Who Are You Becoming? The Question That Changes Your 2026 | 14
Julie Cober:
We wanted to show you that it's possible. We wanted to give you possibility, we wanted to give you new ideas. We wanted to give you new tools to say, well, if they did it, I can do it too. Because if all of us have done it, you can do it as well.
Imagine if you were invited to a room filled with a collection of the most diverse, interesting, authentic women in business leadership and entrepreneurship today, sharing their stories of growth, courage, risk, [00:00:30] and change, women who've declared enough is enough. These rules of success I've been asked to follow no longer work for me and frankly, who made them up anyway. Well, there is such a room and my friend, you're here in it right now.
Welcome to “According To Who?”, the go-to podcast for successful women who are ready to question the current status quo, do things differently and rewrite her next chapter. I'm your host, Julie Cober, former C-Suite, corporate executive turned founder, [00:01:00] CEO and peak performance mindset coach to the female founder on a mission to build, grow, and scale on her own terms. If you're craving more freedom, wellbeing, and true fulfilment both in your work and your life, guess what? You're going to love being in this room.
All right, welcome back everyone. We have our last episode of season one of, According To Who, [00:01:30] I can't believe I'm even saying that it's the last episode of 2025, and we have dropped this on December the 29th. So I hope if you celebrate Christmas, you've had a nice holiday season. I hope you're getting ready for a new year. So if you haven't listened, this is almost, today's episode is a bit of an extension of our last one that we dropped on December 15th.
I provided six very powerful reflective [00:02:00] questions to journal on before you start your planning process or perhaps in the midst of your 2026 planning process. And these questions, regardless of when you're listening to this, they can be used at any time in the year, in any year. So you might want to go back and listen to that first. It's fairly quick. I think it's about a 20 minute episode, and we talked about desire as well. And then I'm going to give you two more tools today, but I can't believe that we're [00:02:30] at the end of season one. We are coming back with season two. We are so happy how, according to who this podcast is starting to evolve and grow. It was a long time coming out of the gate, but we called it according to who because we believe so strongly here that we need to relook and reimagine and perhaps even rewrite the rules of success, how we've been conditioned to succeed, especially as [00:03:00] women is not working.
For many of us, I believe that it's causing a bit of an epidemic around stress and overwhelm and in some cases health issues on how we are conditioned to succeed, hustle, grind, sacrifice, do more with less, a lot of masculine energy, all the things. So we wanted to bring new tools, new ideas, new perspectives in this podcast [00:03:30] around that. That's why we say according to who we wanted to bring you, the most amazing women who have made the change, decided that the rules of success, the way we've been taught, don't work for them anymore and have made big major changes in their life, mainly all of them. Midlife, we wanted to show you that it's possible. We wanted to give you possibility, we wanted to give you new ideas. We wanted to give you new tools to say, well, if they [00:04:00] did it, I can do it too.
Because if all of us have done it, you can do it as well. So I hope that you have found the information useful and you've got that from these amazing women that we've interviewed. We have a whole host more coming in season two. So I'm super excited about that, and I always love feedback. If there is something you would love me to talk about, or if there is a person you think should be on this podcast and I should reach [00:04:30] out to invite, please let me know. You can send me an email, a DM comment, whatever. Please let me know because we want to bring you information that's going to be helpful to you. So let's get on to today. So I want to give you two more tools that I do every year. I do it myself. I do it with my clients. I think these two are very, very powerful.
One you'll be very familiar with. The other one you maybe not, but it's kind of like an adjunct or an [00:05:00] add-on to these six questions that we've got you to reflect on. Once those are done, I would do those first. So even if you're listening to this out of order, listen to this. But go and do those six questions first from the last episode. So once you're done those, the second thing that I get my clients to do and that I do as well is probably one of the most powerful exercises in this type of work that I think you'll ever do. So you'll see from [00:05:30] these two episodes that I'm really focusing here on who you are being, right? So you can always go back to episode number three, which is where I really outline the be, do, have leadership model. So a lot of people know about this, some people don't.
It's really a model that not a huge percentage of the world follow most people when they're looking at success, and this is how we've been conditioned. So back to rewriting the rules, they ask themselves, okay, what do [00:06:00] I need to do to have what I want to have? And then I will be, so what do I need to do to have the weight loss that I want to have? And then I'll be feeling skinny, then I'll be feeling sexy, then I'll be feeling beautiful, whatever. I'm just using that as an example. But most of the world follow. What do I need to do to have what I want to have? And then I'll be the do have model is who do I need to be and what do I need to do to have what I want to have? And from the last two episodes, you'll see here the [00:06:30] being and who you're being, how you're showing up in the world every single day is as important or more important than what you need to do.
