Meet Stephanie Rourke Jackson, Life and Leadership Coach at Beacon Coaching & Leadership where she helps clients develop a sense of true self and create a harmonious lifestyle.
“It’s not what happens to you that matters, it’s how you respond that marks your life.”
From working in fashion marketing to starting her entrepreneurial life as a coach at 50, Stephanie Rourke Jackson is a go-getter who has beaten all odds to get to where she is today. She is a problem solver who guides ambitious people and teams to generate new ideas, grow their confidence, crush limiting beliefs, and discover their full potential. Jackson is passionate about human dignity and is engaged in creating awareness about how to end human trafficking. She likes to listen, see new perspectives, think critically, and values truth and transparency above everything else.
Growing up, Stephanie has always been fascinated by the way people think and act. She was also interested in fashion and styling, which led her to often raid her mother’s, sister’s, and even her friends’ closets to put together new looks. She was 12 when her father brought home a fashion magazine, and she became obsessed. She then started buying every issue of the magazine for 35 years. She went to school for the business of fashion and marketing/communications, volunteered at galas, and landed her job as a sales and PR assistant at 22. She worked in fashion marketing later, traveling, directing shoots, attending industry events until her love for that life changed and she decided to go on a radical journey to figure out who she was and what she now wanted out of life.
So, what led her to change careers? It was a crisis in her marriage that moved her to reevaluate her life. She sought professional help, joined a recovery group, and hired a life coach where she did self-reflection exercises that left her spellbound. “I left every session bawling my eyes out because I was touching the depth of my soul, and it felt so good to know me. The REAL ME was bubbling up,” she says. Fascinated, Stephanie trained as a life coach shortly after this and thus began a new chapter of her life.
Elaborating on what she does as a life coach, Stephanie says, “I help people, women, in particular, get radically clear about their personal identity. Working one to one or in group coaching masterminds, I support my clients to discover their own personal genius. Through my program called Identity Mapping, my clients understand their Shine qualities, the Stressors that threaten to throw them off track and cause their Shadow side to appear, how to Shift at the moment so that they can have success in their work and relationships. It’s an amazing process that works!”
Over the years, Jackson has realized that failure is a great teacher and helps to build resilience. It’s a tool for perseverance. Her life has changed a lot ever since she took the recovery path. Her marriage healed through all the work that she and her husband committed to doing, they now have a thriving relationship and help others who have struggling or broken marriages. In the recovery process, she became more compassionate, and it taught her about shame, being transparent, and forgiveness.
Struggle and challenge are not a foreign concept to Stephanie who, as a mom of three kids with ADHD, learned how to adapt in ways that were more supportive to their learning styles. She has to grow a lot by helping them find solutions every day.
When COVID hit, like many businesses, Jackson also had to take her in-person coaching programs online. It was quite scary at first, learning new tech, but it also helped her reach more people and scale her business model. During this time, she invested in coaching and training herself to learn how to promote, market, and create service offerings that have high value for her clients.
She wishes for every person to know their worth and value. Each one of us has an integral mission in the world, and we just need to discover and live it out. She believes that we need to be on a mission to know our true identity and step into the fullness of our potential without comparison. It requires practice, but it makes us courageous and confident. Inspiring us to believe in the power of self, she says, “You are likely more powerful and more influential than you think. When you know who you are, you can connect on a much deeper level with people and have the confidence to pursue the dreams that your soul craves!”
