I’m exceptionally happy to have Lisa McCourt as my guest today. She’s made GETTING REAL a lifetime pursuit, weaving the world’s most powerful authenticity strategies together into her Juicy Joy training programs, based on her upcoming Hay House book, Juicy Joy – 7 Simple Steps to Your Glorious, Gutsy Self. A lifelong student and teacher of personal development tools, Lisa offers live events and online Juicy Joy trainings through her website, www.LisaMcCourt.com, where you can access a free mini-e-book describing the 7 Steps.Having interacted with her, I can tell you that her juicy joy is contagious. Here’s what she has to say.

To me, true success has come to mean just one thing. It means fully acknowledging, embracing, and loving the hell out of your own uniquely glorious self. I’ve had 36 books published, and together they’ve sold over 5 million copies. But the one thing about them that makes me feel the most successful is my hope that they have led people to know and love themselves a little better than they did before reading them.  
    
The books I wrote early in my career shared the goal of helping parents express unconditional love to their kids, thereby laying a foundation for the kids to grow up with the ability to love and accept themselves. The very best gift that a parent can give a child is to teach that child the art of true self-love. And if you’ve ever been a parent, you know that the only way to teach a child anything is to model it. Your kids will not do what you say. They will do what you do. Your children’s capacity for self-esteem and self-love simply cannot exceed your own – because you’re the example they see every day. 

   
Most of us are NOT loving ourselves enough or even BEING our truest selves, and that means our kids can’t grow up authentic and loving themselves either. This realization led me into my more recent passion – developing an online training program based on my upcoming Hay House book for adults, Juicy Joy – 7 Simple Steps to Your Glorious, Gutsy Self. Juicy Joy is radical authenticity training and that means learning to BE exactly who you are, all the time, and learning to unconditionally LOVE exactly who you are.  
   
Love is our natural state of being. The only thing that keeps us from feeling love all the time is the layers upon layers of conditioning we’ve built up throughout our lives. We think this emotional padding is protecting us and keeping us safe, when in reality all it does is numb us to all the experiences and opportunities that could be making our lives the thrilling adventures they’re meant to be! Juicy Joy is about peeling away the layers that separate us from our true core selves.
   
When it comes to living a successful life, authenticity is the key to everything. There is no other single shift you can make that will so profoundly affect every aspect of your life.  Once you’re operating at the Juicy Joy level of authenticity, anything you want is yours. The word “authenticity” is misunderstood sometimes. People think of it as a virtue, like honesty; like you should feel bad if you’re not authentic, as though you owe the world your authenticity.  But I don’t look at it that way. 
   
I’m not suggesting you should become more authentic because it will make you a better person. You are already a wonderful person. I’m telling you that becoming truly authentic is your golden ticket — to joy, to abundance, to vibrant health and energy, to easily manifesting the life of your dreams. It’s every bit that transformative. You’re not doing this to better serve the world, you’re doing it to better serve you.  But, happily and coincidentally, it’s also the best way to serve your loved ones and the world as well. According to Time magazine, if you are happy, the people around you have a 17% higher chance of being happy themselves.
   
One of my favorite quotes is by the civil rights leader, Dr. Howard Thurman. He said: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.” Juicy Joy is the process I use to help people come alive; to help them hook into their true passion and purpose. It starts with getting real about who you are, and ends with falling madly, passionately in love with who you are, so that you never have to pretend to be anything you’re not, ever again. To me, that is the definition of success.
   
I am the poster child for the common assertion that: “We teach what we need to learn.” I’m not really big on looking back and dredging up all kinds of childhood stuff, so let’s suffice it to say that I had the kind of childhood that would lead someone to go into this field and would make someone passionate about learning how to be truly authentic and self-loving, and teaching these skills to others.     
   
The conditions of my childhood trained me to be a world-class eggshell walker – a skilled chameleon, so eager to please, so starved of genuine human connection, that I acquired a magical ability to shape-shift instantly, transforming myself into whatever would most delight whomever I was with in that moment – friend, boss, romantic partner. But ironically, this “gift” of mine was the very thing that made genuine love and connection impossible for me. 
   
Connection was what I desperately craved, but without any concrete sense of who I authentically was, there was nothing there for anyone to connect WITH, and there was no way for me to find enjoyment from the affection or attention I got from people, because deep-down I always knew it was contingent upon me maintaining whatever mask I had so meticulously crafted in order to get that particular flavor of love in the first place. 
   
It took several decades of intense personal development work and many transformational trainings and programs for me to finally master the art of living from my own profound internal guidance – feeling what’s right or wrong for me instead of always desperately trying to intuit what others expected of me. We are brought up to seek external validation. There’s no question about that. But once we start paying attention and noticing where we give our power away, we gain the opportunity to choose. We can decide if we want to live a life that feels like someone else’s, or if it’s worth the dedicated effort to discover what we feel, deeply, from our human core, to be our own true path.  
   
We all have “stories” that run us. And for most of us, our stories are chock-full of limiting beliefs about what we’re capable of and what we deserve. The stories feel like “the truth” about our lives, but the truth is that there is no objective reality. You create your reality with your attention and where you place your focus. Our stories are the evidence we’ve accumulated to support those limiting beliefs we carry around. It’s easy to point to the things that show up in our lives as “evidence” that these stories we have
about ourselves are true . . . but I’ve come to know that the only thing this “evidence” proves is that the limiting beliefs exist. The beliefs are what create our circumstances.

Identifying and re-writing the “stories” that run us isn’t easy, but it can be done when we start to truly accept and love who we are.
   
Know that you are perfect in your imperfection and be kind and gentle with your precious self. You don’t have to get anywhere fast. You just have to stay aware enough to keep yourself on the track you want to be on. Do you know why Native American rain dances always worked? Because the Native Americans kept dancing until it rained. What would you do if you knew you could do anything? Create anything? What if all you have to do to get there is keep dancing until it rains?

For more information about Lisa McCourt and Juicy Joy:  www.LisaMcCourt.com

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