A Defining Moment

Written on 8/13/09, posted at a later date.

I’m on my way back from the NY nonprofit conference, an annual gathering of nonprofits and their collective vendors for networking, training and other such gatherings. I had the opportunity to hear Gail Blanke speak this morning. She wrote a book called “Your Wildest Dreams” which, you may or may not know, Oprah picked up and did a one hour special on some time ago. The entire hour was dedicated to this topic. I didn’t see the Oprah show, but because I subscribe to the Oprah Magazine I read an article about it and saw that they had a contest in which women with little opportunity ahead of them were given the chance to compete to have their wildest dreams realized.

Gail is also a life coach and has written numerous other self-help books. She joked that she should’ve written a fitness book, which she would have titled “Eat Less, Move More,” and all the pages inside could be blank. And now, back to our story...

One of the points of her discussion was to talk about making sure that as human beings we separate fact from interpretation. This is something that I and many people (women in particular) I know are wont to do. She spoke of an incident when she was 9 and was picking out a loud, frilly pink party dress for her birthday party when her mom didn’t buy it for her and instead said she was the “tailored type,” which she interpreted to mean plain. It wasn’t until her adult years that she found out her mom meant “elegant” type, but she’d already spent decades thinking she was plain because her mom said so.

Then she gave the following recent example, which I just loved.

For the aforementioned Oprah show taping, she was left to her own devices for an hour and a half before the taping of the show. This was simply a fact of the production situation, not by intent. She could overhear Oprah on the monitors as she critiqued her own hair, her choice of wardrobe, and her own little demons of criticism in her pursuit of perfect. She began to internalize those criticisms that Oprah of making of herself, thinking that perhaps Oprah was having an “off” day and wasn’t going to be enthusiastic about the day’s taping. As she says, a lot can go through your mind in an hour and a half, and she began to doubt herself. Who was she to be on Oprah? How was it that others could see her as an expert in this? By the time she was fetched for the taping, the old demons of “I am plain” had circled her head and were about to roost.

She met Oprah on stage in front of the live studio audience. The set had two bright yellow chairs on it, set at a 90 degree angle to each other, for the show in which Oprah and Gail would be next to each other. She was feeling uncertain of herself, and after their initial introductions, Oprah turned to the production team and said, “Get the bench.”

Suddenly the two chairs were swept off the stage, to be replaced with a single yellow bench, and Oprah took a seat in the studio audience. Gail began to interpret this in this way: “She doesn’t like me, she’s going to sit in the audience and grill me, I’m being put on the hotseat, this will become a criticism of my book, I am in over my head, what does this truly mean?” And then she took a step back in her own mind and said, “Don’t interpret – you are NOT plain, be sure of yourself and do it.”

I know that that particular show was an incredible success, and that it spawned a 2-hour special called “Your Wildest Dreams” and helped propel Gail’s book to the NY Times Bestseller list.

After the taping, Gail spoke to her agent about how it had gone and he informed her that by Oprah asking for the bench, she was giving the entire show over to Gail. She wasn’t switching out the seating as a vote of non-confidence, she did it in a gesture of complete trust that Gail would be so truly compelling that she handed over the entire content of her episode to Gail.

Gail and Oprah did not meet for a single moment prior to that second. Pretty amazing that she had that level of trust having just met her.

What an opportunity that could have been squandered had Gail gone with her first interpretation of what Oprah had meant.

It makes me look at various situations in my life, both professional and personal, and how I have chosen to interpret feedback that I receive. I am thankful that for the most part I have developed a good sense of self-worth and when I hear something that doesn’t jive with what I believe to be true, I’ll ask for further details and get clarification. I don’t know how I developed this, I truly don’t. For as much as my mother obsessed over her body image while I was growing up, I should be incredibly self-critical of my own, as many women are. But I’m not. I suspect that even if I weighed 300 lbs I would still think I look damn good. I like to think I’m pretty smart. I’m not trying to brag, but for a small town girl who graduated from a small school (at least in comparison to others), I felt like no doors were closed to me in whatever I chose to do with my life. I remember wanting to apply to Harvard, just to see if I could get in. I knew I could never afford it, and the application fee was prohibitive to me so that I never did apply, but I wanted to, just to see if I could.

I had no ambition to be a doctor, a lawyer, to reach some “lofty” goal, and by lofty I mean one that is valued by society. I knew that if I chose to be a garbage collector my parents would be proud of me as long as I was doing what I loved, and that would be all that mattered. I don’t remember their ever saying that to me, but somehow that message came across, and I love them for that.