Writing
A series on the epistemological and theoretical foundations of serious coaching practice — what it means to coach at the level of identity and lived experience, where biography, context, and meaning-making shape the work. Drawing on postmodern epistemology and a disciplined examination of practice, it explores the development of coaching craft into a rigorous praxis. For practitioners who want to go deeper than technique, and who remain committed to their own ongoing development as integral to the work.
First person inquiry — the practitioner's attention turned inward toward the immediate, the relational, and the particular.
On how coaching engagements are constructed and what unfolds within them — the contracting, the relational field, the dynamics that organise resistance, and the moments when something shifts. Where Praxis examines the conceptual ground the work stands on, The Encounter enters the room itself: the lived texture of practice, written from inside the coaching relationship and twenty-five years of accompanying senior leaders through genuine change.
Second person inquiry — the relational field between practitioner and client, where meaning is made in the encounter itself.
The broader landscape — technological disruption, generational shift, geopolitical fracture — and what it asks of those who lead and those who accompany them. Not a recurring stream, but a necessary orientation to the world in which the work takes place.
Third person inquiry — the forces shaping the field from the outside in.
Each stream corresponds to a register of action research inquiry — first, second, and third person — moving between the practitioner's interior, the discipline in dialogue with itself, and the wider world in which the work takes place. (Reason & Bradbury, 2001)
A space for sustained thinking on coaching practice and the interior life of transformation — for those who want to go beyond the surface.
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A Substack by Dr Kavitha Iyer — on coaching craft and the interior life of transformation.
Stream One
Praxis
The Micro · The Craft
Stream Two
The Encounter
The Meso · The Room
Read at writing.kavithaiyer.com
Published — inaugural posts
Praxis
Emerging from doctoral inquiry — open tension as an epistemological stance and a practice: the disciplined holding of what cannot yet be named.
Read more →Praxis · From the Field
Situating coaching within the broader literature on change, meaning, and organisational life — what a more integrated understanding of change requires of it.
Read more →From the Field
The contemporary landscape — geopolitical, generational, technological — and what it asks of those who must lead within it.
Read more →The Encounter · From the Field
Is coaching, as currently practised and commissioned, built for the depth of work that the contemporary landscape now requires?
Read more →