The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life's Direction and Purpose(12)
For me, the journey to open The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls was one of the most challenging and ultimately rewarding I’ve ever experienced. This was something I felt I had been growing toward my entire life. I recognized myself in the face of each and every girl yearning to overcome the trauma of poverty and all that it encompassed. These strong, talented future leaders could see their way forward but needed an environment in which to thrive. That’s why, despite confronting formidable obstacles along the way, breaking ground on the fifty-two-acre campus just outside Johannesburg, South Africa, was an important full circle for me. It’s taken an enormous emotional and financial investment, but ever since the year 2002, when I shared with Nelson Mandela my hope of creating access to education for those who demonstrated promise and potential, my commitment to the school has never wavered.
So you can imagine my surprise when I was asked, during an interview, about critics who said the school would not last.
“They said that?” I asked the reporter.
“Yes, in the beginning,” she replied.
My response to her was this: “People have no idea of my tenacity. Once I commit to something and I have a full-hearted desire to see it work, I can’t imagine what it would take to make me quit.”
I held a vision for what this school could be—a place to build leaders and inspire greatness. I handpicked every sock, every shoe, every door, every book—to honor the girls who would attend. The purity of that intention was aligned from my heart to my head. I had no ulterior motive. This was about bringing the power of choice to the first generation of apartheid-free women in South Africa.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t ask myself if it was worth it during some of the most difficult times. I certainly did wonder. But the answer that always came back was, Yes, this is 1,000 percent worth it.
I was convinced we could raise these girls to know for themselves what I’ve told them over and over again: You are not your circumstances. You are your possibilities.
In this chapter, it is my hope that you will gain a greater understanding of how discovering your purpose begins with committing to your course. Whether you want to fulfill a long-held dream, find greater success in the career you’ve chosen, give more of yourself to others, or repair a broken relationship, you must first ask yourself, Why? What is the real intention? And then ask, How will I execute the action?
The tenth anniversary of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls was in 2017. To date, nearly four hundred graduates have gone on to attend universities around the world.
I set out to create a dream school where the brightest yet most vulnerable could find their voices and know for themselves that there is no bar. Their only limits are the ones they set. From day one I told them, “Don’t just break the ceiling, reach for what’s beyond.”
As for the interview with the reporter who asked about naysayers? I went on to tell her, “Don’t bet against me. You cannot defeat someone who knows who they truly are. I know who I am and why I am doing this, so I would not bet against me.”
The moment you know with certainty that your intention is fully aligned with what you believe, all bets are off.
You’ve already won!
—Oprah
IYANLA VANZANT
If you don’t have a vision, you’re going to be stuck in what you know. And the only thing you know is what you’ve already seen. But a vision that grows inside of you, a vision that wakes with you, sleeps with you, moves with you, a vision that you can tap into on your worst days—that vision will pull you forward. Affirm your vision. Clarify your vision. Not only what you’re doing, but also why you’re doing it and how you’re doing it day by day, moment by moment. And sometimes the how shows up only on a need-to-know basis. Sometimes you just have to walk blindly. But if you just do your vision every single day, putting one foot in front of the other, committed to your desires, being obedient, walking through your fears, the vision will unfold much grander than you could have ever even imagined or asked for.
GARY ZUKAV
Your job and my job while here is to align our personalities with our souls. And we do that by becoming the personality that has the same intentions of the soul: harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for life. Suppose, for example, you’ve got three children, and you’re overwhelmed a lot. You can find yourself frustrated and/or exasperated by the child that’s most demanding. You can find yourself angry at your spouse. What do you do? This is exactly the time to create authentic power, and here’s how you do it. First, instead of acting on the impulse to tell the child, “Be quiet or you’re going to go to your room for six months,” or yelling at your spouse, instead go inside yourself. That’s the first step. That is developing emotional awareness.
The second step: Once you can do this, you put yourself in a very powerful position. Because just by turning inward instead of acting in the moment, you have created a little gap between the impulse and the action. And into that space, you can inject consciousness. Into that space, you can do something you couldn’t have done before. Choose consciously. You can decide, I am going to say this to my spouse. He or she is insensitive and I’m sick and tired of it. But instead of reacting harshly, I’m going to act from the most loving part of my personality that I can reach for in that moment. And it may be that the most loving part of your personality you can reach for is just not to say anything. But you have then changed your universe. It’s your choice. And you make the choice every time you choose an intention. When you choose an intention of love instead of an intention of fear. That is the spiritual journey. That is the spiritual path.