But we go right to the do because we're trained this way. This is the conditioning we have in success. How do I do this? Okay, just show me how to do it. How do I get this done? And when we don't know how to do something, I don't know about you, but a lot of the women, myself included, that I work with, when they don't know how to do something, it gets kind of stressful. This is when the anxiety [00:07:00] comes in. Maybe this is when they stop doing things, they stop trying. They stop going after goals, they stop trying to create the life that they want to live. Not sure how will always show up. You can figure out the how, even if you don't know, but you do know, actually, I would argue to you that you do know how, you're just not aware of it yet.
But that's the do side. These last two episodes of according to who I've been really focusing on the be, okay, who do I need to be? Who do I want [00:07:30] to be? How do I want to show up? So this next exercise is literally one of the most powerful I've ever done personally. That's why I do it every year. So if you're open to this exercise, and again, in addition to those six questions, I want you to start today, and you'll probably have to do this, maybe you can do it in one day. Usually it takes me a few days to do this. So if it takes you, there's no right or wrong, [00:08:00] but I want you to write a letter to yourself.
I want you to envision that it is December 31st, 2026. Okay? So we are one year out. This is the end of 2026, and your higher self has written a letter to you. So she wrote it at the beginning of 2026. So she wrote it either December 31st, 2025, [00:08:30] or January 1st, 2026, and now it's time to read it. Okay? We're going to pretend that we're all the way down at the end of the year, right? And she knew what you wanted and what you were capable of, and she felt she needed to tell you some things that you needed to hear. That's the letter she wrote to you. So think of this as the grandest version of you has written you a [00:09:00] letter. She knew what you wanted, she knew what you were capable of, and she felt you needed to hear a few things, okay? That's the context of this letter. So what would she tell you?
What would she coach you on? What would she give you some advice on? What advice would she give you? This is the grandest version of you, the highest version of yourself, the best possible version of yourself. I like to [00:09:30] call it the grandest version of me. When I think of the grandest version of who I want to be in 2026, she's written me a letter. How would she tell you to show up for yourself? What would she tell you to let go of? What would she tell you to lean into? What would she tell you to feel? Is there things that need to be felt?
[00:10:00] What would she tell you about the criticism and the negativity and the chatter that potentially goes on in your mind? We call it your noisy roommate When she gets loud, what would she tell you to do with her? That loud, noisy voice? What would she implore you to do? This is what is going to be in the letter. Who would she tell you to be? [00:10:30] Now, okay, these are the things that you're going to write about in this letter to yourself. And again, these are powerful, powerful questions. And so if you really take the time to dig in on these, it can take you snippets of time. You might be only going to answer a couple of questions each time. It depends. It depends on the state you're in. It depends on what comes up. It depends on all the things, right? So just go with it.
There's no right or wrong, but when [00:11:00] this letter is done, whenever that is, and hopefully it'll be into the beginning of January, my recommendation to myself and my clients is we read it every day, every single day, and when we read this. So of course you don't want a 10 page letter, or you can if you want, but if you commit to reading this, and even if you don't think you can do it daily, whatever, then pick a time, two times [00:11:30] a week, once a week, whatever works for you. The more you do it, the better it's going to be or the faster things will change. Because what's happening is you're creating a new identity. You're creating the identity of the version of you that's going to have the success you want to have in 2026.
So it will start to become your reality. This is how we do this and reading it every day, [00:12:00] if you can, that's repetition. And that's one of the ways we reprogram our subconscious mind and those patterns and those negative living beliefs. We want to get rid of repetition. Listen, the things that if there's a belief that's not serving you, a negative limiting belief that you tell yourself, I'm not blank enough, I'm not good enough, I'm not skinny enough, I'm not smart enough, not enough is a big one for a lot of people. It's not true. It's your truth. You've [00:12:30] decided somewhere in your life to believe this, right? And that's fine, and a lot of the time it's from when we were children, but you've told yourself this over and over and over, and you've used your reticular activating system in your brain to prove it, to look for things all day long, scanning.
See, I didn't really do really well at that. See, I'm not really good enough over there. Or see, I started to go to the gym and I'm done by February. See, I can't [00:13:00] keep anything. I can't keep my goals. I'm not consistent. All the things, we could go on and on. None of that is true. It is your truth because you have repeatedly told yourself in different ways, consciously and unconsciously, probably through your whole life. So the beauty of this is, and you might be sitting here going, yep, I get this. You're right. I tell myself this all the time. I'm always critical of myself. I'm judging myself. I'm all the things. If you can [00:13:30] programme and pattern a negative belief about yourself into your subconscious mind where it's on autopilot over, and because you've told yourself over and over and over again, why do you think you can't do that on the positive you can.
