The best life and performance coaches are a world away from the motivational speakers addressing huge crowds with empty platitudes. They offer personalised, actionable strategies to help individuals achieve real, sustainable growth.
For HNWs, this type of coaching is especially valuable because it addresses the complex challenges that come with success—challenges that aren’t about money but about finding deeper fulfilment, optimising performance and managing the demands of a high-pressure lifestyle.
‘We’re all humans,’ says Lisa Christen, who most commonly meets with clients asking: ‘How do I get the most out of life? How do I get the most out of my potential?’
What is a life coach?
Life coaches are most often instructed by HNWs who have achieved what others may deem success (marriage, rising to the top of their field or financial freedom) but find themselves looking for greater meaning beyond their achievements.
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The coaches featured in 2026 practice a range of techniques from spirituality and hypnosis to talk therapy and EMDR. What unites them is their goal to guide individuals in setting new life goals, nurturing meaningful relationships and discovering a lifestyle that fulfils them.
Many wealthy people feel a sense of isolation or struggle with building authentic connections, and a life coach can provide the tools to navigate those feelings and improve overall mental wellness. Often, they feel they will be judged for talking about their experience among friends or family.
Life coaches can also assist with stress management, helping individuals maintain balance amid their busy, often public lives.
What is a performance coach?
Performance coaches work with partners, CEOs and managers to enhance their professional capabilities. Whether it’s improving leadership and interpersonal skills, refining decision-making strategies or building a personal brand, performance coaches help high achievers reach and stay at the top of their game.
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Clients are often seeking help while scaling their businesses, handling complex negotiations or pursuing a promotion. A performance coach provides the tactical support needed to navigate these milestones with greater efficiency and clarity.
The advisers in the Spear’s index work intensely with both advisers to HNWs and the HNWs themselves. They are led by evidence and science, using personality testing such as the Myers-Briggs, to help an individual know themselves and their weaknesses on a deeper level and work past them to achieve even greater success.
Increasing pressure
As awareness of workplace stress and burnout grows, helping clients manage demanding careers has become a central part of life and performance coaching. Many coaches draw on their own experiences. ‘I had a very big corporate job. I had an MBA in economics. I had board positions, a Range Rover and the right postcode. And then I had a catastrophic burnout,’ says Annalie Howling.
For many clients who have inherited large amounts of wealth, online scrutiny and increased access to private information has intensified the pressure they feel. Jessica McGawley, who coaches young people from wealthy and prominent backgrounds, tells Spear’s: ‘The term “nepo baby” has stuck because it makes an easy headline but nepotism exists in every demographic.’ McGawley works with clients to help them step beyond public perception and build their own life purpose.
Click the links below to jump to a section of this article:
- Methodology
- The best life and performance coaches: some names to know
- The best life and performance coaches: the complete list
- Contact us
Methodology
Each year, the Spear’s Research Unit reassesses and refreshes its rankings of the leading providers in each sector by gathering data from and about the advisers and firms themselves, assessing submission forms, collating nominations, carrying out peer reviews, reviewing data from third-party sources, gathering references and recommendations, canvassing experts and conducting hundreds of interviews.
Advisers are evaluated using a proprietary scoring system that assigns different weightings to certain attributes. These scores feed directly into each new set of rankings in the Spear’s Indices. Each of these indices are published first online (according to the research calendar) and then in print. Print publication takes the form of the annual Spear’s 500 directory, which includes the top advisers in every index.
[See also: A guide to The Spear’s 500: Everything you need to know]
Each featured adviser is profiled on spears500.com. The site allows users to search the Spear’s database of more than 4,000 entities to find one (or more) to meet their specific requirements by filtering for specific attributes such as an adviser’s location, their specialist expertise and information about their client base.
The best life and performance coaches: some names to know
Annalie Howling
- Focus: Burnout recovery
- Position: Independent
After achieving an MBA in economics and embarking on a successful corporate career that included a board-level role, Annalie Howling experienced ‘catastrophic burnout’, a turning point that led her to reassess her life and pivot towards life coaching.
Her mission as a coach is simple: destigmatise burnout and the shame that surrounds it. ‘No one chooses to burn out,’ she says. ‘Doctors and nurses burn out; you can burn out doing what you love. The burnout zone is a feeling of apathy, lack of energy and disconnection that is similar to depression and grief.’
Using a combination of somatic techniques, eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy and psychometric profiling, Howling works with high-achieving clients to uncover the hidden stresses that are impacting their mental health.
Read Annalie Howling’s full profile at Spear’s 500.com
Michael Serwa
- Focus: No-nonsense advice
- Position: Independent
Michael Serwa believes that an underlying lack of fulfilment – and the inability to communicate and recognise it – is a significant contributor to emotional unease.
A life coach who routinely works with CEOs, entrepreneurs, international royal family members and other UHNW individuals for as much as £50,000 per programme, Serwa tells Spear’s that ‘the rich unhappy person can easily be seen as ungrateful, so they are unlikely to engage with their feelings’.
His no-nonsense methods aim to get to the heart of the issue and are designed to take people from a functional or highly functional level to an exceptional one.
Read Michael Serwa’s full profile at Spear’s 500.com
Helena Territt
- Focus: Neuroatypical guidance
- Firm: Hatched Coaching
- Position: Founder and CEO
Diagnosed with neurodivergence in her late 40s, Helena Territt knows from experience the issues that it can cause in the workplace. With a specialism in assisting clients who suffer from burnout, autism and ADHD, the founder and CEO of Hatched Coaching underscores her approach with ‘strength-based psychology techniques’ designed to deconstruct unhealthy habits.
She tells Spear’s that there has been an increase in individuals diagnosed with neurodivergence. ‘This does not mean that there is an increased ability to cope,’ she says. ‘I still don’t think people have a great understanding of how to work with their ADHD or autism.
The best life and performance coaches: the complete list
Click on the individual names to be directed to more detailed profiles of each adviser on The Spear’s 500 website. The table is ordered by ranking and then alphabetically by surname.
Contact us
- Click here to order a print copy of The Spear’s 500.
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- If you have missed calendar deadlines for our research cycles in 2025, you can still register your interest for updates about upcoming research and rankings.
With additional reporting by Caitlin Kilpatrick.
