Today is Day 6 of my 31 Days of Self-Love posts to celebrate Self-Love Month with suggestions for jump-starting your own self-love and joining The Self-Love Movement™.

Since it’s Self-Love Month, it’s very fitting to have Self-Love ambassador, my fabulicious friend, Lisa McCourt, as my guest today. Lisa coaches writers, creatives, and other joy-seekers who are ready to substantially up-level their success in work and in life. Author of Juicy Joy – 7 Simple Steps to Your Glorious, Gutsy Self (Hay House) she has published 37 books that have sold over 5.5 million copies, won six publishing awards, and gone into 11 languages. A frequent speaker at both writing conferences and self-growth events, Lisa lives in sunny South Florida with her two self-loving kids.  And I’m excited that I’ll finally meet her face-to-face in March when I go there to speak.

The Question You Need to Ask for 2013
By Lisa McCourt

I’m feeling extra-grateful right about now to a certain uber-inspiring luminary who was just crazy enough to have January officially declared Self-Love Month so all of us would have an excuse to revel in our own yummy deliciousness throughout these glorious kicking-off-2013 days.  (Thank you, dear Daylle. Yours is the brightest light.)

Are you reveling? Are you taking time each day to acknowledge your wisdom, your depth, your beauty . . . your own overflowing, juicy goodness?

I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to silently answer it in your head. After you answer it, I want you to tuck it away and promise me you’ll pull it out often during this month of self-love and beyond. Make a mental list around it as you fall asleep each night. Deliberately call it up into your conscious awareness as you wake each morning.

Ready for the question? How is the world a better place for having you in it?

I’ll give you a hint to get you started.  If you’ve ever spent a single moment expressing genuine affection to another human being, the world is a better place for having you in it. If you’ve ever recycled anything, the world is a better place for having you in it.  If you’ve ever pet a dog, or picked a friend up at the airport, or laughed with someone, or given a gift, or drawn a picture, or fallen in love . . . this world is better for that.

And sometimes people hear this and they’ll start a tally going, like: “Yeah, I did some of that stuff. But what about all those times I didn’t do the right thing? What about the times I really screwed up? What about the times I hurt someone?” I’m not asking you to pretend those things never happened. We all have those events in our memory vaults. I’m simply asking you to notice what the Universe notices about you. You’re here to make this world a better place or you wouldn’t be here. And it’s exactly what you’ve done since the day you arrived.

Here’s a crazyass idea for you to try on: What if all those things you’ve done that make you wince right now and feel that you should have done them better – what if all those things were divinely guided, too? What if, in their own brilliantly-disguised ways, those things actually made the world a better place, too? What if that heart you broke in high school gave your high school sweetheart the emotional momentum necessary to deepen and evolve as a person in precisely the way that was most beneficial and enriching for that individual? What if that roommate you heartlessly kicked out for not being able to pay the rent, was forced, uncomfortably, to mend a broken family relationship in order to have a place to stay . . . and that was exactly what the Universe had planned when it guided the two of you together as roommates in the first place?

None of us is without regrets and it’s so easy to fall into self-incrimination over past “should-haves.”  But what if it’s all been exquisitely, irrationally perfect every step of the way?

That laundry list of self-judgments you carry around — it’s weighing you down so bad. And it’s not founded on anything real. It’s just a bunch of crappy beliefs that got dropped into your consciousness, and then got reinforced by your insistent determination to mentally harp on them. Objective reality is an illusion. Your reality is nothing more than the sum total of your perceptions, and your perceptions of the events around you are just by-products of your beliefs.

Can you imagine the energy, the chi, the prana that would be released if you could neutralize all those egregious, self-love-robbing beliefs? Can you imagine what you’d be able to create with all that newly freed-up energy and power?

Here’s the kicker: Those crappy beliefs are doing more damage than just keeping your self-love out of reach. They’re also actually causing you to behave in ways that reinforce them. That’s what our beliefs do. Beliefs are powerful perpetuators OF THEMSELVES. (Can you say “self-fulfilling prophecy”?) That’s true for all levels of beliefs from the teeny tiny ones to the huge ones. Once a belief gets woven into your habitual belief system, you’re programmed to reinforce it. If you’ve got a belief that says you’re a failure with money, you’re going to keep experiencing financial failure. If you’ve got a belief that says you’re unlucky in love, guess what? No love for you. Until you get in there and do some deliberate work to re-wire those beliefs, you are their puppet.

I guarantee you unequivocally that up-leveling your self-love will generate an up-level in every aspect of your life – money, romance, health, success. If you’re not madly in love with every last spec of you right now, make 2013 the year you commit to changing that. Treat yourself to one of Daylle’s programs. Treat yourself to one of mine. Pick something and start it. If you’re not ready for a program, I implore you to simply make a promise to yourself right now to start loving YOU in some new and powerful way that feels doable to you.

It doesn’t work to just say, “Okay, now I’m gonna love myself. Yeah, I’m pretty great.” No.  You can’t fool you.  You have to take action.  Make it big. Go do some bold, significant thing! Today, or at the very least by the end of the week, make some kind of joyful, exciting investment in yourself. You’ll be blown away at the energetic shift you’ll create by just doing some unprecedented kindness to YOU.

What would make you smile? What would give you some sort of ongoing gift? What would be kind of indulgent, and might even take a bit of your time or energy away from others? Doing this thing will be in their best interest, too, because a joyful, self-honoring, blissed-out YOU is your best gift to your loved ones, your community, and the world.

When the Universe sees that you’re serious about shaking things up a bit by demonstrating self-love to your own higher consciousness in some kind of concrete way, it opens the gateway for more good to start flooding into your life. Synchronicities will abound! Situations you thought were stuck will smoothly move in fortuitous directions! It’ll knock your socks off. Go love YOU in some juicy, measurable way . . . and watch for your miracles.
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Join The Self-Love Movement™! Take the 31 Days of Self-Love Commitment and get my book, How Do I Love Me? Let Me Count the Ways for free at http://howdoiloveme.com. Read my 2012 31 Days of Self-Love Posts HERE.

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