It's the same thing. It works both ways. It's the same exercise, so we put it on repeat. But the key is in this work is we can't say, okay, this is how I think [00:14:00] how I should be. I should be confident, I should be consistent, I should be happy. All of those things. And then just try to start. If you're not those things, like let's say you say, I'm an unhappy person, or I should be happy. You have to really figure out what your true limiting beliefs are and then change those. We don't want a list of shoulds. Often we make a list. Well, I want to be confident and I want to be happy, and I want [00:14:30] to have joy in my life. Well, so for example, with me, I would never put confident on a list because I already am. I'm super confident.
I always have been. It's not anything that I have to change and re pattern. So make sure, I guess what I'm trying to say, it's not easy to explain, but we want to ensure you really know what that negative limiting belief is, and then you work to reprogram that. Put it on repetition through a letter like this, [00:15:00] reading it this to yourself, this reality that you've created of who you want to be every single day in 2026, or who you want to be because that's a big, big piece of what you're going to have, who you want to be and what you need to do. So that's strategic plan. You're going to put in place the goals, the revenue goals, the compensation goals, all the business goals, the career goals. That's all the do. That's all the doing, right? That's actually the [00:15:30] easier part. It's the being who do I need to be and who do I want to be is just as important. So this letter is going to help you figure out who you want to be in 2026. And if you read it often, and I would suggest daily put it in some of your routines if that's what you're going to do, and it becomes your reality, this becomes your consciousness.
The goal in this work is to take negative limiting beliefs that [00:16:00] are subconscious, bring them up into the conscious and change them. That's the work we're doing here. So this is going to become your consciousness. This is going to become your reality. This letter, this is going to become your new identity. This is ways in which we change the identity. So you're going to write, if you have a health goal here, we talked about this in the last episode, what does she need to tell you in this letter about [00:16:30] how to have a health identity, right? This letter isn't going to say, okay, Julie, you need to go to the gym three times a week. I know that already and I'm not doing it. What does she need to tell you really about your health identity? Because if you have a health goal or to get in shape goal, and you set a goal of going to the gym three times a week and you're not doing it, it's because your identity hasn't changed.
All of this work in the last two episodes, [00:17:00] all of the work around who do you need to be? This is identity work. Okay? So the other piece that I wanted to give you, many of you probably know this, but I find this to be super, super powerful. This is kind of the last piece of what I do. I do this work before I start getting into the strategy, is pick a word, right? Pick a word that becomes your anchor. So because you've reflected on those six questions, you've now written a letter to yourself of who you [00:17:30] want to be in 2026, the version of you, the powerful woman that's going to get everything she puts on her list for 2026. What's a word that comes out of this work that's really going to anchor it all for you? So for example, I've been starting this work, actually, I'm way down the road now.
You're hearing this on the 29th. The word I chose for 2026 is experience, and I'll share with you openly, the reason why I [00:18:00] chose that word this year is because I believe in every fibre of my being. You guys know this. I say this all the time, that I believe that we are all meant to love every aspect of our life and have that supported by work that we enjoy. That is a fundamental conviction of mine. And I also believe that the purpose of why we're all here on this earth, we all are all mind, body, and spirit. We're all made up of a mind to body and a spirit [00:18:30] or a soul. I call it my soul. Some people call it spirit, but I believe the purpose that we're all here, our soul's purpose is to experience a grand life, the grandest version of ourselves.
We are here to experience our soul wants to experience the grandest version of ourselves, the grandest version of our lives, a life that we love living. That's why our soul is here to experience [00:19:00] life. I want to experience life in the grandest form that I can. I want to create and manifest a life that I love living every aspect of my life. So because I know that's my soul's purpose is to experience life, not know, right? Knowing is in our mind, find experience. So now it's like, okay, what life do I want to experience in 2026? [00:19:30] What version of me do I want to experience in 2026? So that word is over everything. What experience do I want my clients to have? What experience do I want my business to have? Do I want my family to have my children to have my husband, my relationship, my marriage?
What experience do I want in my marriage? It's just like it's in everything I'm doing. It's such a powerful word, and it took me a while. I was playing around with different words and they were kind of, yeah, that's good. [00:20:00] I don't know. They weren't landing until I hit this word and it was like a visceral body reaction. That's what happens with me when I know I'm onto something or I'm making, that's how I make decisions. It's through my body and I get this specific reaction. So that's my word, but you want something that moves you. You probably could feel, even if you're not watching me, if you're just listening to me, you probably could just feel my aura and my energy change there when I started talking about that word, right? You want something [00:20:30] that moves you literally. You actually have emotion attached to it, something that your future self or your higher self.
