About Lorraine
I notice what repeats.
Coach for twenty years. Engineer before that. Coach educator for the last decade. Working stand-up comedian, which turns out to be relevant more often than you’d expect.
This page is for working out whether you’d want to be in a room with me. The credentials are further down, and they’re there so you know who you’re dealing with, not to impress you.
How I think
The engineering lens
I’ve kept a live client practice throughout the years I’ve trained coaches. What happens in real conversations continues to shape how I think, teach and work.
Before coaching, I trained as an engineer. Cause and effect mattered. Systems mattered. And ideas were only useful if they held up over time.
That way of thinking never left me. I notice systems, feedback loops, inconsistencies, and connections between things that look unrelated at first. I can’t teach frameworks that don’t make sense under scrutiny, and I won’t recommend systems that create more work than they save.
Why I notice what I notice
Pattern recognition is a fairly significant feature.
I’m autistic. I wouldn’t make claims about what that means for anybody else’s brain. In mine, pattern recognition is a fairly significant feature, and it’s the part of me that does most of the work in a coaching conversation.
Clients usually bring me an incident. I’m listening to that. I’m also listening for the pattern underneath it. Add twenty years of coaching conversations and a decade of training other coaches, and I have a substantial library of human patterns to draw on.
Not so I can tell you who you are. So that I know where to get curious.
How I work
The container is mine. The contents are yours.
I like good structure. I’m less interested in forcing people through it. Whether I’m working with one person, a group or a room full of coaches.
The structure gives us somewhere reliable to work. What happens inside it depends on the people in front of me, what is actually happening, and what deserves attention.
I don’t decide the answer before we’ve understood the problem.
The credentials
Would we work well together?
Probably, if you value curiosity over certainty, want to understand what is actually producing the problem, and don’t need me to pretend there is a neat framework for everything.
The context might be private coaching, an organisation, or your own work as a coach. The way I think is fairly consistent across all three: notice what repeats, look underneath the obvious explanation, and work with what is actually there.
The conversation is how we find out.
Private Coaching
Fortnightly, online, three months to start. For capable people whose way of sustaining their performance has become expensive.
Organisations
Coaching, workshops and training, and speaking, for the people an organisation relies on.
For Coaches
For professional coaches looking for ongoing development, experienced consultation, practical systems and a more sustainable way to build the practice around the work.
The other half of the practice
For the last decade I’ve also trained and developed professional coaches. That work eventually became the SWITCH Coaching System® — the ecosystem I’ve built around coaching craft, business and the practical systems that support a sustainable practice.
The fuller story lives on the coaches’ side of the site.
Get in touch
If something here sounded like you, or like someone you’re looking out for, tell me what’s going on.
A few sentences is enough. If it’s coaching you have in mind, you can also start a private conversation.