The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life's Direction and Purpose(13)

BRENé BROWN


OPRAH: You say that every home has to have its own manifesto. You wrote this one for your family?

BRENé BROWN: Yes.

OPRAH: I’d love to share this for people to incorporate as their own and adjust as they will. Will you read it?

BRENé: Above all else, I want you to know that you are loved and lovable. You will learn this from my words and my actions; the lessons on love are in how I treat you and how I treat myself. I want you to engage with the world from a place of worthiness. You will learn that you are worthy of love, belonging, and joy every time you see me practice self-compassion and embrace my own imperfections. We will practice courage in our family by showing up, letting ourselves be seen, and honoring vulnerability. We’ll share our stories of struggle and strength. There will always be room in our home for both. We will teach you compassion by practicing compassion with ourselves first, then with each other. I want you to know joy so together we’ll practice gratitude. I want you to feel joy so together we’ll learn how to be vulnerable. Together we’ll cry and face fear and grief. I will want to take away your pain, but instead I will sit with you and teach you how to feel it. We will laugh and sing and dance and create. We will always have permission to be ourselves with each other, no matter what. You will always belong here. As you begin your wholehearted journey, the greatest gift that I can give to you is to live and love with my whole heart and to dare greatly. I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you, truly, deeply seeing you.

OPRAH: I just wish everybody could live by those words.

BRENé: Me too.

OPRAH: That’s how you change the world.

BRENé: I believe it.





STEPHEN COLBERT


STEPHEN COLBERT: Spike Jonze, the director and a pretty good actor, too, came by and said, “Do you need any help starting your show?” And I’m, like, “Sure, let’s talk.” So he came by and interviewed me six months before my show went on the air about what I wanted the show to be. After we’d been on the air for a while, he sent those notes back to me and said, “I wanted to remind you what your intention was.” And one of the things that he circled and pointed out in it was when I said, “I don’t know how to do a nightly comedy show that’s also about love. But I’d like it in some way to be about love.”

OPRAH: I think it’s interesting that you set an intention for it. I live by that principle.

STEPHEN: Yes. The hope is for love. And I think now we found that I love my country, I love science, I love facts, I love people regardless of their race or their gender identity. The challenge now is to love the people who don’t seem to have that value in their heart.





DAVID BROOKS


In character building, there’s a central piece of us that makes decisions. And every time you make a decision or have an experience, you turn that core piece of yourself into something slightly more elevated or something more degraded. If you make disciplined choices, you slowly engrave a certain set of habits and dispositions inside that core piece. If you make fragmented decisions, you make that core piece a little degraded. When I look at people with character, what they have is consistency over time.





Vice President JOE BIDEN


I think the reason people abuse power is that they are seduced by the notion that they are so self-important. That they really matter. When, in fact, it is not usually the case. The leaders I’ve observed who are the best are the ones who have courage to take a chance and be willing to lose on principle. And they are self-aware. They understand their strengths and they understand their weaknesses. They play to their strengths, and they try to shore up their weaknesses. The people who don’t do that, who aren’t self-aware—that abuse of power ends up in their downfall.





JEFF WEINER


Management is telling somebody what to do. Leadership is inspiring them to do it. And inspiration, for me, comes from three areas. It’s the clarity of one’s vision, the courage of one’s conviction, and the ability to effectively communicate both of those things.





MARIANNE WILLIAMSON


I always talk about how, before you go into a meeting, just blast everybody with love. So, if you’re going to an audition, if you’re going into an interview for a job, blast them with love. Because if you have the thought, Oh my God, I need this job, I really need it, and I hope they’ll like me, all of that actually limits your capacity to shine in the ways that might promote their wanting you to work for their company. So if you instead think, The only thing going on here is I’m going to bless that person. And they’re here to bless me. I don’t know if I’m supposed to get that job. My only agenda is that God’s will be done, it will all unfold perfectly.





CAROLE BAYER SAGER


I’ve always believed in my heart that the best songs, the ones that resonate in my soul and therefore go out into the world and resonate in other people’s, don’t come from us. They come through us. And I always say a little prayer before I go into my music room. It’s sort of a prayer of intention that says, Please let me bring forth something that will help heal.