Amanda Gore - The joy project

Amanda Gore

The Joy Project - From fear to love

Words Tricia Welsh

Amanda Gore is one of Australia’s and the USA’s best keynote speakers, a coach, Huffington Post columnist, author and founder of the Joy Project – helping people be the best versions of themselves. She is one of only four Australians inducted into the USA Speaker Hall of Fame.

Born and bred in Brisbane, she lived in Brisbane and India for the first five years of her life. She was educated at St Margaret’s Anglican School in Brisbane and graduated with a Bachelor of Physiotherapy with a Major in Psychology, and is a Master Practitioner of Neurolinguistics. She now lives in Buderim from where she continues to give regular talks to audiences around the world from her home studio.

Combining her experience and talents, Amanda began a full-time professional speaking career in 1985, and has spoken on average 80 times a year for nearly 40 years, both in Australia and internationally. Her accreditations and awards are indeed impressive. Sharing the speaker’s platform with people like Brian Tracey, Les Brown Robert Schuller, Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn and Wayne Dyer, her areas of expertise are stress and wellness, mental health and joy, resilience, communication, leadership, relationships, emotional intelligence and change.

Along with many others, Amanda’s world as a speaker was transformed overnight with the pandemic. Her journey of pivoting and re-evaluating everything she was doing has deepened her level of empathy and experience. She says: “It has given me many new stories and concepts that are so relevant for adapting to ongoing change, new ways of working, and disconnection, as well as strategies for staying mentally, emotionally and physically well, being more resilient, stopping burnout, embracing change and helping people engage with work again.”

Her basic philosophy is based on Carl Buchener’s quote:

“People will forget what you say; they will forget what you do– but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

She believes everything in life and business is about feelings! The way we feel about ourselves, a product, organization or person, influences how we behave and has an impact on our decisions about how we spend our time and money, or with whom we conduct business. The way we feel during a meeting or conference impacts our ability and desire to learn and change.

“I was told some years ago, my mission in life is to eradicate fear,” she confides. “No small task! But it has dawned on me over the last few years of disruption, that all these experiences are giving us is an opportunity to move from fear to love; To learning that we truly ARE the embodiment of pure love, and learning to break and stop old patterns of fear, find joy and learn to live - truly live - from love! Which brings Joy. JOY stands for Just One You - and how you feel about yourself determines your life! If you know you are pure love everything changes! And no, I am not a hippie, space cadet, woo woo person!”

Amanda works with small and large organisations in every industry such as McDonalds, Westpac, KPMG, CISCO, Flight Centre, Google, Disney, Hilton, hospitals and schools to help them create cultures of joy and engagement, and to bring the humanity and joy back into their organisations. Her largest audience has been 15,000 people; the smallest just 12 people. She estimates she has addressed some two million people over her 40 years and has registered more than two million visits on YouTube.

Her presentations are very personal and funny experiences - often bringing audiences to their knees while she still gets powerful and relevant messages across that connect with people’s hearts.

Mark Victor Hansen, co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series is effusive in his praise for her: “Amanda is a wow of wows of speakers. She’s enchanting, captivating, brilliantly funny, tenderly charming, heartfelt, genuine, sincere and poignantly authentic and yet she delivers a powerful message that we each want and need to hear. She’s unforgettable with her innovative audience involvement techniques…that will give you skills to take home, tell others and start using immediately to better your life, your relationships, your future and finances.”

“the last few years of disruption, that all these experiences are giving us is an opportunity to move from fear to love.”

The savvy businesswoman says we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves and other things that are not true. “Everything in life is about feelings. Beliefs rule everything – but our beliefs are just stories we have told ourselves.

“There are three core fears that drive most people’s lives: I am not good enough or I am not worth loving; I am unsafe in some way; and I am separate - I don’t fit in or belong. And they are not real or true!”

Amanda has written five books, one of them, Joy is an Inside Job, was used to pilot a Joy in School program at Kidman Park Primary School in Adelaide. “The principal and I would have continued with this,” she says, “but the education department did not consider it was part of the curriculum. I am passionate about this idea of teaching our children about joy and eradicating fear.”

In recent years, she says she has learnt to breathe a lot more often and stay centred and calm. “Stress does nothing for your life or capacity to think and make decisions let alone be joyful, “she says. “I love gardening – it grounds me and centres me! I never valued stillness before COVID – now I love it,” she adds.