Is Life Coaching Still Relevant in 2026?

Making the Cut · Liza Day in conversation with Jacquie Stebbings of Centerstone Coaching

Some conversations shift something in you. This is one of them.

Liza sits down with Jacquie Stebbings, a mindset and identity coach she has worked with for the past 18 months, for an honest, wide-ranging talk about anxiety, growth, and the stories we tell about ourselves. It is part coaching session, part personal reckoning, and it lands somewhere most conversations about self-help never reach.

Beyond the "life coach" label

Jacquie is quick to admit the term life coach is dated. It puts a picture in people's heads that has nothing to do with the actual work. Twenty years ago, when she was first certified, it was a different animal. What she does now sits at the level of identity: who am I, and who am I being? Because, as she puts it, who you are being defines everything in your life.

The distinction she draws is simple and freeing. Most approaches tell you to work harder, fix yourself, improve. Jacquie's lever is the opposite. You stop trying to become a better version and start identifying as the person who already has the life you want. That shift, from fixing to being, is where transformation actually happens.

Liza describes herself as Jacquie's biggest challenge, and then proves the work by example. She lost 40 pounds and, more importantly, got relief from an anxiety that had shadowed her for 30 years. Her honesty about the journey, therapy after her mother passed, the years of trying and slipping back, is what makes the episode hit.

The mind is a muscle

Liza reframes what Jacquie does as mind coaching, and Jacquie agrees. Most people don't know how to think in a way that matches what they want, and they don't realize their mind is the source of it all. Once you understand that how you think is making or breaking your life, you get very interested in how to use it well.

And here's the part people skip: repetition. You don't get in shape from one gym visit. You don't rewire a thought pattern by hearing the insight once. The muscle only strengthens through returning, again and again, to the identity of the person you want to be. Liza is candid that the repetition is exactly what got her over the last hill, and why she believes the work needs time, not a quick fix.

Our ceiling is their floor

One of the most striking threads is about the next generation. Jacquie, who has kids and clients in their twenties, notices that Gen Z and Alpha catch on far faster than her generation did. They don't need an insight explained ten times. Something she spent a decade getting embodied, she can share with her niece in a single conversation, and off she goes.

Our ceiling is their floor, Jacquie says. They are standing on our shoulders, going further and faster. She believes they are well designed for the world unfolding in front of them. What trips them up is not capability. It is a fierce loyalty to a bad story, a hard thing that happened, and letting it define them. Drop that, she says, and they take off.

The story you can't stop telling

This is the heart of the episode, and the idea that gives it its name.

Whatever you are dealing with that creates that inner feeling of "I don't want this" is designed for one purpose. It is a pointer. Everything you don't want is pointing you toward what you do want. The trap, and Jacquie admits she lost years to it, is getting hooked on the "what I don't want" loop until it becomes your story, your badge, the thing you gather around a glass of wine to talk about. It builds its own momentum, and while you are riding it, you miss the gold sitting right there: the excitement of what you actually want.

Feel the hard feeling, she says. Grieve it, sit in it, one night or one month, however long it takes. But you will know you are stuck when the same lines keep coming out of your mouth weeks later and the story hasn't changed. That is the signal to turn the page. And here is the sharp edge of it: the longer you harp on the old storyline, the further you delay turning the page. The mind cannot be in two places at once. You are either moving toward what you want or rehearsing what you don't.

Everything is for you

Liza brings it home with a story about a student, a gifted, neurodivergent designer who had been told by another school that the industry wasn't for him. He struggled with the technical module and started to spiral into "I suck, this isn't for me." Instead of drilling the patterns harder, Liza gave him two days to get the "I suck" out of his system, then had him learn draping, a 3D way into the same skill his mind could actually grasp. He showed up half an hour early every day. By the end, he understood it.

What mattered to Liza wasn't the patterns. It was him changing how he relates to himself when he hits a bump, because a designer's whole life is bumps, and the work is finding your solution to them. Jacquie widens the lens: you can suck at something today and still persevere. The lighter you hold those moments, the faster you move through them. Even the school that turned him away can be seen as the turning point that led him somewhere better. Everything is for you, even the parts that seem shitty, if you are willing to dig for what they are pointing to.

It's not the end of the story

The closing idea is the gentlest and maybe the most useful. When something feels like a setback, you simply haven't turned the page yet. There is another thing happening on the next one. Liza's mother used to tell her the fun is in the getting there, not the there, and it took her decades to understand it. The artist doesn't really want the finished painting. They want to paint.

Jacquie's final reframe on anxiety ties it together. So much harm comes from latching onto anxiety as an identity, "I am the person who has anxiety," rather than "I'm having a season where I'm feeling more anxious than usual, and that makes sense." The label sticks because it carries so much weight in the culture right now. But you are not served by making it who you are. What serves you is community, the people who genuinely love you, and pointing your attention, again and again, toward what feels good and what you actually want.

Listen to the full conversation with Jacquie Stebbings on Making the Cut, wherever you get your podcasts.