Life Lessons from Oprah, Tony Robbins, Malala and more
Taken from The Wisdom of Sundays, here are a few lessons that will help guide you through life.
In The Wisdom of Sundays, Oprah Winfrey shares some of the most meaningful conversations from her show Super Soul Sunday. From how to take control of your life, to how you can find courage in difficult circumstances, here are a few lessons that will help guide you through life.
Tony Robbins on why you need to take control of your life
When life matches your blueprint, you're happy. When life doesn't match your blueprint, you have pain. When life doesn't match your blueprint, but you feel helpless to change it—that's when you suffer. That's when it's the dark night of the soul. That's when people feel like things can't happen. And the delusion is, it's just the mind taking over. When that happens, you have to blame someone, which is what most people do. They blame the environment or they blame someone else or they blame themselves. Blame doesn't change anything. Your other choices are change your friggin' life. Do something. Or change your blueprint.
Oprah on trusting your intuition
With every decision, you are steering your own ship. Beneath all of those protective layers built up between you and the world lives an inner voice that goes by many names. Some call it instinct or intuition.
I call that persistent “knowing” our spiritual GPS. It acts as our internal compass, designed to help you move through life no matter what distractions or obstacles get in your way. Your GPS is always turned on. Whether you're headed on the right track or about to take a destructive turn, your emotional guidance system lets you know.
Every right decision I've ever made has come from listening to my gut. Every wrong decision was a result of me dismissing the small, still voice within me.
Malala Yousafzai, author of I am Malala and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate, on being courageous
There's this fight between courage and fear. And sometimes we choose fear because we want to protect ourselves. But we don't realize that by choosing fear, we put ourselves in a situation that has a really bad impact on us. So if I would have kept silent in Swat Valley and my father would have kept silent and all of us would have kept silent, then there would not have been that moment when change would have come to us in our valley. So it's better to speak out to … to have that moment when you say, “I'm going to do something for my side.” And that needs a bit of courage. So our courage was stronger than our fear. And that is what really changed our lives.
Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, on how we are responsible for attracting both positive and negative events into our lives
Well, what I experienced in my life is that when I really wanted something, I always got it. Positive and negative. Because the Universe does not think. You have this subconscious mind that sometimes is attracting tragedy. Attracting bad things, you know? Because you want to be a victim. Because to be a victim is to justify a lot of frustrations and failures in your life. The Universe is helping you. You want to be successful. The Universe is helping you.
Shonda Rhimes, creator of television series Grey's Anatomy and Scandal, on success
When I was a kid, my father used to say to me all the time, “The only limit to your success is your own imagination.” And I took that as not just being financial success or work success. I took that as being every kind of success—love and family and emotional and everything. The only limit to your success is your own imagination. Whatever you can imagine is possible.
Oprah on gratitude
I can't tell you how much my life changed when I started writing down five things I was grateful for each day. It sounds simple, but when you go through the day staying conscious about what you will put on your gratitude list, it completely shifts the lens through which you see the world.
The Wisdom of Sundays
by Oprah Winfrey
The Wisdom of Sundays features insightful selections from the most meaningful conversations between Oprah Winfrey and some of today's most admired thought leaders.
Visionaries like Tony Robbins, Arianna Huffington and Shonda Rhimes share their lessons in finding purpose. World-renowned teachers like Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson, and Wayne Dyer explain our complex relationship with the ego and the healing powers of love and connection. And bestselling writers like Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Elizabeth Lesser explore forgiveness and letting go.