Unlock Your Power, Purpose, & Life’s Calling: An Unforgettable Conversation With Oprah Winfrey

I'm so happy to be here with you. I really am.

No, I had to come to you.

No, I had to come to you. You were born to fulfill the dream of your life here on Earth. You were born into this planet, into the density of this gravitational pull to fulfill the dream of your life and of the creator's dream of your life here on Earth. Get about the business of doing that. Whatever you're looking at is only a piece of the picture of your whole life.

Oh my gosh. I can't, I'm so glad I can reach you.

Hi. Of course. Hi. It's so good to see you.

Thank you.

Really?

Well, I appreciate the invitation to actually be able to sit in your home space because this is where you reign and this is where you reign. And I have watched you, listen to you, and I watch the bestsellers list regularly and I am just so rooting for you. I have watched you become the voice of our time in leading people home to themselves. This is why one of the things I hope people get from you and I today because I see so much of myself in you, Mel. I actually see and am honored by who you have become because I know for sure that some of what I did and what I've said over the years, you really got it. And you to me are like on the same mission in your own voice, in your own way, through your own self-expression. But to me, you are one of those people who took the message of everything that we were trying to say on the show, and you just paid it forward, are moving it forward in your own way. So, it's like every time I run into someone who says, 'I watched your show. My mother watched your show. My grandmother watched your show. I watched your show. I was a latchkey kid.' It makes me feel like, 'Oh, you're a part of the children I raised.' Yes. And you are one of those who's taken that light and just blasted it through the world.

Mhm.

My intention for flying to Boston to be with you, Mel, and to be with you all is to be used as a light and a light that shines or illuminates in a way that you can see yourself through me, through my stories, through Mel, through her stories and have that light ignited within yourself. I believe that I've had just the most blessed life on earth. I just can't get over how blessed I have been in my life. I can't get over it. I marvel at what God and the life forces have done for me. I marvel at that. But when I think about it now from the point of view of 72, I realize that what I have acquired is not as magnificent or extraordinary as who I have become. And I know that the world looks at what I have acquired, but it's who I have become. And I recognize that the work to become myself is the same work and ability that everybody has to become the most of themselves. And I am most proud of the woman that I have become. And I want everyone else to have that. I want you to have that. I want before I leave this earth, I want everybody to know that you have the power to literally fulfill the fullest expression of yourself as a human being. So that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you today. I believe everybody has come to do a service to the planet. That's why we're here. I believe that this is a, I don't believe we're the only planet. I don't believe we're the only life, but I believe that this is a special one. I believe that this is the Earth school where we all get to teach and we all get to learn from one another. And right now, a lot of us are messing that up because we've missed the point. But I also know that within each of us is this internal GPS within you. Mine is no different than yours. Mine is no different than yours. The difference is I'm obedient to mine. Everybody has it. I just listened and I'm obedient to mine. But every single person that comes to the planet comes to the planet with the ability to have that light within themselves and to be guided by that light. And every time you go off course, every time you allow yourself to be out of alignment, things go wrong or you feel stuck, you feel overwhelmed, you feel exhausted, you feel that you can't go forward, you feel you don't know what to do next, you feel confusion, you feel... but everybody has it. I know one of the reasons why I think I was so successful and we were number one for 25 years because I really did not see a difference between me and the audience that was watching. I recognized that we were the same and that I was the surrogate voice for them. That I get to sit there and I get to interview Tom Cruise and I get to interview all the people. But what gave me the power to do it was that I was speaking for the audience, not for myself. And so I do believe that a lot of people are missing out because they're not obedient to the call. And the call is within you. It's not out here. It's not on social media. You're not going to hear it from your friends. It means being still enough to know what it is. And you can feel it's just a, it's a feeling, doesn't it? Wasn't it a feeling? It's a feeling.

