The Path Made Clear, page 4
I know this is going to sound simple, but I really feel this: Your self-worth is your job. It’s your sacred space to cultivate. Because there’s always going to be somebody who comes along and says, “You’re not thin enough,” or, “Your hair’s not that enough,” or, “Your voice is not high enough,” or, “You’re not going to make it in the music industry because you don’t sound like all the other girls.” But if you can, remind yourself that they’re wrong because you know you’re on your path. Sometimes I just ask myself, What would I do if I knew I was 100 percent worthy of this? What would I do? Just ask, What if?
MICHAEL BERNARD BECKWITH
There’s a shift that takes place when you’re talking about the possibilities more than you’re talking about your issues. With your issues, your energy goes into the lower frequencies. Doubt. Worry. Fear. Now you’re in that sediment. You’re in that dynamic. But if you start talking about possibility, even if you don’t know how to get there, then your energy starts to go up. Ask a what if question. What if all my needs were met? What would I be doing in my life? What if everything is really working together for my good? What if all the bad things that have happened in my life are leading me to activating some great potential in my experience? What if God really is on my side? You ask a what if question and you start to notice little tiny miracles happening in your life.
DEBBIE FORD
DEBBIE FORD: The shadow belief is always fear based. It’s when we say, I don’t want to be like that. Or, I’ll never be like my mother. It’s also a fear-based judgment when somebody says something to us and it has this jarring effect and makes us angry. We know it’s our shadow, because otherwise we wouldn’t care.
OPRAH: And the ultimate shadow belief is that I’m not good enough, right?
DEBBIE: I think that there are a couple of core shadow beliefs. I’m not good enough. I’m unlovable. Another form of I’m not good enough is I’m unworthy. And I think women more than anybody have that innately inside of them. So those are three very powerful shadow beliefs that birth all the other ones that come along. It’s not about resisting these beliefs, it’s about embracing. And asking how do we feel strong enough no matter who we are? We’re born with gifts that have been so suppressed that we can’t allow that real self to emerge. And if you can’t allow the dark to exist, then you can’t allow the light.
MICHAEL SINGER
OPRAH: What are we supposed to do when problems show up?
MICHAEL SINGER: The moment it starts with that chitter-chatter, my first reaction inside is to relax and lean away. I lean away from the noise the mind is making. Because you’re going to do one of two things once it starts: You’re either going to lean into it and get involved, and let it pull you in—
OPRAH: Yes, which is what most of us do.
MICHAEL: Right, or relax and lean away. And once you lean away and get some space, you will learn over time that that’s the smartest thing you ever did. Why? Because you gave the noise room to pass through and it does. It passes right through.
OPRAH: Why are we so afraid of change?
MICHAEL: What happens is we’ve gone into the mind and said, I’m not okay. How does everything need to be for me to be okay? And then we devote ourselves to trying to create the situation that we think will make us be okay. And when things start changing and don’t match that model, then we get scared, because it looks like it’s not going to work. Fear is a thing. You can either push it away or you can let it go. You can either avoid it and be scared of it or you can let it pass right through. Fear comes up out of your heart, that’s a very natural thing; it’s human. You are watching, you see it, but you have the right to relax and let it pass right through you. If you don’t do that, you’re going to try to fix it. You’re going to try to control situations so you don’t ever feel the fear, and it all starts to bother you. Eventually you’ll forget your whole purpose and you’ll just be scared. You just get scared.
OPRAH: The alternative is to decide not to fight with life, but for some people that can feel like just giving up.
MICHAEL: But you don’t do that in any way, shape, or form. Life is a natural unfolding of reality. You’re supposed to harmonize and work with it. You don’t give up and let it take over. Like if you get on a horse and you’re scared, you’re not going to be a very good rider, right? But that doesn’t mean you let the horse go wherever it wants. You learn how to interface and interact with life in a wholesome, participatory way. Letting go of fear is not letting go of life.
ELIZABETH GILBERT
This was my victory and my battle. All my demons, all my monsters that I’d been carrying around forever, the light came through and I realized, Oh, they’re not demons. They’re not monsters. They’re not dragons. I’ve been making them more grandiose than they are. They’re just the orphaned parts of me. They’re just the fearful-est, most terrified parts of me. They are scared to death. And they are throwing temper tantrums because of their fear. And now I have to tell them that it’s going to be okay. And they will all go to sleep. I am the mother of all of these parts of me. At one point, I remember in my mind ascending above them all and saying, I love you, fear, and now you go to sleep. I love you, anger, you’re part of me. Go to sleep. It’s fine. I’m in charge now. I love you, shame. Even you. Come into my heart. Go to sleep. You’re safe. I love you. I’m not leaving you. You’re part of me. You’re part of the family. You’re never going to be away from me. I love you, failure. Come into my heart. Rest. You’re so tired. You’re so scared. You’re just children. You don’t know how the world works. I love all of you. I have space for all of you. And together, we’re just going to go forward now.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MAP
All dreams start from the core. Unless you are in total alignment with whatever you envision, the dream will get derailed. Your intention has to be pure.
