Founder of Holding Space Coaching & Consulting | Executive Coach | Leadership Specialist | Trainer | HR Professional
In a wood-paneled courtroom in Mauritius, wearing a magistrate’s robe, Lola Chetti once weighed evidence, interpreted law, and pronounced decisions over people against whom breaches of the law had been alleged. The authority was certain. Today she sits in quiet rooms with executives, leadership teams, and aspiring coaches, doing something that looks gentler but is, in her experience, more impactful. She speaks to leaders that the judgment that actually changes behavior is not the one delivered from authority. It is the one people reach about themselves when they finally feel safe enough to look honestly in the mirror. She then supports them in determining and evolving into the best selves they wish for.
Lola Chetti, Master Certified Coach and founder of Holding Space Coaching & Consulting, is a globally experienced executive coach, leadership specialist, and ICF-accredited organizational coach trainer who has spent 17 years working across Asia, Europe, and now the United States. Her work sits at the intersection of ethical rigor and human development, treating coach education not as credentialing, but as a structured laboratory for self-discovery, trust, ethical maturity and growth.
From Lincoln’s Inn to the Limits of Legal Authority
Her perspective began forming long before she entered a coaching room. After completing her LLB with honors at the University of Buckingham and her Bar Exams at Lincoln’s Inn, Lola entered the Ministry of Justice in Mauritius in 1991 as State Counsel. She rose steadily through the judiciary over eight years, progressing to District Magistrate, then Senior Magistrate at the Intermediate Court.
The legal training was rigorous, structured, and exacting. It taught her to build arguments from evidence, to distinguish what was proven from what was assumed, and to hold accountability as non-negotiable. Those habits never left. But the work also confronted her with something that would reshape her entire career trajectory.
“My first lesson in the judiciary was that people have vastly different and unequal starts in life, which often have a lasting impact on how they live and what they achieve,” she recalls. A court could punish or protect, but it could not repair a sense of self shaped sometimes by trauma, exclusion, or chronic social disadvantages. Formal authority could impose outcomes, but it could not produce the internal shift that made those outcomes stick. It took an internal shift first.
That realization did not push her away from rigor. It redirected it toward a different arena where precision could address root causes rather than consequences.
The Refugee Center That Became Her Hope Laboratory
Lola began volunteering at a refugee center in Malaysia under the aegis of the UNHCR in 2009, working with Myanmar nationals who had fled displacement and were rebuilding their lives. For over six years, she coached children and teenagers, many carrying experiences they had never named aloud.
This became her proving ground. Working with fifteen-year-olds who had endured very harsh personal experiences and displacement, she used coaching as an area for free expression and a reflective space that had inbuilt psychological safety, where young people could process what had happened to them, understand how it had shaped them, and still leverage a sense of hope for building a better life.
“Coaching enabled these young individuals to leverage their insights, hope, and self-awareness to envision and pursue their ideal future selves,” she explains. “I learned that every human being has a story, and once we tap into their hearts and trust, people realize that much of what they need is within themselves.”
If the approach worked with adolescents in a refugee center, she reasoned, it could work anywhere that trust was built carefully and held firmly. After completing her Master in Consulting and Coaching for Change with Distinction at INSEAD Business School specializing in leadership and evidence-based coaching, she moved fully into executive education and leadership development.
Building Trust as a Concrete Practice, Not a Slogan
For 17 years, Lola has applied that understanding at the highest levels of organizational life. Her client roster spans multinational corporations, leadership teams navigating post-merger complexity, and senior executives managing cultural misalignment, internal political friction, and organizational change across Asia, Europe, and the United States. She holds certifications in Hogan Assessment, serves as a consultant for the Global Executive Leadership Inventory and Personal Audit through KDVI, and works as an adjunct leadership coach at institutions including Hult Ashridge Executive Education and INSEAD.
At the center of her practice is the evidence-based, 136-hour Organizational Coach Training program she designed and delivers. Accredited at Level 2 by the International Coaching Federation and aligned to all eight ICF core competencies and Code of Ethics, the program reflects her journey as much as her coaching philosophy.
