The Coach Who Wrote a Novel (And Lived to Tell the Tale) By Yusuf Poonawala

How a veteran business coach with no fiction background ended up writing a 72,000-word family drama set in Spain—and what it revealed about leadership, identity, and emotional truth

— Yusuf Poonawala

If you had told me three years ago that I would write a literary fiction novel—let alone a 72,000-word, thirty-chapter family drama unfolding across Spanish highways—I would have responded with the polite smile reserved for people suggesting you should take up skydiving, and quietly changed the subject.

I am a business coach. For over thirty years, I have lived in the language of outcomes, KPIs, accountability systems, and performance frameworks. I have worked with entrepreneurs in Singapore who treat sleep deprivation like a competitive advantage. I have advised founders in London who can optimize a P&L but cannot interpret their own exhaustion. I have coached leaders in Mumbai who can close multi-crore negotiations before noon yet struggle to ask their children how school was.

My world has always been structured, measurable, and, on paper, rational.

Fiction is none of those things.

Fiction is uncertainty made visible. It is a 46-year-old woman in Barcelona confessing a truth she has carried for decades while the writer has no control over what the husband says next. It is a teenage girl in Andalucía stepping onto a stage and suddenly changing the emotional direction of an entire narrative. It is unplanned, unstable—and disconcertingly alive.

And yet, I learned something unexpected: fiction may be the closest thing we have to honest coaching.

That realization became the foundation of The Spanish Table.

It did not begin as a plot. It did not begin as a structured idea or a publishing ambition. It began with a single, uncomfortable question that kept resurfacing in my coaching practice:

What happens inside a family when everyone is successful, but no one is emotionally well?

I have seen this pattern repeatedly across leadership rooms and living rooms alike. The outwardly successful marriage that collapses in silence at 2 a.m. The son whose creative ambitions are slowly redirected toward “practicality.” The daughter who learns, subtly but consistently, to make herself smaller to maintain harmony.

In consulting, you respond with models. You offer frameworks. You propose action plans.

But some truths resist formatting.

They require something closer to narrative than analysis—something that can hold contradiction without resolving it too quickly.

So I created the Shroff-Agarwal family.

Azam, the father whose anger is never loud but always physically present in the smallest gestures. Miana, the mother who operates with strategic precision while carrying emotional contradictions she has never named. Karan, the son who writes private worlds no one has access to. Samaira, the daughter whose voice can shift an entire room—but rarely gets the permission to do so.

I placed them in a rental car in Madrid and sent them across Spain for fifteen days.

What followed was not construction, but observation. The story did not behave like a plan. It behaved like a system under pressure—collapsing, adapting, reconfiguring itself in ways I did not anticipate.

That is when I understood something fundamental: characters do not obey intent. They reveal it.

People often ask whether the novel is autobiographical. It is not—at least not in any literal sense. But it is observationally true. Every entrepreneur I have coached under conditions of pressure exists somewhere inside that car. Every family that performs cohesion at social gatherings while privately negotiating distance exists at that table.

Fiction simply removed the professional distance I used to maintain. It replaced interpretation with immersion.

And unexpectedly, it made me a better coach.

Because coaching, at its core, is not the delivery of solutions. It is the creation of conditions where truth becomes speakable. Fiction taught me what frameworks often obscure: that change rarely begins with strategy. It begins when someone feels seen enough to stop performing certainty.

That is what Spain does to the Shroff-Agarwals. And, in a quieter way, that is what writing the novel did to me.

The Spanish Table is now available through Dreamboat Publishing. It is a story about family, ambition, and the emotional cost of success. It will not offer you a checklist. It will not optimize your life.

But it may do something more uncomfortable.

It may make you look at your own table—and ask when real conversation last took place there.