—Oprah
How many times have you witnessed someone get close to achieving a goal, only to see it all suddenly fall apart?
Or, he or she does reach the top of the mountain but can’t hold on. Maybe you too have struggled with near-misses and not-quite-realized dreams, yet are unable to pinpoint why. Self-sabotage can be a devastating cycle.
I believe deeply in what Paulo Coelho so famously wrote in his seminal book, The Alchemist: When you want something, all the Universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
Time and again, I have seen how the Universe rises up to meet the vision that lives inside us. But just as often, I’ve seen dreams crushed.
The variable between winning the race and faltering at the finish line lies with one of the guiding forces in my life: intention.
Before you embark on any quest, you must first articulate your vision. Set your course. It doesn’t have to be a public or formal declaration, but it does need to be clear. Particularly in today’s climate, where there is a palpable craving for meaning and authenticity. People can feel what’s real and what’s not. So if you want support for your idea, stand in what you hold sacred. Those who sense your truth will rise up. And, most important, you must believe with your whole heart that you are capable of achieving your goal. If not, your path becomes murky and the goal stays out of reach.
For me, the journey to open The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls was one of the most challenging and ultimately rewarding I’ve ever experienced. This was something I felt I had been growing toward my entire life. I recognized myself in the face of each and every girl yearning to overcome the trauma of poverty and all that it encompassed. These strong, talented future leaders could see their way forward but needed an environment in which to thrive. That’s why, despite confronting formidable obstacles along the way, breaking ground on the fifty-two-acre campus just outside Johannesburg, South Africa, was an important full circle for me. It’s taken an enormous emotional and financial investment, but ever since the year 2002, when I shared with Nelson Mandela my hope of creating access to education for those who demonstrated promise and potential, my commitment to the school has never wavered.
So you can imagine my surprise when I was asked, during an interview, about critics who said the school would not last.
“They said that?” I asked the reporter.
“Yes, in the beginning,” she replied.
My response to her was this: “People have no idea of my tenacity. Once I commit to something and I have a full-hearted desire to see it work, I can’t imagine what it would take to make me quit.”
I held a vision for what this school could be—a place to build leaders and inspire greatness. I handpicked every sock, every shoe, every door, every book—to honor the girls who would attend. The purity of that intention was aligned from my heart to my head. I had no ulterior motive. This was about bringing the power of choice to the first generation of apartheid-free women in South Africa.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t ask myself if it was worth it during some of the most difficult times. I certainly did wonder. But the answer that always came back was, Yes, this is 1,000 percent worth it.
I was convinced we could raise these girls to know for themselves what I’ve told them over and over again: You are not your circumstances. You are your possibilities.
In this chapter, it is my hope that you will gain a greater understanding of how discovering your purpose begins with committing to your course. Whether you want to fulfill a long-held dream, find greater success in the career you’ve chosen, give more of yourself to others, or repair a broken relationship, you must first ask yourself, Why? What is the real intention? And then ask, How will I execute the action?
The tenth anniversary of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls was in 2017. To date, nearly four hundred graduates have gone on to attend universities around the world.
I set out to create a dream school where the brightest yet most vulnerable could find their voices and know for themselves that there is no bar. Their only limits are the ones they set. From day one I told them, “Don’t just break the ceiling, reach for what’s beyond.”
As for the interview with the reporter who asked about naysayers? I went on to tell her, “Don’t bet against me. You cannot defeat someone who knows who they truly are. I know who I am and why I am doing this, so I would not bet against me.”
The moment you know with certainty that your intention is fully aligned with what you believe, all bets are off.
You’ve already won!
—Oprah
IYANLA VANZANT
If you don’t have a vision, you’re going to be stuck in what you know. And the only thing you know is what you’ve already seen. But a vision that grows inside of you, a vision that wakes with you, sleeps with you, moves with you, a vision that you can tap into on your worst days—that vision will pull you forward. Affirm your vision. Clarify your vision. Not only what you’re doing, but also why you’re doing it and how you’re doing it day by day, moment by moment. And sometimes the how shows up only on a need-to-know basis. Sometimes you just have to walk blindly. But if you just do your vision every single day, putting one foot in front of the other, committed to your desires, being obedient, walking through your fears, the vision will unfold much grander than you could have ever even imagined or asked for.
