Celebrities as informal life coaches.

Introduction

Celebrities status comes in three forms: ascribed, achieved and attributed. (Cris Rojek, 2001) An achieved celebrity is someone that has gain fame due to having a unique talent or a set of skills that stand out from the rest. They often gain that fame and recognition after receiving a well-know award. An example of this would be Adele, an English singer and songwriter. She was discovered after having a friend of her uploading her demo to Myspace, and now she has received awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Time magazine has named her one of the most influential people in the world.

 These celebrities such as Adele, give young struggling artist hope that if they pour their heart into their work, believe on them selves and are lucky enough they can make it in the entertainment business.

Have been said that, in this essay I will discuss the proposition of whether achieved celebrities can perform as informal life coaches, and whether their behavior, example, or success can be emulated by others and influence positively on an aspirant’s expectations of success.

Celebrities as informal life coaches

 We find ourselves in a society permeated by fashion, relativism and hedonism. Glamour and elegance arouse interest in thousands of people. We are constantly projected with ideals, and these ideals have spread a negative self perception of the body. Body image is now marked by the thinness of women and the vigor of men’s body, leading people to seek diets, medications and even dangerous surgeries without considering the risk that it could entail just to have the perfect body. This perception has been given by different media, including television, magazines and movies.

 Today, one of the main goals of people is to satisfy their need for entertainment and imitation of what it is considered to be modern, interesting or in fashion. We live among celebrities and a consumerist culture. We have set aside the simple things because we believe they are boring. This generation is constantly searching for noise and activity, leaving a side reflection and enjoying what nature has to offer. We procrastinate strengthening family ties because priorities have been set differently, and we have lost the essence of what family life is all about. We have set aside real communication and we are more turn to get “more” because it is a model we constantly see in the media, and this model leads us to a culture of imitation.

This culture of imitation begins in at an early age, when children and young people become captivated by a celebrity’s performance and are dazzled by their fame and luxurious lifestyle, thus becoming icons in their lives and they choose to imitate them. When they fail to accomplish such lifestyles as those of celebrities they have chosen to imitate, people can become frustrated with low self-esteem, because they made that aspiration their reality. Conseunetly this low self-esteem can many times lead to having a bad mood, or even become a worse mental disorder, such as depression or anxiety.

 “The exorbitance of celebrity’s contemporary cultural visibility is certainly unprecedented, and the role that the celebrity plays across many aspects of the cultural field has certainly expanded and multiplied in recent years.” says Graumer. We had been experiencing a revolution in communications technology, according to the International Communication Union 43.4 percent of the population have access to the internet as that of 29.2 percent in 2010. This growth has opened a new mode of consumption for the industry and has opened a surfeit of outlets where celebrities can output their lives and upload online content. From blogs, news sites, official fan pages to other sites where interaction can be made such as Twitter feed, Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. If all this new technology growth, access to internet and social media is combined with a society that is highly obsessed with the culture of entertainment and celebrities, it can have such a strong impact in society’s way of living. From fashion trends to political opinions, the appeal of a celebrity’s lifestyle can influence beliefs, interests and peoples’ behavior.

 Boorstin says “Celebrities are basically fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness.” In media and cultural studies, celebrities can be seen as a product of different processes, those which can include: creation of the individual celebrity through promotion, publicity and advertising. In this case, celebrities tend to have a complete image in stage, and people may think those celebrities have a perfect lifestyle, when in fact, their image might just be a product of self promotion and exposure management. Also a big factor behind great celebrities is the cultural intermediaries working for that celebrity of which people are little or not aware of at all. These celebrities tend to have, managers, media content producers, make-up artists, trainers etc. and everything tends to be staged and arranged to project a perfect image for the public or consumer.

 That is when human discernment should come in hand. People should have their own judgment and as an audience, they need to have their own capacity to discern on the authenticity of certain news and events regarding celebrities by being able to interpret the media representations shown to them. They should be able to identify between an achieved celebrity and an attributed celebrity. According to C. Rojek, an achieved celebrity is one individual which posses a unique talent, an impressive set of skills that stand out from the rest, while an attributed celebrity is a self-made one with out a rare talent or skills. Being able to identify between these two types of celebrities will make people have a better judgment of situations presented by the media and decide whether a celebrity is some one naïve and false, or a unique talent worthy of admiration. Having made a decision about a celebrity in particular it will be easier to decide if he or she will be a good life coach to incorporate to one’s life. But what exactly is a life coach?

A life coach aims at helping people meet their personal goals or business goals by guiding them in the right direction. Some of the methods that these life coaches use can vary greatly from one another, but their ultimate objective is helping people achieve their goals by providing unique value and helping to mirror their true self unjudged by the thoughts, values, and views of another person. In that way the coachee ( the person being coached) can see himself as he really is, free from other’s desires, and it becomes easier for himself to figure out what he would like to do and where he would like to go and find a path that withholds a meaningful and fulfilling life. And as Google CEO Eric Scmidt says, ‘A mentor is crucial to give perspective,’ ‘Everybody needs a coach... every famous athlete, every famous performer, has somebody who’s a coach... someone who can help them see themselves as others see them.’ So, being clear on what a life coach is, what happens when we consider an achieve celebrity as a life coach?

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