“I like to say I designed the coaching certification I felt would give participants the most comprehensive learning experience,” she explains. The curriculum integrates emotional intelligence, cultural competence, narrative intelligence, and brain science, but ethics and accountability form the spine of the learning.
She is blunt about trust as a measurable practice rather than an abstract value. “We often want to trust others and be trusted, yet we overlook what others need to trust us,” she says. In her training, participants identify what helps them trust others, then break those patterns down into concrete factors: credibility, reliability, relationships, and the perception of low self-interest, along with one persistent corrosive and yet very human agent: unchecked self-interest.
Rather than treat these as concepts, she turns them into experiments. Participants test how consciously using credibility-generating traits changes conversation quality, while examining how they project their own interests and what that does to psychological safety in teams already under pressure. They also examine unconscious patterns adopted through the years to protect themselves, which in their leadership positions may not be needed and, at worst, hinder their effectiveness.
Her work with leadership teams in post-merger environments demonstrates this approach under maximum stress. Using validated psychological assessments, she helps individuals understand how they operate under pressure, communicate in conflict, and contribute to team culture. Then she brings the group into a structured, pressured environment to observe what actually happens between intention and impact-and what pressure brings out in them.
“I emphasize the importance of individuals recognizing their role in overall results,” she explains. “When people can see, with validated data, how they contribute to a culture, accountability becomes a choice rather than a punishment.” In merger scenarios where cultural differences and power dynamics create vulnerability, those sessions often become the first safe space where unspoken concerns surface.
Her legal training shows up again in how she approaches coaching ethics. Lola co-led the review of the ICF’s Code of Ethics in 2024-2025. She is also a sought-after speaker on coaching ethics. This work culminated in her book “Developing Ethical Maturity,” co-authored with Jonathan Passmore, which extends her belief that ethical principles are not abstract professional obligations but practical tools for building trust and accountability with real people. “ Ethics is the oxygen of coaching, leadership and human relationships”. Ethics engenders trust and the integrity that others need to show up as they are and collaborate. Cultural Intelligence is another foundational aspect of Lola’s work on leadership and coaching. Drawing on Geert Hofstede’s description of culture as “the software of the mind,” she has seen across Asia and Europe how misreading that software derails strategy. “Without awareness of cultural differences, it is easy to mistake them for negative behaviors,” she notes. “Understanding these nuances provides deeper insights into people’s actions and helps leaders eliminate assumptions.” In the United States, she incorporates Cultural Intelligence when coaching leaders who often lead and work with peers from other parts of the world.
The “Verdict” That Changes Everything
Thirty-five years after entering that first courtroom, Lola Chetti has built an entire practice around the space between what authority can decide and what people can leverage to build influence, growth, and their definition of success. She now works with leaders who hold real power to positively impact their teams, organizations, and the conditions in which other people spend their working lives.
What she teaches them is that the most durable form of influence is not the kind that comes from a title or a ruling or a position at the top of a hierarchy. “Creating trust and psychological safety is not a nice-to-have. It is a must-have and a non-negotiable,” she states plainly, backing it with research that shows these conditions are prerequisites for learning, creativity, and growth.
The perspective that truly changes a person and charts their way forward is so often the one they reach about themselves and then who they truly want to be. Her ICF-accredited course “Organizational Coaching Practitioner Certificate” starts with that precise question and is enriched by research-based aspects on the significance of this question and many others for human growth and development.
Lola Chetti, MCC, is the founder of Holding Space Coaching & Consulting and designer of an ICF-accredited Level 2 Organizational Coach Training program, based in New York City. She works with executives, leadership teams, and organizations worldwide, offering evidence-based development that integrates business outcomes with ethical maturity and human awareness. To connect with Lola or learn more, visit https://holdingspacecoach.com/ or linkedin.com/in/lolachetti-us-mcc.
