Rewrite the script

Oprah rewrote a life that was never meant to work.

We often look at successful people and assume they were always destined for it. In reality, almost everyone who tastes real success has had to endure tremendous, sometimes unthinkable, hardship.

Oprah Winfrey is one of those people.

Born in 1954 in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother, her early years were spent with her grandmother. They were so poor that Oprah wore dresses made from old potato sacks.

At six, she moved to Milwaukee to live with her mother, who was working long hours and barely getting by. In a cramped apartment, while her mother was away, Oprah was sexually abused by relatives and a family friend. This was something she’d later speak about on her show.

By 14, she was pregnant. Her baby boy was born prematurely and died shortly after birth. It looked like Oprah couldn’t escape the dark and dangerous path that life had taken her on.

After years of instability, she went to Nashville to live with her father, Vernon Winfrey. He was strict about curfews, education, and church. Under his roof, she became an Honours student, excelled in speech competitions, and landed a job reading the news on local radio while still in high school.

At 19, she became the first Black woman to anchor the evening news in Nashville. A decade later she was given a low-rated morning talk show in Chicago called AM Chicago, and she turned it into a raging success. It became the number one show in the city, and the name soon changed to The Oprah Winfrey Show, which went on to become the highest-rated daytime talk show in history.

From there, she negotiated ownership of the show, built a media empire and, in 2003, became the first Black woman billionaire.

Pretty wild for someone who once wore potato sacks to school!

She has since used her platform to talk openly about child sexual abuse, trauma, race, and healing. She’s funded scholarships, donated hundreds of millions to education, and opened a $40M school for academically gifted girls from impoverished, often traumatic backgrounds in South Africa.

Oprah tore up the script that life gave her. And then used her success to help others rewrite theirs.

If we want to transfer the lessons of Oprah’s life to our lives and work, here are four tools we can lift from her story.

1. Name the script we’re breaking. Oprah’s starting script included poverty, race, instability at home, abuse, teenage pregnancy and more. If she’d accepted that as the final version, there’d be no show and no empire. Instead, her life became about breaking that script, for herself and for others. But we have to see the script before we can seek to change it. What’s the script we’re seeing right now? It could be “I never get promoted” or “Things never go my way." Once we have the clarity, we need to write the alternative: “I work harder than everyone to earn my promotion.” or “I look for the positive opportunities everywhere.” Keep it simple because we don’t need to fix the whole story instantly. But once we name the script we’re breaking, our decisions start lining up with the new one.

2. Find (or become) one serious ally. None of us are self-made. We all need a hand up (not a hand out!) from time to time. For Oprah that was her father. He created structure that she needed: curfews, chores, Sunday church, and a house where school mattered. Under that roof, she had stability, expectations, and an adult who believed in her potential, and insisted on it. Who is one person we could invite to be our ally in this chapter? Sometimes it’ll be a friend or family member, but perhaps it might also be a colleague or even a professional therapist. We want someone who’ll hold a boundary with us, not just sympathize. And, if we’re in a good place in life, perhaps we can support someone who needs the help. A simple outreach for a coffee could change someone’s trajectory!

3. Wounds become work. Oprah chose specifically to talk about her trauma on national television. She built entire episodes and campaigns around topics most people avoided and her pain became the way she could help others. This is the old adage that the obstacle is the way. We can also turn something that has hurt us into something we can use for good. Perhaps trying to use it as a way to mentor someone starting down a similar path, or even taking a failed project and using it as an opportunity to assess openly for others to learn the mistakes. One thing to note is that we choose our boundaries. We don’t need to share everything, but sometimes a miss will help others see it before it hurts.

4. Gratitude. My old faithful that I come back to every time I’m veering off course. Oprah talks about gratitude a lot. Despite the pain and challenges of her early life, she consistently remarks on how gratitude can transform any situation. She says: “Gratitude alters your vibration, moving you from negative energy to positive. It's the quickest, easiest, most powerful way to effect change in your life. This I know for sure." I mean, if she can reflect back on the life she’s had and attribute a lot of her success to gratitude, it’s worth us giving it a shot! Each day, we write down three things or people that we’re grateful for, and why. That activity helps channel our energy towards what is going well, and that makes all the difference!

We may not feel like we control the script we’re given, but we do control the way we choose to interpret it and navigate it. With the right support, courageous honesty, and a stubborn commitment to gratitude, we’ll begin to rewrite it into a magnificent way forward.

Until next time friends, stay resilient.

Carre @ Resilient Minds

PS - do you know someone who might enjoy stories like this? Please send this along to someone who might like to flip their own script.