When you chase someone else’s definition of success, there’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes. You hit the targets, climb the ladder, check every box on the achievement list, and still wake up wondering if this is all there is. The metrics say you’re winning, but something inside you knows you’re lost.
This edition of Leadership Coach of the Year 2025 exists because that feeling has become too common to ignore. We’re living through a moment where the old measures of leadership—revenue growth, market dominance, operational efficiency—still matter, but they’re no longer enough. Leaders everywhere are asking harder questions. Not just “How do we win?” but “Why are we playing?” Not just “What do we achieve?” but “Who do we become in the process?”
The coaches featured in these pages have built their reputations on refusing to let leaders hide from those questions. They don’t offer quick fixes or tactical shortcuts. They demand something far more uncomfortable: that you confront the gap between who you say you are and who you actually show up as. That you stop performing leadership and start embodying it. That you acknowledge the quiet desperation of success without meaning before it hollows you out completely.
Our cover story captures this shift in its most authentic form. Kamila Paličková didn’t stumble into conscious leadership—she earned it through the hard currency of walking away from everything she’d built. A high-achieving corporate leader who recognized that her definition of success was slowly killing the parts of herself that mattered most. Her reinvention wasn’t about rejecting ambition; it was about refusing to divorce achievement from wholeness. Through her coaching practice and the Women Changing the World Awards Czech and Slovak, she’s amplifying a model of leadership that values collaboration over competition, empathy over extraction, purpose over profit-at-any-cost. Her recent Global Mentor of the Year recognition affirms what many already know: the future belongs to leaders who stop pretending they can separate their humanity from their work. With initiatives like the Redline Expedition, Kamila proves that bridging business, ecology, and consciousness isn’t idealism—it’s the only sustainable path forward.
This edition also brings you the architects of transformation whose names have become synonymous with leadership evolution. These are the practitioners who’ve coached hundreds of executives, written the books that changed boardroom conversations, and built methodologies that turned abstract concepts like purpose and authenticity into executable frameworks.
We’ve also examined a case study that gets to the heart of why purpose-driven coaching matters.
What binds all these stories together is a simple truth: leadership coaching stopped being about making people better at doing what they were already doing. It became about helping them figure out whether what they’re doing is worth doing at all. The coaches who matter now aren’t the ones making leaders more efficient. They’re the ones making leaders more human.
That’s uncomfortable work. It should be.
