Oprah Winfrey’s Life Advice Will Change Your Future (MUST WATCH)

empowerment is authority it is a sign permission slip to actually seize the day it's the process of getting stronger and more confident and more engaged and to be empowered is to move to the world without any kind of fear or any kind of apology and with these gifts comes an even deeper privilege i believe and that is the ability to take charge of your own life to own yourself and claim your rights and here's what i know for sure that to whom much is given much is expected and i have been given so much i've earned it i've been blessed with it but i've been given a lot and that's why i've chosen to use my life to lift other people up i think some people think that are under the impression that i was born empowered that i was born coming out of the womb ready to interview a klansman but the truth is i know very well what it's like to be marginalized to be told either subtly or quite directly that my contribution isn't or wasn't welcome that my face was invisible and that my needs were an affront so back when i was doing the news in baltimore i asked to be paid the same as my co-anchor who did exactly the same job as i was doing and i expected that i would be compensated so i went in and i asked that i would get the same amount of money so he was doing the same job i was doing except that he called me babe all the time babe yeah babe anyway i was told by my news director and by the general manager because first i went to the news director that i'm a general manager and i was told that because i was a single woman who didn't have a mortgage and i didn't have kids that i was not entitled to earn the same kind of money as the man who was sitting next to me doing the same thing and i realized in that moment that my employers did not get it they did not understand my value but you know what i did so cut to am chicago the team's hard at work and they had been working for a long time and after a year or so we were asked to be syndicated that work began to pay off before long we were now no longer called am chicago we're the national oprah winfrey show i got a raise but my producers did not so i went into the boss at the time and i asked that my producers who incidentally were all female i asked that they would be given a pay raise increase and my boss this is in 1986 said why they're only girls what do they need more money for girls uh i've used the word affectionately sometimes referring to women as girls and there was no affection in his tone it was absolutely condescending so you know it takes a while to develop a voice but once you have it you damn sure better use it on stuff that matters so i took a deep breath in that moment and said either they're going to get raises or i'm going to sit down i'm not going to work if they don't get paid more babe i would like to believe that i could have spoken that kind of truth to misogyny even if i'd been all by myself but here i was on the brink of finally getting what i really wanted and had been working uh many years for a national show i mean i might have been too intimidated to stand my own ground against this guy if i were actually alone but here's the thing you're never alone you're never alone the sovereign sound of maya angelou's voice was pushing me forward that day whispering i come as one but i stand as ten thousand so when i was faced with the opportunity to advocate for my producers i silently called on some of the ten thousand and walked into my boss's office hand in spirit with the women who had come before me i could feel bessie smith and billie holliday an elephant's girl and pearl bailey and sarah vaughan and lena horne clutching their green books looking for a place to eat while they sang in supper clubs for whites only and i could feel resi taylor and rosa parks refusing to relinquish their dignity in the face of death threats all these women were with me that day walking into the office in chicago as was diana carroll and petula clark and joan baez and mary tyler moore and mom's maybelli and barbara walters and all of the astonishing women whose names none of us will ever even know despite their sacrifice and i'm pretty sure i even heard shirley chisholm urging me on with this thought if they don't give you a seat at the table bring a folding chair [Applause] i understood that there were so many times that many women from my mother's generation and god knows my grandmother's generation who were forced to grit their teeth and just take it because standing up for themselves wasn't even an option the risk was too great and they knew it but they also knew in their bones what my dear friend maya puts so eloquently into words when she says you may not control all the events that happen to you but you can decide not to be reduced by them because these women and so many others like them made the decision not to allow themselves to be reduced by the many injustices they were subjected to i found the strength to act if not just for myself not just for my producers but for all the women who in their ingenious ways subverted the rules laid the foundation and pushed the envelope just a little bit further for me the best way to begin to figure out who you are really meant to be is to ask the universe god that question god how can i be used in service to myself first and how can i then use that service to serve the world use your life to serve the world and you will find that it also serves you one of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that they have to get paid a lot of money or even get paid at all for their calling you are here to honor your calling whether you're paid for it or not if you can get paid for it that makes life exponentially better but if you are not paid for it that is also really just fine because honoring the calling feeds everything else you do in your life i have always known this about celebrity the real power of being somebody that somebody knows and i really think that the only difference between being famous and not is that more people know your name so the only difference between understanding that is understanding that what selma has done what susan has done what anna has done rebecca has done what jim has done what i've done you too can do because true philanthropy comes from living from the heart of yourself and giving what you have been given how will you do that how will you use your personality the energy of your personality to serve that which is your soul's calling i know this for sure any life no matter how fantastic it is how glorious it seems how much attention you receive how much square footage you have any life and every life is enhanced by the sharing and the giving and the opening up of the heart space your life gets better when you can find a way to share it with someone else so what we've done you can do the real empowerment comes when every person leaves this room makes a decision maybe that decision is that you will write a check and support some of the wonderful 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