This article presents the controversial role of emotions in projects of self‐realization through the particular practice of empathetic caring. Israeli life coaches claim to allow minimal space for trainees’ emotions: they teach them to master self‐steering through a calculative reflexivity that also aims to limit affect. At the same time, they engage with their trainees’ feelings by invoking emotional reactions only to argue against their trainees’ subjective experiences. The article traces this mixture of “emotion‐free” empathy and authoritative neoliberal technologies of the self to a culturally specific Israeli notion of care which is grounded in an egalitarian ethos. I therefore showed that Israeli coaching produces a unique vernacular version of neoliberal selfhood, one infused with tensions between seemingly incompatible attitudes: self‐reflection and authoritarian assertions and a type of empathetic concern that is centered on the caregiver's assessment rather than the feelings of those being cared for.

In this study, we reflexively focus our gaze on the global shift toward the emotionalisation of academic culture, taking the perspective of a university institution and its staff. We argue that emotional consumerism is fundamental to the current condition of academic teaching; it is embedded in its institutional agenda and shapes faculty’s subjective experiences. Our ethnographic analysis reveals also that understanding emotional academic capitalism requires a cross-cultural lens. Thus, we probe the meanings of teaching in three academic contexts – Russia, Israel and the US – tracing how local neoliberalism, cultural emotional communicative scripts and educational traditions, as well as political cultures, shape the emotionalisation of university teaching differently. Academic teaching in the US appears as care combined with fear; teaching in Israel is articulated as a therapeutic power struggle; while in Russia, teaching is interpreted as a peculiar combination of authoritative impersonalised services. This juxtaposition exposes different local manifestations of neoliberal emotional university discourse that merges therapeutic logic and its emotional language, reconfigures hierarchical relations, and integrates national political ethos into the act of teaching.

In the global crisis of expertise, experts are often viewed with skepticism. This article zooms in to this crisis to analyze how life coaches seek professional legitimacy and verbally perform their expertise by navigating a tension between asserting their authority and cultivating their clients’ agency. Performances of expertise are a range of verbal practices and rhetorical strategies that are co-produced and shaped through interacting with clients. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at three life coaching training schools in Israel, I show that life coaches perform their expertise through the following strategies: (1) defining the problem that coaching addresses as simple, significant, and mendable; (2) using authoritative charismatic speech to define clients as powerful, independent agents who are their own life experts; and (3) creating reflexive experiences of self-revelation by using semi-intelligible jargon. Finally, the study advances the understanding of expertise as performances inextricable from clients’ sense of agency.