failing. It is simply no longer sufficient.
For years, coaching served an important function: it helped men optimize performance, clarify goals, and increase effectiveness within an existing identity.
But something has shifted.
The men coming forward now are not trying to improve who they are. They are confronting the fact that the identity itself is no longer true.
This is where coaching ends—and initiation begins.
Coaching Improves the Self - Initiation Reorganizes Identity
Coaching assumes continuity.
You are who you are— you just need better tools, strategies, habits, or mindset.
Initiation assumes rupture.
Something must end.
A role must die.
A threshold must be crossed.
No amount of optimization can resolve an identity that has expired.
The men I am witnessing are not asking, “How do I do this better?”
They are asking—often quietly—“Who am I now that the old way no longer works?”
That question cannot be coached.
Why Improvement Culture Is Collapsing
Improvement culture promised mastery through accumulation.
More knowledge.
More skills.
More frameworks.
But accumulation eventually reaches a ceiling.
Men become informed but fragmented.
Capable but internally divided.
High-functioning yet strangely uninhabited.
At a certain stage, improvement becomes avoidance. It delays the deeper reckoning.
Initiation does not add. It removes.
What no longer fits.
What no longer belongs.
What no longer tells the truth.
This is why initiation feels frightening—and necessary.
Initiation Requires Witness, Not Cheerleading
Coaching often relies on encouragement, accountability, and reassurance.
Initiation requires something rarer: witness.
Someone who does not rush the process.
Who does not rescue discomfort.
Who does not negotiate the threshold.
Initiation cannot be scheduled like a weekly call.
It unfolds in the body, the nervous system, and the relational field.
It is marked by:
Disorientation before clarity
Stillness before direction
Loss before authority
These are not problems to be solved. They are passages.
The Return of Thresholds
Modern culture removed thresholds in favor of convenience.
No rites of passage.
No clear endings.
No symbolic deaths.
Men were expected to transition from boyhood to manhood through achievement alone.
But achievement without initiation produces exhaustion, not authority.
What I am witnessing now is a collective remembering: Men do not become leaders through instruction alone. They become leaders by crossing something that cannot be undone.
Initiation creates irreversibility. Once crossed, there is no returning to the old identity.
Why This Is Happening Now
The pace of the world has outstripped old identities.
What once worked—ambition, endurance, control—is no longer enough to hold the complexity men are carrying.
The nervous system demands coherence.
Relationships demand presence.
Leadership demands embodiment.
Initiation is returning because performance has reached its limit.
Men are not breaking.
They are being called.
This Is Not for Everyone
Initiation does not market itself.
It does not explain itself fully.
It does not reassure.
Many men will stay in improvement culture—and that is appropriate for where they are. Others will feel an unmistakable pull toward threshold.
They will sense that something is ending.
And that the next chapter cannot be negotiated.
Initiation selects by resonance, not readiness.
A Final Observation
Coaching asks, “What do you want to achieve?”
Initiation asks, “What must die for you to be true?”
One refines the self.
The other reorganizes it.
Both have their place.
But this era belongs to thresholds.
And thresholds do not announce themselves loudly.
They wait.
Not everyone is meant for initiation.
Those who are will recognize the moment.
🔱
Christopher Shaw works with masculinity at the level of identity, nervous system, and embodied authority. His work serves men and leaders who are no longer interested in performing strength, managing image, or outsourcing power. It is for those ready to stand in coherence.
Drawing on over 17 years of experience in depth psychotherapy, somatic practice, and initiatory mentorship, Christopher guides men through the stabilization and reorganization of masculine presence. Masculinity, in this work, is not a concept to adopt or perform — it is an internal structure that reasserts itself through presence, integrity, and responsibility.
This work is initiatory in nature. It supports sovereignty, steadiness under pressure, and the return to an authority that is already inherent — not taught, imposed, or borrowed.
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