Category Archives: Oprah Winfrey

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OWNing Your Mistakes (with apologies to my 21-year-old self)

Hello World,

What I love about Oprah and have always loved about Oprah is her ability to keep it real although she is in the public eye and admit her mistakes – from her decision to use a dangerous quick weight loss regime to lose the pounds years ago to the launching of her OWN network last year. In an interview with her bestie Gayle King on “CBS This Morning,” Oprah revealed her top mistakes in launching her network. Launching too early was her top mistake, she said.

“Launching when we really weren’t ready to launch,” she said. “And doing that because you’ve announced you’re going to do it. It’s like having the wedding when you know you are not ready and you are walking down the aisle, and you are saying, ‘I don’t know if we should be walking down the aisle… maybe we should have postponed this.’”

 Check out the video below if you want to see the interview…

Oprah isn’t shy about admitting mistakes she made before she was Oprah the media mogul either. In the May issue of “O Magazine,” Oprah writes a letter to her younger self when although she was a college student at Tennessee State University, she was already a reporter at Nashville’s WLAC-TV! She was actually the youngest and the first black news reporter for the station. And although she was already on the cusp of success, she was preoccupied with dating a boy named Bubba. One day, she brought him to the station to let him see where she worked. Instead of being proud of her, he was intimidated by her success…An excerpt of her letter is below…

“On this day you’ve brought him to the station to see where you work, hoping he’ll be proud, too. He seems less than impressed. The truth is, he’s intimidated. You don’t know this, though, because you can see yourself only through his eyes. A lesson you will have to learn again and again: to see yourself with your own eyes, to love yourself from your own heart.

Read the entire letter here….

When I look at my life when I was about 21 years old or so, I, too, regret some of the choices I made in love…choosing the guys that were ambivalent about me instead of the ones that really held me down…my mother warned me about mistreating one former really nice boyfriend in particular…all things have worked together for my good (Romans 8:28) but if I could go back, I would have done it differently for sure…

I don’t live in regrets but what would you do differently at 21 or so if you could go back and right wrongs?

Any thoughts?

 

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Too Soon? Oprah interviews Bobbi Kristina & Family…

Hello World,

I plan to have a box of Kleenex at my side as I watch “Oprah’s Next Chapter” on OWN this Sunday…a month to the day that beloved music icon Whitney Houston passed away, Oprah will air her interview with Bobbi Kristina, Whitney Houston’s daughter; Gary Houston, Whitney Houston’s older brother; and his wife Patricia Houston, who was Whitney Houston’s manager….The family “addresses the rumors and speculation surrounding Houston’s death” according to Oprah.com  The interview will air at 9 p.m. /8 p.m. CST. (According to the AJC, Oprah flew to Atlanta to interview them…)

While I am eager to hear their thoughts on Whitney’s untimely death, I wonder is it too soon for them to be speaking publicly about it all…Have they even had the time to process it all much less speak to the masses about it…

What say you? Will you be watching? It is too soon?

Any thoughts?

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Are you watching “Oprah’s Lifeclass?!”

Hello World!

Well, if you hadn’t heard, Oprah is back! Instead of her beloved “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” the talk show that had the whole world tuning in, she is now the host of “Oprah Lifeclass.” Her new show is a hybrid of an advice column, a talk show and a webinar. The show debuted last Monday. Her five lessons (show) were: “The Power of the False Ego,” “Letting Go of Anger,” “You Become What You Believe,” “The Truth Will Set You Free” and “Joy Rising (The Car Giveaway.”

In each lesson, Oprah pulls segments from her 25-year talk show to illustrate her advice for the lesson, and she also incorporates new interviews to demonstrate her points. Instead of an audience as the backdrop, she often speaks directly into the camera as if she is speaking to each viewer directly. After each show, viewers can chat with Oprah and her guests online at her website via Facebook, which is really cool. Oprah and her guests read the comments as they are flooding in and react to them in real time!

To the discerning viewer, Oprah was always a teacher although she was known as a gifted talk show host all of these years, but in this new show her true purpose is illuminated.

Will Oprah’s new show help to save her OWN network, which despite Oprah’s success in everything else she endorses, has lost viewers since its debut in January? Hmmm…not sure…What say you? Did you watch? I watched her new show on Monday and Wednesday. Below are a few of the videos from her new show that caught my attention…

Any thoughts?

From Lesson 2: Letting Go of Anger (Best- Selling Author Terry McMillan on Letting Go of Anger After Discovering That Her Then Husband Was Gay)

From Lesson 3: You Become What You Believe (Why Oprah Knew She Would Never Be a Maid Although Her Grandmother Was A Maid)

From Lesson 5: Joy Rising (The Car Giveaway)