No, that is, I just had an aha listening to that. You're right. You're so right. A lot of people are thinking, 'What do I want to do? What do I want to do?' Do you know what you don't want to do? And a lot of times, you're in a, if you're in a job that you know you don't want, that is vital information. You're in the job that you don't want. That's telling you you don't want to be here. So, let's figure out where I actually do want to be. So this story I've shared often but it's so dear to me because it's the only conscious memory I have of recognizing the voice from the first time for the first time. I had to be between four and five because that's where like round memory starts. But I was very very small and my job with my grandmother was to take out, we had what we call a slop jar because there's no, there was like a pee pot, you know, for using the bathroom because you don't want to go to the outhouse at night cuz it's too dark and there might be snakes in there. And so my job was as a little girl, too much responsibility, to empty that pot every morning. My other job was to, you know, sort the clothes pins for my grandmother. She's hanging clothes on the line so that she doesn't have to sort them and also pick them up at the same time. And also turning butter because all you do to turn butter is you just did there with the stick turning butter. Butter had to be churned back then, y'all. We didn't have butter. So, I was turning butter on the back porch looking through the screen door and it was cold and my grandmother was hanging clothes on the line and I'd sorted the clothes pins all in one place and she's just picking up the clothes pins and hanging these sheets because she was a domestic worker and had brought the sheets home from the white people's houses and was boiling them in the pot. That's how we clean the sheets. And she said, 'Opale, you better watch me now cuz one day you going to have to learn how to do this for yourself.' And I was just turning the butter and I was watching her and this feeling came over me that literally spoke to me and said, 'No, you won't. This will not be your life. But don't tell her cuz she will not appreciate that.'

Yeah.

What did you say? Okay. Hold on a second. I want to make sure that you heard that. Don't get confused that oh, it has to be a big thing. It has to be Instagrammable.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, no, no, no. That's where you're wrong. It's in here. It's in here. And it's also how do you best serve where you are? You know when I ended the show I said you know that I had had this marvelous platform of speaking to millions of people on a daily basis but every person has a platform. Your family is your platform. Your community is your platform. Your church is your platform. Your job is your platform. Your work. You have the ability to reach and touch people's lives wherever you are. If you touch the life, you still have a legacy. And so for everybody, everyone who listens and hears us, your legacy isn't the big big big picture. It's what you're doing today. It's how you speak to the person that's dry cleaners. It's how you talk to the person who's parking your car. It's how you're treating the people in your immediate circle. That's how you will be remembered. And so, and that's the heart print that you leave or don't leave with people.

Yes. It's the heart print that you leave or don't leave. Actually, I learned that word from a little guy named Mattie Stapanic who was on my show and was in a wheelchair and ended up dying when he was 13, but really one of the wisest little angels who've come to earth. And he used to say, 'Whenever you touch someone's heart, whenever you're moved by something someone does, you leave a heart print.' And so we're leaving heartprints all the time. And you know that wonderful phrase that Maya has about people don't remember what you say or what you did but they always remember how you made them feel. So just be responsible for the energy that you're carrying into the world and understanding that you are a part of the bigger picture, we are all a part of the big thing, we are all here. And I know it's so hard when the price of eggs, the price of everything, the price of just living seems so overwhelming. But there is a deeper reason other than just working to survive. And when you recognize that, I think it gives you room to breathe in a deeper force field. You know, it's not just about the job, the real work of your life is to figure out why you actually came. The real work of your life is why did you actually come. And I know I can tell just by listening to you that you have figured that out.

Yeah. That you are in service to the call.

In service, that it's true.

Mhm.

Yes. Which is a deflection because when you start to blame and get triggered by the very thing that could save you and help you and free you, that's a sign that you want it, but you don't know how.

Yeah, I think the difference is if you're very stuck right now, it's because you can't see the bigger picture. You can't see that the source of all being didn't bring you here to get you stuck. It brought you here so that you can continue to move forward and offer what you came to give to the rest of us, to the rest of the world. That's all we're all here to do is to bring our offerings. And our offerings come from every lesson we've ever learned. Don't you see that now? Maya used to, Maya actually wrote a book called, I think it's a book of poetry called 'I Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now.' But she used to sing the song. It's an old hymn. 'I wouldn't take nothing for my journey now. For my journey now. For my journey now. Oh, I wouldn't take nothing for my journey now.' And that means all the stuff that was a part of the journey to this moment. I wouldn't take nothing for it. Yeah. And I feel that and I want you to know that whatever has happened to you was also happening for you once you could recognize why it was happening to you no matter how horrible it was. And that's why I can say in spite of the sexual abuse, in spite of growing up poor, not only in spite of, I am so grateful to have been born literally red dirt road poor in Mississippi with no running water and electricity. I am so grateful for that. I am so grateful for having an outhouse and not knowing what a bathroom was for the first six years of my life. Because it makes every darn time I flush my toilets like a wow experience. I'm just like wow. So it makes coming from that dirt road so much more thrilling, that journey.