GARY ZUKAV
Your job and my job while here is to align our personalities with our souls. And we do that by becoming the personality that has the same intentions of the soul: harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for life. Suppose, for example, you’ve got three children, and you’re overwhelmed a lot. You can find yourself frustrated and/or exasperated by the child that’s most demanding. You can find yourself angry at your spouse. What do you do? This is exactly the time to create authentic power, and here’s how you do it. First, instead of acting on the impulse to tell the child, “Be quiet or you’re going to go to your room for six months,” or yelling at your spouse, instead go inside yourself. That’s the first step. That is developing emotional awareness.
The second step: Once you can do this, you put yourself in a very powerful position. Because just by turning inward instead of acting in the moment, you have created a little gap between the impulse and the action. And into that space, you can inject consciousness. Into that space, you can do something you couldn’t have done before. Choose consciously. You can decide, I am going to say this to my spouse. He or she is insensitive and I’m sick and tired of it. But instead of reacting harshly, I’m going to act from the most loving part of my personality that I can reach for in that moment. And it may be that the most loving part of your personality you can reach for is just not to say anything. But you have then changed your universe. It’s your choice. And you make the choice every time you choose an intention. When you choose an intention of love instead of an intention of fear. That is the spiritual journey. That is the spiritual path.
BRENÉ BROWN
OPRAH: You say that every home has to have its own manifesto. You wrote this one for your family?
BRENÉ BROWN: Yes.
OPRAH: I’d love to share this for people to incorporate as their own and adjust as they will. Will you read it?
BRENÉ: Above all else, I want you to know that you are loved and lovable. You will learn this from my words and my actions; the lessons on love are in how I treat you and how I treat myself. I want you to engage with the world from a place of worthiness. You will learn that you are worthy of love, belonging, and joy every time you see me practice self-compassion and embrace my own imperfections. We will practice courage in our family by showing up, letting ourselves be seen, and honoring vulnerability. We’ll share our stories of struggle and strength. There will always be room in our home for both. We will teach you compassion by practicing compassion with ourselves first, then with each other. I want you to know joy so together we’ll practice gratitude. I want you to feel joy so together we’ll learn how to be vulnerable. Together we’ll cry and face fear and grief. I will want to take away your pain, but instead I will sit with you and teach you how to feel it. We will laugh and sing and dance and create. We will always have permission to be ourselves with each other, no matter what. You will always belong here. As you begin your wholehearted journey, the greatest gift that I can give to you is to live and love with my whole heart and to dare greatly. I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you, truly, deeply seeing you.
OPRAH: I just wish everybody could live by those words.
BRENÉ: Me too.
OPRAH: That’s how you change the world.
BRENÉ: I believe it.
STEPHEN COLBERT
STEPHEN COLBERT: Spike Jonze, the director and a pretty good actor, too, came by and said, “Do you need any help starting your show?” And I’m, like, “Sure, let’s talk.” So he came by and interviewed me six months before my show went on the air about what I wanted the show to be. After we’d been on the air for a while, he sent those notes back to me and said, “I wanted to remind you what your intention was.” And one of the things that he circled and pointed out in it was when I said, “I don’t know how to do a nightly comedy show that’s also about love. But I’d like it in some way to be about love.”
OPRAH: I think it’s interesting that you set an intention for it. I live by that principle.
STEPHEN: Yes. The hope is for love. And I think now we found that I love my country, I love science, I love facts, I love people regardless of their race or their gender identity. The challenge now is to love the people who don’t seem to have that value in their heart.
DAVID BROOKS
In character building, there’s a central piece of us that makes decisions. And every time you make a decision or have an experience, you turn that core piece of yourself into something slightly more elevated or something more degraded. If you make disciplined choices, you slowly engrave a certain set of habits and dispositions inside that core piece. If you make fragmented decisions, you make that core piece a little degraded. When I look at people with character, what they have is consistency over time.
Vice President JOE BIDEN
I think the reason people abuse power is that they are seduced by the notion that they are so self-important. That they really matter. When, in fact, it is not usually the case. The leaders I’ve observed who are the best are the ones who have courage to take a chance and be willing to lose on principle. And they are self-aware. They understand their strengths and they understand their weaknesses. They play to their strengths, and they try to shore up their weaknesses. The people who don’t do that, who aren’t self-aware—that abuse of power ends up in their downfall.
JEFF WEINER
Management is telling somebody what to do. Leadership is inspiring them to do it. And inspiration, for me, comes from three areas. It’s the clarity of one’s vision, the courage of one’s conviction, and the ability to effectively communicate both of those things.
MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
I always talk about how, before you go into a meeting, just blast everybody with love. So, if you’re going to an audition, if you’re going into an interview for a job, blast them with love. Because if you have the thought, Oh my God, I need this job, I really need it, and I hope they’ll like me, all of that actually limits your capacity to shine in the ways that might promote their wanting you to work for their company. So if you instead think, The only thing going on here is I’m going to bless that person. And they’re here to bless me. I don’t know if I’m supposed to get that job. My only agenda is that God’s will be done, it will all unfold perfectly.
