Get Out of Your Own Way Guide to Life. Justin Loeber

shoplifting Prada bags at Macy’s.

      or

      #She was a hero who saved an old lady from an attacker.

      Making a 180-degree life turn is not that hard; all you need to do is have the ability to keep it moving in a positive direction and open up to the possibility that you deserve a better experience.

      Like the person who goes from shoplifter to caregiver, you can absolutely, unequivocally transition from a negative past to a positive, uber-successful future. Reinvention is amazing. You really don’t need anyone other than yourself to approve the change you want to redefine your life—good, bad or indifferent. Through the anecdotes in this book, I truly hope you will gain the strength to be honest and intimate with yourself, so that when it’s time for the artisans to start etching an epitaph onto your mausoleum, you and your friends will have so many great things to say about you that even your enemies will even applaud!

      #Roll up your sleeves and get scrappy about your life.

      #Talking honestly about yourself can be inspirational.

      Lemme get this party going, and let me start to tell you my story—you’ll find it ain’t hard for me.

      Way back in the late 70s and 80s, I was a bit of an ultra-creative ball of fire...a self-involved, overly sensitive twentysomething. But after going through many humbling experiences—including losing my biological parents, losing an inheritance, losing four recording contracts (as a pop singer), going through two cancer health scares and losing friends to tragic illnesses—now, at my age, I live, without apology, in a luscious color of everything. I crave to always be challenged. One side of me wants to kick off my shoes and eat some bonbons, but the other side says, light the fiyah and keep it moving, grandpa!

      #Breathe like a dragon who is

      going to be honored for Chinese New Year.

      People often tell me I have a quirky outlook on life and an inspiring backstory, which I hope is a solid platform for handing out some heartfelt advice in this book. In my career in public relations and now with PR and social media, I have represented hundreds of fascinating people—I’ve had the luck and good fortune to work with some of the greats: superstar athletes like Michael Jordan; recording legends like Peter, Paul and Mary, Carly Simon, Judy Collins, Neil Sedaka and Kenny Loggins; actors like Olympia Dukakis, Blair Underwood, and Marlo Thomas; movie producers like Linda Obst; models like Cindy Crawford; reality stars like Snooki; iconic sex kittens like Pamela Anderson; political prisoners like Ingrid Betancourt; senior prime ministers like Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore; newscasters like Dan Rather; attorneys like Gloria Allred and Raoul Felder; brands like The Elf on the Shelf and Halo Purely for Pets; Latina powerhouses like Celia Cruz; extraordinary wellness warriors like Kris Carr; heartfelt doctors like Andrew Weil and Neal Barnard; moral philosophers like Peter Singer; and literary stars like Paolo Coelho, Leon Uris, Diane McKinney-Whetstone, and Mitch Albom, just to name a few. I have had the honor of stepping into each one’s unique definition of “normal.” Normal or not, seeing some of these people reveal their “deck of cards” has given me the perspective to understand parts of my life that either work or don’t.

      #Share your deck of cards in order to

      help others find their purpose.

      I want to expose you to the fire that burns inside my clients’ bellies, giving them the impetus to persevere. I am humbly grateful for the opportunity to work with such inspirational people—whether for a few months or for several years—and I want to thank them for helping me find one of my personal missions in life. When people sign up for public relations and social media services, they are typically at a quasi-mystical level that drives them to only want to bring their “A” game and to be sitting in the front row when the curtain goes up and the stage explodes. After repping famous people, I now know, and you will too, that:

      #Everyone can afford a ticket to their own

      award-winning performance of a lifetime.

      The public relations and social media “show” that my staff and I proudly perform each day requires a talent for becoming a client’s messenger to his or her own message—holding up a mirror and asking, “Just who are you? What do you bring to the table? Why should anyone care? I want to help you press the accelerate button on the story of your life. From this page forward, it’s just you and me, navigating our plusses and minuses together. (I’ll show you mine if you show me yours!) When it’s time for people to consider you for work, friendship, or play, this handbook and (at least some of) my philosophies will help you, I promise. As I hinted above, one of the biggest secrets to living a full life is that you don’t always need to follow the rules—or struggle to fit into anyone else’s standards to be successful.

      #It takes a lotta guts to dream big and take bold steps.

      # # #

      Back to my life: I didn’t start out as bold as I am today. As a kid, I was so shy and quirky—like a flower that needed to be watered in order not to shrivel up.

      #If you’re a hot mess, take ownership of it—

      and either fix it or wallow in paranoid.

      When people would call my house, I sounded like a squeaky little girl and would get so upset when the phone rang that I’d refuse to speak. (It’s funny that I now own a company with the word “mouth” in it.) At the age of four, someone shot a cap gun in my eye and I was rushed to the hospital, blinded for hours. Doctors thought I would never see again. Overnight, my mom became uber-overprotective. In response to her panic, I built an emotional wall around myself, reinforced with tons of stuffed animals sitting by my side in fantasy. Then, at the age of eight, I had an ear abscess so “dire” that a doctor told my parents I should live my entire life in a plastic bubble to avoid more infections. Michael Jackson had nothing on me, trust me. (Happily, my parents didn’t follow that wacky doc’s recommendation—but then again, it was the 1960s and there were a lot of those wack-a-doodles out there, trust me.)

      Before long, my emotional wall morphed into a “wall of weight.” I was the first person in third grade to break one hundred pounds. When I made a mistake in class at South Mountain Elementary School in South Orange, New Jersey, one teacher, Mrs. Ernst, put a dunce cap on my head and paraded me around to every classroom in the building, telling everyone that I was stupid and a dummy. So, you can imagine why I carried around a lot of baggage and became chronically shy and obese. Here I was at nine years old, unlike everyone else, and at times I felt obsolete. (I was in my twenties when my mom told me she threatened to poke Mrs. Ernst’s eyes out if she ever put a dunce cap on me again—I wondered why Mrs. Ernst was suddenly being nice to me!)

      In fourth grade, still waddling down the hallways like a roly-poly, the other kids would scream in between classes, “Fat Larry wants to marry Miss Vancarry!” Yes, my first name is Larry—Lawrence, actually. My full name is Lawrence Justin Loeber. My mom had visions of me going to Lawrenceville, a college preparatory boarding school in New Jersey, but I wanted to be comfy-cozy, chubby Larry who was born in NYC and grew up in Jersey, thank you very much! (And no, I wasn’t named after the prep school. )

      #My mom wanted me to go to boarding school—

      all I wanted was to go to a diner.

      I fell further into the “lack of confidence” category—until high school. Hit with the performance bug and armed with potent fantasies—picturing myself singing with Louie Armstrong (while he sang “Hello Dolly”), James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Average White Band, Earth, Wind & Fire, Melba Moore, Rufus & Chaka Khan (my dog Rufus is named after the band), Marvin Gaye, The Brothers Johnson, Ohio Players, Aretha Franklin, The Isley Brothers, Bette Midler, and Barbra Streisand (a huge inspiration for me!), among others—I convinced my parents to allow me to take the bus (from the Jersey suburbs to Manhattan!) three times a week for lessons in singing, dancing and acting.

      #When the chips are down,

      start tap-dancing and sing pop music!

      I’d finally found something that fit me. Once I stepped on the stage, I owned it—without analyzing the fear that supposedly came with performing.