Yeah. I mean, come on. Like the things that are violent and terrifying and awful that I don't deserve. How do you flip that in your mind so that the things that happened to you don't keep you there?

I know. Because I just believe that sometimes very cruel and unfair and horrible things happen to people who don't deserve them. But I think a lot about how to truly grow and reclaim your life after something like that, you have to find a reason to move forward after it.

Well, when it happens, if you don't move forward, then you just get stuck and your life debilitates. And one of the things that becomes a debilitating energy, a debilitating force field. And so when I say it happens for a reason, I don't mean, oh, there's a reason for everything. I mean that when that thing shows up for you that often feels unfair, that often you don't understand, why was I raped at nine? Why did that happen to me? I at the time couldn't see any good coming from it. Why did I have to grow up poor in Mississippi in an environment where it was illegal for black people to be on the street after dark? All the things that happened in my family life. Why was I raped again at 10 and 14? Why? I mean, I'm actually not supposed to be here. And people have more horrific stories, unimaginable stories than mine and yours. So, I don't mean that like, oh, willy-nilly, like, oh, everything's happening and there's a reason for it. There's a reason for everything, but it doesn't mean you're responsible for the reason or that that thing should have happened to you.

And so, really bad things happen to me. I grew up feeling very lonely and I know a lot of people grow up, most people grow up not getting what they need. I remember doing a show with John Bradshaw who is the founder of the whole inner child movement. John Bradshaw did an exercise where he had people go back into their childhoods and look through the window. Walk yourself home and then look through the window of your home and what do you see? And I saw myself separated from my grandmother and my grandfather, but feeling very much alone. I don't actually remember feeling loved by my mother or my grandmother growing up. I now know they loved me in the best way they knew how. But I didn't feel it. And because I didn't feel it and didn't get what I needed, that is what inspired me to be such a talker, to be a speaker, to be an orator, to do so well in school because that's where my validation came from. I felt no validation from home. So I felt love from my teachers. I felt pleasing my teachers made my teachers like me. I felt a sense of satisfaction and worthiness outside my home, not inside my home. Because I didn't get that from the people that I needed it from. I got it from the world. I got it from strangers.

Because we all have a design for our lives. You know, one of the things that impressed me so much to be able to find peace within my own family because I grew up, as I said, not feeling loved. But once I became Oprah Winfrey, everybody loved me. Everybody. I was driving in Chicago and my mother was in the car and she goes, 'We didn't have much, but we sure had love.' I almost wrecked the car. Like, what are you talking about? What? Who are you? Who are you talking to? I said, 'What did you just say?' She goes, 'Well, we didn't have much, but we sure had love.' So, I know that I never felt it. I know that I was never shown it. I don't remember one moment ever when my mother ever complimented me or said, 'I'm proud of you.' I do remember being young and reading in the house and it was summer and it was hot and I was sitting in a corner reading and my mother goes, 'What you doing in here sitting up in here reading in the house? You need to get out there with all these other kids. You think you better than everybody else just sitting up in this house reading.' So, I remember being punished for wanting to read. I don't ever remember, but I made peace with my mother. I made peace long before she died.

Oh, that was a fantastic life class that I did with him and it actually struck me too cuz I remember crying like tears just shot out flowing when he said that because it was so affirming for me. He said that you're a 10-gallon person. I'm a 10-gallon person. A lot of you are 10-gallon people trying to get 10 gallons worth of love from pint-sized people who cannot carry the 10 gallons. They can't even carry the gallon. You're looking for 10-gallon love, 10-gallon responses, 10-gallon reception, 10-gallon acceptance from people who have a pint-sized ability. So what I learned from that is that expecting people to offer you or give you the love, the attention that you need who do not have the capacity to do it. They just don't have it. And you have to recognize they don't have it. So what do they have? Can I accept you exactly where you are with what you do have? And so my mother could cook. She made some incredible collard greens and could make cornbread like nobody else. And that was the way she offered love. And her idea, just like I know a lot of you have grown up with parents, especially if you're my generation or below my generation. You have parents who thought because I provided for you that was love. You had food on the table. You had shelter. You weren't on the streets. That was all I had. And I realize now my mother was a maid her entire life until I retired her. My grandmother was a maid, a domestic worker. And taking care of other people's kids. You're giving all of your energy to taking care of other people's kids. Putting on the face for them, wearing the mask for them, and by the time you came home, you had nothing left for me. I recognize that now. And I forgive that. And you know, my favorite definition.

