If you’ve been on your personal growth journey for a while, you probably know that books and courses can only take you so far. At one point, you need someone who can give you personalized guidance on your path to your best self. Our list of top personal development coaches is here to do that for you!
In this article, we’ll give you a quick overview of what personal development coaches do, some of the best professionals in this field, and where you can do further research to find the one that’s just perfect for you.
The professionals you’ll find on this list have extensive experience and a unique approach to guiding clients on their personal development journey. They are coaches first, which means they focus on working with clients over publishing and speaking engagements.
What Is A Personal Development Coach?
Since technically, all coaches work on helping clients in their personal growth, you might wonder what a personal development coach is in the first place.
Professionals we refer to as personal development coaches are typically holistic life coaches who work on more than one area of their client’s lives. While some coaches specialize in a narrower topic, such as dating or investments, personal growth coaches help people become more well-rounded and balanced individuals.
[ Read: 5 Unexpected Ways a Dating Coach Can Whip Your Love Life into Shape ]
Some of the areas personal development coaches can help you with are:
- Mindfulness
- Spiritual growth
- Managing negative emotions
- Improving your confidence and practicing self-love
- Finding your purpose or passion
- Creating a life vision and goal setting
- Achieving work-life balance
- Time management and lifestyle improvements
Why Hire A Personal Development Coach?
We often tend to put the most effort into our careers where the expectations are clear and neglect other areas such as our communities, love relationships, spiritual life, or emotional and physical health. We dream of starting creative projects or enriching our lives with special experiences, but we never take the initiative. We may want to improve our character and change how we show up in our everyday life, but we feel unsure of where to start.
A personal development coach can help with any and all of these aspirations and give us frameworks to define where we want to be in life and how to get there. When we live a conscious life, reflect on all facets of ourselves, and set goals for all areas (not just our careers), we can live a happier and more well-rounded life.
A few reasons why you may decide to work with a personal development coach are:
- You want to overcome childhood traumas or break generational patterns.
- You want to live a less stressful and more balanced life.
- You want to discover who you really are, not who the world wants you to be.
- You feel stuck in your life and miss a sense of purpose or meaning.
- You always put others first and struggle to name and prioritize your own needs.
- You’re simply an avid learner and a student of life who wants to live in perpetual growth.
8 Top Personal Development Coaches You Can Hire
There are plenty of well-known life coaches out there who rose to fame during the self-help boom of the 90s and 00s. They may work with a few hand-selected clients and charge thousands of dollars for their sessions or mostly spend their time promoting their bestselling books and courses or booking speaking engagements.
In this list, you’ll find none of that. Instead, we’ve gathered some of the best personal development coaches who focus on working with clients and are available for new intakes. Each of them specializes in different areas and helps people with a unique set of issues.
Here are some of the top personal development coaches listed on CoachCompare, in no particular order.
Lystia Putranto
Lystia’s mission is to empower millennials and Gen Zs to become their most authentic selves and live more fulfilling lives. She’s a certified holistic wellness coach who believes that true wellness extends beyond physical health and wellbeing. Lystia helps her clients cultivate and maintain a growth-driven mindset and a healthy lifestyle.
Djelani Hamm
Djelani helps his clients achieve their personal and professional goals in creative and career pursuits. He focuses on identifying the core strengths of the people he works with, so they can easily overcome challenges and discover their most creative selves.
His process is to create personalized plans for his clients and provide tools for guidance on the way to accomplishing them. These intentional systems help them activate their desired goals through their unique strengths and make a positive influence on the world.
Sue Wang
Sue is an ICF and Co-Active certified coach, an energy healer, and an MBTI practitioner. She’s worked as a career coach for 20+ years in some of the top universities in the US and graduated from Harvard University herself.
Today, she focuses on helping clients heal their wounds through heart-centered practices and discover what makes them come alive. From getting to the next stage in your career to learning to speak up more in your relationships, she follows a holistic approach where self-care and self-knowledge always come first.
Tina Unrue
Tina is a certified life and mindset coach who helps moms prioritize their own needs, prevent burnout, and create a life that reflects more of themselves. Her method is designed to break behavioral patterns and create a new perspective for a more balanced life where her clients can thrive, not just survive.
As a mom herself, she’s deeply familiar with the weight of mom guilt, the stress of perfectionism, and the constant feeling of being in service to everything and everyone. She’s passionate about helping other moms find their way back to themselves and establish healthier patterns in their lives.
Andrea Biricotti
Andrea is a mental wellbeing coach with a mission to help people overcome emotionally stressful situations and take control of their inner world. He works on a wide array of areas with his clients, including emotional resilience, relationship problems, overcoming limiting beliefs, cultivating self-confidence and self-acceptance, and finding their life purpose.
His coaching process includes identifying his clients’ problems and challenges, defining the necessary steps for achieving positive change, and keeping them accountable to help them progress. He follows a collaborative approach where his clients get a chance to define what they would like to focus on at the start of each coaching session.
Lebo Mopeli
Lebo is a “joy facilitator,” life coach, and business consultant specializing in digital marketing. She works with leaders, teams, and executives to cultivate a growth mindset and define their purpose in four key areas of life and work. She also works with young people who aspire to be digital entrepreneurs and those who wish to restart after experiencing major life changes.
Wil Gravely-Strayhorn
Wil is a transformational coach who helps people uncover their true selves. He provides guidance for his clients to overcome obstacles in their minds, gain confidence, and face their anxieties to feel more whole. This allows them to exist more freely, honestly, and completely.
First, he helps clients define who their ideal self is. Then he uses tools to teach them how to take control of their thinking patterns, deal with impostor syndrome, overcome procrastination, and let go of their negative habits.
Olivia White
Olivia is a coach who uses therapeutic art to empower QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous People of Color) professionals. She helps them shed the mindsets of oppressive stories that hold them down and excel in alignment with what they love through the power of creative expression.
Her process is based on using art materials to communicate and process deep personal experiences. This way, her clients can heal from emotionally depleting work environments and create a professional and personal life that feels more authentic and aligned with them.
How To Choose A Personal Development Coach
What you’re looking for in a coach is personal to you. In order to find the one that you most resonate with, keep these two criteria in mind.
1. What values do they embody?
You might be sharing very personal aspects of your life in a coaching session, so it’s important that you feel safe and see eye-to-eye with the person you’re working with. Though your coach isn’t required to agree with you on everything (so long as they respect your personal life choices), we often feel most understood by people who share similar stories or believe in our values.
2. What process do they follow?
Every coach is different. Some may assign reading materials and homework to you every week, while others only expect you to show up fully at the sessions without additional work required.
Some use more spiritual tools, while others work with psychological frameworks. Ask your coach at your discovery session about their process and choose someone whose expectations you feel comfortable committing to.
Where To Find A Personal Development Coach
CoachCompare is a diverse, free directory of coaches where you can select from a wide range of vetted profiles. Using tags such as ‘personal development coach’ on the site, you can easily filter your search down to the type of coaches you’re looking for. You can enter keywords in the search bar that are even more specific to the topic you’re seeking help with.
Try CoachCompare now and find the perfect personal development coach for you.