Stand Up For Yourself And Lead Your Life | Oprah Winfrey | Motivation

Every single person who ever came on my show, and I hear there's like 37,000 guests I've talked to, a lot of them came from dysfunction and a lot of them wouldn't appear to be teachers, but every one of them had something to say that was meaningful and valuable and that I could use to grow myself into the best of myself, which is what all of our jobs are. Your number one job is to become more of yourself and to grow yourself into the best of yourself. And so I had a lot of great teachers, as we all do. I was doing an Oprah show about a decade ago. One of my greatest teachers was a man named John Diaz. We were doing a show called Would You Survive? And on Tuesday, October 31st in 2000, Singapore Airlines flight 006, a Boeing 747 from Taipei to Los Angeles, took off with 179 souls aboard. Four crew and 79 passengers perished in that flight, a total of 83 fatalities. There was a typhoon rolling through at the time and the plane went down the wrong runway. Now what's interesting, John Diaz was on that plane and he had had several, several, several indications, whispers, that he shouldn't have gotten on the plane, but he did anyway. He got on the plane and he managed to be one of the survivors. And on the Oprah show, I was asking him, what do you think it was that you were one of the survivors? And I said, do you think it was your position on the plane? Because he was in first class and he was sitting on the right next to an exit door. And he said, yes, I think it might've been the position of the plane. And also my quick thinking, he says, and the fact that I didn't stop moving. So I said, you don't believe you're not a religious man? You don't believe that there was some kind of divine intervention going on there? He goes, no, I'm not a religious person. I don't believe as any, I do not believe that it was anything divine. I don't believe that. I did see, he said, as I got knocked back into the plane, that it looked like Dante's Inferno with people strapped into their seats and just burning. And it seemed a bit to me as I turned and looked backwards, like there was a light coming out of the tops of their heads. I guess you could call it an aura was leaving their bodies and some lights were brighter than others. It changed, he said, it changed me. It gave me a new kind of spirituality in a sense that I now believe somehow, I don't know how, but life continues on somehow through that light. And I thought, you know, I'm not a religious man, but I thought the brightness and dimness of the auras were how one lives one's life, so to speak. So that's one of the major things that really has changed with me since then. He says, I want to live my life. So my aura, when it leaves is one of the brightest ones. I got chills when he said that. How does one lead a meaningful life? Because ultimately, isn't that what we all want? We want to lead a life so that however we transition, people can say, wow, that was a bright one. That was a bright light. First of all, I think that it comes from a deep sense of awareness about who you are and why you're here. It comes from being in touch with on a regular basis, the appreciation and the holy gratitude that should fill each of our hearts on a regular basis, just knowing what a privilege it is to be here and to be human. To me, successful is getting to the point where you are absolutely comfortable with yourself. It does not matter how many things you have acquired. The ability to learn to say no and not to feel guilty about it, to me, is about the greatest success I have achieved. The fact that I have in the public side done whatever, it's all a part of a process for growing for me. But to me, to have the kind of internal strength and internal courage it takes to say, no, I will not let you treat me this way, is what success is all about. It's the same thing that prevents you from being abused as a child, that prevents you from being abused as an adult, that allows you to build success for yourself. I will not be treated this way. I demand only the best for myself. All the mistakes I've made in my life, I've made because I was trying to please other people. Every one of them. There's not one that I've made because I did something, because I really wanted to do this for myself. Every mistake I've ever made is because I went outside of myself to do something for somebody else that I should not have, to please them, just for the purpose of pleasing them. You are worthy to say no, that it's okay if you say no. It's okay if you say no and then people don't like you. That's really okay. The important thing is how you feel about what you're doing, how you feel about yourself. It's a long struggle though. And I'm just hoping that, you know, in the work that I do on the show and the speaking that I do around the country and that young people who are watching this can get the lesson sooner than I did because it's painful because you keep repeating it over and over and over until you get it right. And what I found is that every time you have to repeat the lesson, it gets worse because it's, you know, it's, I call it God trying to get your attention, the universe trying to get your attention. So we didn't get your attention the first time, so we're going to have to hit you a little harder this time. So I'm still doing it. I'm still learning. I say this, I say many times, I say the universe is always trying to get your attention. I use universe and God interchangeably. It's trying to get your attention. And sometimes it starts out, any major problem you encounter, it always started out as a whisper. By the time it gets to be a storm, you have been, you've had a pebble knock you upside the head. You've had a brick, you've had a brick wall, you've had the house to fall down. And before you know it, you're in the eye of the storm. But long before you're in the eye of the storm, you've had many warnings, like little clues. So now my goal in life is, is to not to have to hit the eye of the storm, is to, is to catch it in a whisper, to get it the first time. And getting it comes from understanding your, I think the thing, the one thing that has allowed me to certainly achieve both material success and spiritual success is the ability to listen to my instinct. I call it my inner voice. It doesn't matter what you call it, nature, instinct, higher power, but the ability to understand the difference between what your heart is saying, what your head is saying. I now always go with the heart, even when my head is saying, oh, but this is the rational thing. This is really what you should do. I always go with that little feeling, the feeling. I am where I am today because I have allowed myself to listen to my feelings. I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity. One of the biggest lessons I've learned recently is that when you don't know what to do, you should do nothing until you figure out what to do. Because a lot of times you feel like you're pressed against the wall and you've got to make a decision. You never have to do anything. No, don't know what to do. Do nothing. I wait. And that has been a big lesson to, to, to be willing, to be still with myself and trust myself and my higher power to help me make the right decision and to not feel pressured. See, I think, you know, we create stress for ourselves because you feel like you have to do whatever, but you have to do it. You have to, I don't feel that.