Yes. Is giving up the hope that the past could be any different. If you are still wishing, hoping, wanting what happened to you to be something different than what it was, that will leave you so stuck. So for you forgive for yourself, you forgive to say I am going to release this thing that happened to me and first of all get to the stage that requires all of us to move forward and that is acceptance. You know Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her famous, you know, five stages of grief. You know, you go through denial and you go through anger about it and you go through telling yourself it could be different and then you get to acceptance. When you get to acceptance, when you've lost someone or any other job or relationship, when you get to acceptance, acceptance leads you to freedom. And until you get there, you're still just living in the past. You're hoping that it could be different. That is the best definition I've ever known. It's hard to apply when you first hear it because there's so much holding on to and bargaining with and wishing things were different. And the wishing things were different. Whether it's wishing this tragedy didn't happen or wishing the mom or the dad could have been a 10-gallon person even though they're a pint-sized person. It keeps the pain alive.

Oh my gosh. It's Mel. I have an invitation. I want you to come with me to Vegas to experience something extraordinary with Oprah Winfrey.

This is at Sphere and it's not a speech. It's not a show. It's an immersive experience. I cannot wait to be in the audience with you, Oprah.

Ah, I need wonder. I need joy. I need the connection. I cannot wait to experience what you've put together.

A call to joy.

Yeah.

You know, in the beginning, I was just doing a job just like so many people that are listening to us and watching us right now. I was just working at a job. But that decision to change my job and my work into a force for good, to actually use it as not just a show, to recognize it's not just a show but you have a platform here and you can use this to help other people see themselves. But you know I had got caught up into the whole, you know, confrontational television. And my producers were so proud of themselves because they had gotten a guy to come on with his mistress and his wife, which unheard of that you can get the three of them together. Wow. On national television. So, they were on the show and I had no idea. I mean, I'd read the background and he was having the affair and she was, this was not in our, you know, in our preview. And so he says to her on the air to his wife, he turns to his wife and he says, 'Well, what you don't know is that she's pregnant.' And I'm telling you, the audience gasped. I gasped. And I looked at her face and I said, 'Never again will that happen to me. Never again.' I was so angry with myself and angry, upset with the producers who were so proud of themselves and they go, 'We didn't know he was going to say that. We didn't know he was going to say because her humiliation still abides with me.' But was a great teacher for me cuz I thought the worst thing you can ever do, if y'all are listening, if you're listening right now, the worst thing you can ever do to anybody is to cause them to be humiliated. That's why if you've got to criticize somebody, if you have something to say to somebody that's going to be hurtful or is going to put them in a position where they feel devastated, you never ever ever do that in front of other people. Because then they have the humiliation and then the shame of it. So I said to myself, I cannot live with myself doing that to somebody. And I apologized to her afterwards and him afterwards. We're on live television, though. We're on live television. I know she never got over it cuz I have still to this day never gotten over it. And I said to my producers, 'Never again will that happen. We're not doing that anymore.' Cuz around this time, in the late 1980s, I was reading Gary Zukov's book, 'Seat of the Soul.' And in that book, one of the best books of my life actually, and he has two chapters on intention. And he talks about intention being one with cause and effect. And you all know that cause and effect is the first, is the law of karma. It is what you put out is coming back. And when I got that, I got it. It changed everything for me because I used to be such a huge people pleaser. I didn't know how to say no. And what I learned from the principle of intention is that if you're saying yes because you want to please the person, that is what they feel. They feel your pleasure. They feel your acquiescence. They feel your desire to make them feel okay. They don't know that behind it you are resentful. They don't recognize that behind it you really didn't want to do it cuz you said you wanted to. You said yes.

