‘More than half the effect is placebo: As a coach you can just hum along’. Well yes, and the other half is important too - the client’s attitude, the coach’s method, the context, for example.
 
At this year's Wales Coaching conference, Eric de Haan spoke about what we know about what makes an impact in coaching. He was presenting headlines from the quantitative research that finds patterns in data - usually after the coaching sessions. It’s the sort of research that sees the coaching work as a lab experiment, ideally comparing clients with control groups of non-clients.
 
Most of what we can say about coaching research is derived from the more extensive research on therapy. 

​By asking ‘who is successful here and why?’, in her TED talk, Angela Lee Duckworth identifies ‘Grit’ as one of the key predictors of success. She defines Grit as ‘Passion and perseverance for long term goals. Having stamina and sticking with your future, day in day out. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint’.  

Of course, setting goals is one thing, sticking with them is another - so energise your journey by make it more enjoyable and your goals more achievable.  One way of doing this is by noticing successes along the way - how far you’ve come.  Identify what’s working and what you contributed, ask yourself : ‘On a scale of 1-10, where am I now, and what’s got me so high?’. And ‘What’s the next step that will take me forward?’ . If you're running a marathon there’s so much more to pay attention to than the finish line.

Successful coaching depends on the words we use with our clients – the words in our questions or comments, the words our clients find themselves saying in the sessions.
 
I wonder sometimes if we are living in such a problem-saturated environment, that we can’t always find words for the problem-free opposites.
 
If we are talking to a client who describes themself as ‘depressed' or ‘anxious', we know that ‘depressed' or ‘anxious' is what they don’t want, but it’s far from clear that they are seeking ‘ecstasy’ or ‘at total peace with the world’ as their goal. I might guess they are aiming for something a bit more day-to-day OK. Perhaps a touch more dynamic than 'not depressed’ or even - a fateful word that brings its own troubles about judgement - 'normal’. 'Functioning well' may be better, but still seems dully inadequate. 
 
Part of our work as coaches is to expand our clients’ world, in part by expanding their vocabulary. Our conversation co-constructs their sense of preferable possibilities and – given the vocabulary challenge - it may be quite a struggle for both parties. Generating worthwhile descriptions of the preferred alternative to the unwanted current situation can be painstaking and slow.  But the struggle is OK: as long as the client sticks with the conversation, then they still want to work with you.
 
People are fluent in ‘problem'.  And not so fluent in ‘instead’.  Our questions in the Solutions Focus repertoire are mostly in the language of ‘instead’, and we are encouraging clients to  answer as best they can - during this whole process of building up their ‘instead’ vocabulary. They might say, 'I’ve never thought of it like that before’.  If you were to give up before that point, you’ve mislaid your belief in that client and their capacity to change.  And it’s our professional duty to stick with this faith in the client’s competence to describe and thus start to inhabit a more positive world.