Happy New Year! Yesterday, my cronies and I attended Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life In Focus tour with guest speaker Lady Gaga. The wellness seminar (to a sold-out audience of 15,000 people at the BB&T center in Sunrise) was a full day filled with laughter, tears (duh — Oprah) and raw honesty. It was just what I needed to get my mindset in the right place after spending my entire Winter break sick on my couch battling a nasty cold alongside my family (Read: This gal needed to elevate her vibration in a BIG WAY).
Yesterday was the kick-off to Oprah’s tour which also stops in St. Paul, Minnesota; Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta; Brooklyn, New York; Dallas; San Francisco, Los Angeles and Denver. Other “visionaries” who will sit down with Oprah at the other stops include Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Michelle Obama, Kate Hudson, Jennifer Lopez and Gayle King (Oprah’s best friend, who casually sat in the audience during Saturday’s event).
At times, the Tour felt a bit disorganized (the hype set from Daybreaker droned on and on) and too much like a Weight Watchers seminar (Oprah is a major shareholder). Toss these glitches aside and here were the day’s biggest takeaways à la Cliff Notes for those of you who crave transformation for yourselves in 2020:
♥ Oprah may have millions of fans — but sometimes, like so many of us, her own worst critic is right inside her head. “Whenever I have the negative talk self now, I stop it immediately,” Oprah says. “Like OK, how do I switch this to something more positive. My thing is nobody gets ahead beating yourself up.”
♥ My favorite nugget was this: “You are dreaming too small,” Oprah says. Dream BIG. Envision your future with great detail. When Oprah was a news anchor in Chicago, she met a wealthy woman whose front yard boasted six trees and three cars. She told herself at the time, “When I’m rich, I’m going to get myself six tree and three cars.” Well, that certainly happened. With abundance.
♥ “Stay in YOUR flow,” Oprah says. This means when the going gets rough, go inward. Be present in yourself. Check in with yourself on a daily basis. This also means you need to quit trying to change the flow of someone else. In other words, stay in your lane. This was big for me, to be honest.
♥ “Healthy is the new skinny,” Oprah says. When she was embarrassingly fat shamed by Joan Rivers on The Tonight Show, Oprah went on a four-month liquid only diet called Opti Max and weighed 140 pounds. “I may have looked rail thin but I was the picture of unhealthiness,” Oprah says of the time. So practice body positivity, self love and self care.
♥ Lady Gaga left me in tears and loving her more. She spoke of her mental health struggles and living with chronic pain with raw and jaw-dropping honesty. “I was raped repeatedly by someone I knew at age 19,” she confessed to the aghast crowd. This left her depressed and battling PTSD. For 5 years, she lived a zombie-like life filled with pain brought on by Fibromyalgia until a psychotic break (brought on by a court deposition) and the doctors she met through it helped her out of the abyss. “I take many anti-psychotic medications. I want to break the stigma that taking medication is bad. I want to shed light on the world’s mental health crisis,” Gaga says. Did I mention I LOVE THIS WOMAN? Um, I did.
♥ “You don’t get what you want; you get what you intend,” Oprah says. An intention is the first whisper of purpose you bring to what you do or say. It’s the real motivation behind any action. The why behind the why. And the energy driving that motivation is what determines every outcome.