So, as soon as I got clear on, oh, the reason why people keep coming back is because they are feeling my intention of wanting to please them and not wanting to hurt their feelings. So, I don't hurt their feelings. Not only do I not hurt their feelings, I make them feel pretty good. That's why when you loan money or you give something or you're the person who's carpooling and they always ask you to be the carpooler, it's because they know when they come to you, you're going to say yes. And so when I learned to say no, when I learned to say no for myself, I then carried that principle of intention. I sat down with all the producers and said, 'We're no longer going to do a show unless we come from the point of view of intention.' So when you present me the ideas, I want the intention for the idea alongside the idea.

And so every show then after 1989 became designed around the intention of how are we going to let people be enlightened, uplift them, see something today, hear something today that's an aha moment for them that changes the direction for them. Yes, you as you're listening or watching right now, you have a platform right in front of your face. It's your family. It's your community. And through the power of your intention, you can start to be a force for good exactly where you are.

Never, ever, ever lose sight every day you're walking out of the door. This I do for the love of my family. This I do to show that I am a provider and one who can offer to my family a sense of safety, a sense of comfort. Just that little shift makes a difference in the way the work day moves. And whatever the job or the work is to be able to shift it to how do I use this thing that I'm doing that is boring the hell out of me or that is irritating to me and I got a boss. How do I use this in service to something greater than myself? How do I use this to serve?

Absolutely. And if you're in the energy of resistance, you're going to be stuck in resistance. And so I often ask myself, if something's not going the way I want, what is it I'm resisting?

Yeah. You ask yourself, what am I resisting? What am I resisting? For every person who is listening to us right now, you're listening to us right now. You know whether or not your life is in flow or not. It can't flow unless you're in flow. And so if you're out of order, your house is out of order, your closets, your car. I was just sharing with somebody the other day that I used to drive this little Chevy Chevette and it was, I would do my hair on the way to work and I'd take the rollers out and I'd throw the rollers in the back and change my at the stop signs. And then at one point, if you do that every day after a while you look in your car and your car is like a wreck. And I was like coming to my car one day and I looked in the car and I was like, whoa, my life is like that right now. This car represents my life right now. And so I started taking them out one roller at a time, one roller at a time, finding 25 cents...

under the car seat, all that stuff. But I have learned that getting out of flow with myself, getting off center, not listening to this inner GPS is what causes disruption in all the areas of my life.

Want? Yeah.

Oh, and I started to listen to my audience back in the when did this happen? Late 80s, early 90s. And women started to actually say out loud to me, Mel, you know, I've done everything. When I say, "What do you want?" They say, "I've done everything. I got the college degree. I'm married. I have the house. I have all the things. I have the Le Creuset pots. I have the whole I have the things. But it just feels like there's got to be more than this. There's something more. There's something more." And I said to my producers, people keep saying the same thing that they realize that there's more. And I believe we know what it is. And we got to show them what it is. What they're missing is the connection to the spiritual core within themselves. Not a religion, which I got accused of. Oprah's trying to create her own church. No, they're missing the essence within themselves. They're missing being centered in that GPS guidance for themselves.

And we started, Mel, doing these little clips called Remembering Your Spirit. And I remember doing a show where Caroline Myss was on with her book, Anatomy of Spirit, and the audience was watching, but I could see they had gone somewhere else. And I stopped the show and I said, "Hey, are you all not tracking?" And they said, "Well, what is she talking about spirit?" This was in '92.

In 1992. In 1992, people didn't know, weren't familiar. They said, "Are you talking about Jesus? Are you talking about Moses? What are you talking about?" I said, "No, I'm talking about you have a mind, right? You have a body, you have a soul, or you have a spirit." That's what she's talking about. The soul of yourself. There's something deeper than just your mind that you feel in the most quiet still moments of your being with yourself.

And that's the something more that you're talking about that you're looking for. And if you stay connected to that thing, you will never be guided wrong. Now I can talk the talk and most days I live it. But oh my god, when it came time to end the show, I made one of the biggest mistakes actually of my life and that is I didn't listen to that GPS and I struggle. I mean 2012 was one of the worst years of my life. Every single story headline about me was Oprah and the Struggling OWN Network. Oprah and the Struggling OWN Network. And it was hurtful and painful to me because it was the truth. I was struggling. I was hurting. And I was so angry with myself.

I did not listen to the voice inside myself was so strong telling me not to do it that I would wake up in the middle of the night and couldn't breathe. And I'd say don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Then I'd say, "But I already signed. I already signed. Already said I was going to do it."

What?