Part 2: When Gravitas Has No Address:A Coaching Engagement in Three Parts

PART TWO: What the Biography Carried

This is the second of three parts. Part One introduced the engagement, the presenting frame, and what was observable in the room before anything more substantive became available. This part follows the engagement into the biographical material that began to surface beneath the presenting goals, what that required of the practitioner, and how it led to a fundamental reframing of the development agenda.

What the biography carried

Within the first few sessions, something shifted in register. The leader began to speak about a pattern she had recognised across multiple contexts: a constant state of heightened alertness, an attentiveness to what might be about to go wrong, followed by a rapid impulse to move into fixing mode before failure could arrive. She traced this, without prompting, to early life - to her biological roots, family life in which she had assumed practical and emotional responsibility at a very young age. She spoke of it in a matter-of-fact way, that was itself telling, as if this were simply how things had been and how they still were, rather than something that had shaped her in ways worth examining. I suddenly felt I saw the person behind the role in her descriptions of the small town she grew up in, her humble beginnings, her parents struggles and her physically challenged sister.

The interpretive pull at this point was strong and legible: a formative experience of early, unwanted responsibility had produced a pattern of anticipating failure and moving quickly to fix. This was now being enacted in her leadership in a role that actively needed something else. It was an accurate account and in some way, felt complete. And yet I was cautious of that completeness, not because the reading was wrong, but because it was too tidy, and because the woman in the room was not primarily asking to be understood in that way.

My early impressions from the previous sessions against this emerging biographical material was accreting in not very visible ways. The passivity I had observed read now as something more like exhaustion; the exhaustion of being in a state of anticipatory vigilance for a very long time. I wondered if the coaching might represent, at some level, both a demand to do more and a permission to finally put something down, neither of which she knew how to respond to yet. The movement toward detail and control, similarly, was not simply a cognitive preference. I also considered other possibilities including is she carried guilt for her success, what hopes were pinned upon her, at a very young age etc. Against her biography, it became visible as a long-serving protective pattern: if she could manage the detail, she could prevent the failure; if she could stay in technical control, she could not be exposed as inadequate. This had served her extraordinarily well for decades. It had also made the transition now required of her genuinely threatening — not to her career, but to her sense of who she was.

What the biography asked of the practitioner

I was very moved in the way she narrated her history. There was a simplicity and a dignity in how she carried her life, no self-pity, no dramatisation, no bid for sympathy, that touched something in me that went beyond my role and analytical capabilities. At one level, it was simply a human moment, a moment that reminded me of how we all carry the residues of our biography as we go about our lives. She had built a professional life of real substance from beginnings that had asked a great deal of her before she was ready to give it. That deserved to be acknowledged, and not only as a skilled response. It deserved to be honoured, as one person recognising the weight another has carried without complaint. I noticed a simplicity about her, that perhaps was not acknowledged as a strength and, more importantly, as an authentic part of herself

I said something of this to her, not in an elaborate way, but directly and simply: that what she was describing spoke of considerable resilience, and that I was struck by the quietness with which she held it. Something shifted slightly in the room: a minor relaxation in her bearing, as if she had been given permission to be a person rather than only a leader working on her development goals.

At the same time, I was aware of something in myself that was harder to name: a sense of mismatch between the person in front of me and the developmental frame, around gravitas, presence, strategic confidence, being applied to her. The implicit assumption of that frame was that she needed to become something more than she currently was.

Sitting with her and her history, I was struck by a different feeling entirely: of a round peg being pressed insistently into a square hole, not because she was inadequate to the role, but because the developmental language available to describe what she needed bore so little resemblance to the actual texture of her difficulty. She did not need to acquire something new so much as she needed to lay something down. The gap was not a skills gap. The frame was not wrong, but it was too small for what it was trying to contain.

Reframing the development agenda

That recognition made it necessary, midway through the engagement, to return to the development goals established at the outset and rebuild them from the inside out. Gravitas, the word the leader had internalised as “good leadership” without fully owning, had by this point begun to reveal its actual content. What it was pointing toward, now, was not a quality of presence that could be acquired or performed, but something more interior: a settled relationship with her own authority, a confidence in her perspective that did not depend on the validation of others or the technical mastery that had previously been her source of certainty.

It was, at its root, a question of self-authorisation. My doctoral inquiry, situated within a feminist psychoanalytic frame, defined self-authorisation in leadership as a particular quality of natural confidence that comes from being at home in oneself (Iyer, 2020): an authority that is not performed, not derived from title or hierarchical position, not dependent on the validation of others, but that arises from a settled and genuine relationship with who one actually is. Nothing forced. A naturally commanding presence that belongs to the person rather than to the role. In this engagement, the leader did not yet have access to it — not because she lacked capability, but because the conditions of her transition had temporarily severed her from the ground it requires.

In place of gravitas, we began to work with three areas that were now genuinely her own: strategic thinking and the capacity to operate at a longer time horizon than her technical expertise had required; planning and decision-making in conditions of ambiguity, without the anchor of operational certainty; and inspirational leadership, the capacity to lead people toward something rather than managing the detail of how the work got done. These were not new goals. This was a reframing of what was in the presenting agenda from the beginning. But grounded in her actual experience and in the specific transition she was navigating, they became more accessible to work with.

This was also the moment to bring the biographical work back into direct contact with the leadership and organisational agenda — not as a departure from the coaching goals but as it’s necessary foundation. The biographical detour, as it might appear, was not a digression. It was the work itself: the ground without which the reframing of strategic thinking, planning in ambiguity, and inspirational leadership would not have happened. Biography is not context but essential to the content and process of coaching and its transformational potential. It is this postmodern and interpretive position that underpins this three-part series - that the interior life of the leader is not background to the developmental work but constitutive of it.

This conviction, that biographical understanding is not peripheral to coaching outcomes but integral to them, is one shared across psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approaches to leadership development. The theoretical frame that informs this attentiveness, and the specific body of thought I draw from in my own practice, will be the subject of a dedicated essay.

Part three follows and attends to the moment the frame gave way, what was discovered beneath it, how the development agenda was rebuilt, and what eventually shifted.

Photo via Unsplash

© 2026 Kavitha Iyer. All rights reserved. If you found this useful, please share with attribution. You can find out more about my practice on kavithaiyer.com