What Would Oprah Say?
By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist
Advice giving is a tricky business and when I thought up the title of this week’s column, I actually googled the sentence “What would Oprah say?” to find out she is the modern day Plato. No one can argue with her words of wisdom as she is a mentor to us all in that respect and a glass breaker in so many ways. I watched her as a girl from my TV screen in Northern Ireland not knowing that my own destiny would bring me to the USA to help people be their best selves.
My point? As useful as anyone’s advice is in this life, what matters is how you use it and integrate it. To do this, it’s key to know yourself and the constructs that you have built over time. What beliefs do you hold? How does that affect how you to take on new beliefs? Do those new ones confirm old biases or transform you? How can you check for validity in a meta-universal way so you can escape subjectivity of just adding to the pile of assumptions that may or may not be true? What beliefs are so implicit that they are hidden to you, yet create competing agendas to your espoused goals?
Oprah can tell you to go higher, Sheryl can tell you to lean in and all of that has truth in it. It’s good advice, but its just advice. Only you can dig deep into your own paradigms and figure out what you believe in and why you do what you do.
