The Most Important Lesson People Learn TOO LATE – Oprah Winfrey

so i want to talk about my dream for you because i have been so blessed to live inside the dream of god i figured out early on you know i had these dreams for myself i used to tell my father i'm going to live in a house on a hill i'm going to have a million dollars and i learned early in my career that the dream i had for myself couldn't compare to the dream that life had for me so i figured out how to lean in to life to lean into life and allow the flow that was designed for me to follow to allow that flow to be my guide and every decision i've ever made has come from listening to the flow that represents the truth in me that is also the truth in you you already know the truth you've been making decisions having choices fulfilled throughout your life since you were a kid and being able to make the right choice based upon what is the truth of you is the dream and prayer i hold for you today because being able to do that has led me to this stage and many other stages throughout the world it's the truth you know everybody has what i call this instinct this inner voice it's called by many names intuition the divine the flow but everybody has it and the truth is every decision i've ever made that led me to the right space and place in my life i got there because i relied on that inner voice the truth of me when i was 30 years old and about to leave baltimore because i felt something inside that thing that instinct that flow that truth that said it's time to move on and every single person around me except for my best friend gail that's why she is my best friend gail said you shouldn't move to chicago you should stay here my bosses said you're right here in baltimore you're little fish in a big pond you can grow old here i go that's the problem i don't want to grow old doing the evening news here so i listened to that inner voice that said go and i knew whether i got the job in chicago which of course i did or not that it was time to leave because the truth of me was urging me forward and every decision i made after coming to chicago when everybody said you should just take a salary it's too big of a risk to own yourself to own your show what if that show fails then you're stuck i said i'm gonna bet on myself because the truth of me the inner voice that i was allowed to get still and feel said take the risk bet on yourself every decision i've ever made i've come back to that space and allowed myself to live in the place of intentional living about 1989 after i'd been doing my show for three years i ran across a book called the seed of the soul by gary zhukov and in it he talked about how every action follows is followed by a reaction which we all know is the third law of motion in physics but he also said that before there's even a thought or an action there is an intention something struck me about that there's an intention that follow that it precedes every thought and every action and the outcome of your experiences is determined by the intention [Music] at the time i was a kind of woman who tried to do everything that everybody wanted me to do because i just started making money the amount of money i made was being published i got a lot of cousins instantly a lot of people i used to know in school and friends of mine who all needed things and i had problems saying no so this principle of intention is what literally saved and changed the trajectory of my living because i started to make my decisions based on what i intended not just what somebody else wanted me to do or what i thought would please them but what do i really intend to happen from the outcome of this decision or this choice and so i started to apply this intentional living and this intentional thinking to everything in my life i said to my producers do not bring me a show or an idea unless you have a clear intention about why we're doing it what you want to say what you want the outcome to be and changing the paradigm to just from just doing a television show from just being on tv to actually intending to be of service to the viewers change the trajectory of the show the reason we were number one for 25 solid years is because we intended to be we intended to create and to use the opportunity of being able to speak to people every day to use that as a platform to inform their lives in service intentionally and i would say that the producers do not bring me an idea that i cannot find my thread of truth in so that i could sit in the seat and ask the questions with the intention of accomplishing something bigger than the interview so i remember the first time i used this principle of intention there was a mother on who had lost her 16 year old daughter she'd been murdered by her boyfriend junior in high school popular straight a's cheerleader everybody loved her nobody ever suspected that the boyfriend was abusing her i learned then back in the 90s that domestic violence for young girls for teenagers is at the same rate of domestic violence for grown women in this country one out of four girls 14 to 18 dating are being abused by their boyfriends so this girl had hidden it from her mother and her friends because girls hide it because they don't want anybody to know and also because they want to keep the boyfriend so i went into the green room and i asked the mother please tell me why you're here what is your intention she said i'm here because your producers asked me to come i said but what is the reason you said yes what is your true intention in being here and she said i want people to know that my daughter's life was bigger than her death everywhere i go people only want to talk about her death and how she died and how i didn't know or why i should have known but i want people to know that my daughter our daughter was loved she was loved by her siblings and loved by her friends and she loved us and she had a life that was bigger than her murder and i said good i can do that i can make sure that people know that your daughter's life meant something that her being here on the planet earth for 16 years truly mattered and here's my intention i want everybody who hears your daughter's story to be able to see their friend to see themselves and to know that to remain silent can be a killer and so every question that i ask you comes from the point of view of an intention to serve the life of your daughter so that her life would not have been in vain that's the first show i won an emmy for when i aligned the intentions and since that time [Music] [Applause] since that time i don't make a decision without getting still checking in with my inner truth with what is the real reason i'm doing anything [Music] you