Contemporary students face a structurally novel existential challenge: an excess of ambiguity that undermines the very capacity to choose. Existing coaching and guidance approaches, whether humanistic, vocational, or grounded in positive psychology, presuppose a stable self and coherent world that no longer hold. They fail at the level of philosophical anthropology rather than technique. This paper argues that the Beauvoirian task has inverted. Beauvoir wrote in response to a world presenting false certainty: the task was to introduce ambiguity into apparent stability. Contemporary young people face the precise opposite. They inhabit a world already too fragmented and contradictory to act within. What attentional collapse destroys is a specific and nameable condition: existential freedom, the condition under which freedom discloses itself to the subject who has it. To address this inversion, the paper develops the Situated Existential Coaching Framework for Students (SECFS), grounded in an original synthesis of Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil. Weil's account of gravity and grace, placed in philosophical dialogue with Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity, provides the structural account of why facticity must be restored before authentic transcendence becomes possible. SECFS reconceptualises the coaching encounter as a practice of restoring the conditions under which students can recognise their own freedom, refusing resolution that existing frameworks promise. From this analysis, five coaching principles are derived, including the proposition that productive irresolution is the framework's best possible outcome. Methodologically philosophical and phenomenological, the paper demonstrates how conceptual analysis generates pedagogical practice.

Authors:
Kristina Lebedeva, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Master's candidate in Coaching at Cambridge. Researcher in existential philosophy and student educational transitions. Founder of Lebedeva Education, Switzerland. Vice President, Cambridge Coaching Society.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristina-lebedeva-switzerland/

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