She's telling you, right? When I wrote this letter, it was like, oh yeah, she's telling you you are here to experience life. How do you want that experience to be? So you're not just picking a word, right? It doesn't matter. It won't work. It's not going to anchor you if it doesn't have that kind of emotion and tie and anchoring. But [00:21:00] this is where you need to lean in. We have to lean into this work that I've shared over the last two episodes because this is going to help you focus on getting whatever those goals are that you put in your strategic plan for 2026. Personal goals, professional goals. When the days are hard, you're going to go back to the word, you're going to go back to the letter, you're going to go back to the word. You can even go back to the six questions, the [00:21:30] word that you want to choose. You wanted to embody your gaps. So what you wrote in this letter, because what she told you, some of the things she thinks you need to hear, those are some gaps. We all have them, right? But this word's going to help you embody the gap. Close the gap.
How will the word help you fill the gap? What word is going to move you emotionally and help you fill some gaps [00:22:00] or some help you reprogram and re-pattern? Some of these negative beliefs help you stay focused on what you desire. We talked about desire last time, right? On what you want and why you want it, and it will help you stay the course when things get hard. Because listen, it's the law of polarity. We can't know up if we don't know down. We can't know success if we don't [00:22:30] know failure. We can't know front if we don't know back. There's an opposite to everything. So there's going to be challenging times. There's going to be times where you're like, I don't know if this is going to work. I don't know what I'm doing. All the things, right? Regardless of what's going on in your life, it's just natural. It's what life throws at us.
So the word picking a word can help you through that. And so listen, you can get really [00:23:00] creative with this. You could start putting it on your vision board, putting it on your computer, putting it on your bathroom mirror. Go onto Canva and create something. You can go even go out onto Etsy or Pinterest or any of them and maybe whatever your word is. I know people have gotten jewellery bracelets like inexpensive, but something where they see it and feel. It depends. If you're someone who's kinesthetic and you feel you like to touch things, then maybe you have something that you can touch. If you're visual, make sure you can see it. [00:23:30] Maybe you want to make sure you can hear it. If you're auditory, somehow voice record yourself talking about your word and what it means to you and the emotion it brings you.
I mean, you can do a whole bunch of things around this. The key is to have it tied to emotion. What's going to change you? That's what's going to move you, our subconscious mind when we're re pattering that, that's our emotional mind. It works on feeling, okay, so you want it to move you and you want to feel it. [00:24:00] So that is my recommendation. So we have the six reflective journal questions from last episode. Write yourself this letter and pick your word and do this this year and tell me, reach out and give me feedback like did it work? Did it move anything? Did it change anything? I know the first year I did this, the first time I did this was in 2022, so this is the fourth year I've been doing this, and it makes a world [00:24:30] of difference. So if you've been somebody in the past who's just gone through the regular strategic planning, business planning, career planning, goal setting, that kind of thing, like many of us do, when a new year comes, which is all the doing that needs to happen, the actions, the tasks, the goals, what if you tied or tried, tried and tied being to this as well?
Because it's the being doing [00:25:00] the doing that makes the difference. It's the being doing the doing that is going to bring you what you want anytime of your life, who you're being every single day, how you're showing up, what you're saying to yourself, what you're believing, what you're assuming, what stories are you telling yourself. All of that is what brings actually success. I actually call it the new high performance model. And [00:25:30] if you're in my world, you'll hear me talking about this a lot in 2026, because we are rewriting the rules of success around here. We are doing things differently. We are not staying on these hamster wheels of stress and overwhelm and sacrifice and not loving every aspect of our life. We are changing. This is a movement going on over here. We are meant to love every aspect of our life and have that supported by work that we enjoy not consumed by our work. [00:26:00] Alright, my friends, try it out. Let me know. Hope you have an amazing new year, and we will see you back for season two of According to Who in 2026.
Thank you so much for choosing to spend your time with us. I hope today's insights have empowered you and given you ideas and tools to start to rewrite your rules of success. If you love today's episode, please leave us a review and be sure to share it with a friend. And if you'd like to hear more [00:26:30] from these trailblazing women, be sure to hit the subscribe button so you never miss out on another powerful episode. Don't forget to connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram for daily doses of motivation behind the scenes insight, and to keep the conversation going. For additional resources and strategies, visit juliecober.com and subscribe to my newsletter where you'll receive life-changing content delivered right to your inbox. And always remember, you have the ability [00:27:00] to create any change you want in your life at any time. You are 100% worthy of living a life that you genuinely love, that's supported by work that you truly enjoy. Keep pushing the boundaries. Question your thoughts. Step into the elevated version of you. And until next time, always be asking yourself “According To Who?”.
According To Who?
