Linguistic foundations of techniques instigating mental and behavioural change in coaching conversations

This article discusses coaching as a problem solving method and adopts an innovative linguistic perspective. Reducing the psychological aspect to the minimum the author promotes language to its deserved status presenting it as the basic coach’s tool and initial reason for the effectiveness of coaching itself in instigating behavioral, attitudinal and emotional change. This is done by resorting to the philosophy of language (theories of relevance, speech acts and communication). It appears that a coaching conversation occurs on two levels of communication and by using two main linguistic devices, reflective language and powerful questions, the coach can provoke client’s change with little intervention.