The Pragmatics of Executive Coaching

Book excerpt: The Pragmatics of Executive Coaching is the first linguistic monograph on executive coaching, a recent, not fully professionalized, yet booming helping professional format in the organizational realm. The book is positioned at the interface between applied linguistic analysis and the activity of coaching, coupled with its structuring professional theory. It presents the Basic Activity Model of coaching, a model for the qualitative analysis and description of the discursive co-construction of coaching by coach and client within and across individual coaching sessions and whole processes. The analysis is based on 150 hours of authentic data from the coaching approach Emotionally Intelligent Coaching and presents coaching as hybrid and interdiscursive helping professional format. The gained insights into the discursive layout of coaching interactions advance our linguistic understanding of helping professions as such, contribute to the theoretical and methodological underpinning of coaching and help promote the coaching practice.