A lifelong dream of mine was to be in the presence of Oprah, so I was very excited to be able to hear her speak at her recent Melbourne event. One of the most profound things she told me (and the thousands of other women there) was a story about launching her new network the OWN network after the close of her popular talk show. She was having a hard time finding the right team of people for her staff and balancing the content properly. Except when you’re Oprah Winfrey if you’re having a hard time you don’t just privately cope with it, the media of the world jumps on board too and starts talking about it and making things feel much, much worse than they already were. The problem gets bigger and bigger and the more your mind focuses on how hard it is, the more difficult the problem becomes. This is the same for all of us, when we tell ourselves something is hard, it is hard and it becomes harder, when we tell ourselves something is easy it is easy.
Once Oprah realised this and started to change the way she was thinking about it, things literally started happening easily for her. I really loved this story and the idea that we could make our lives and our work more enjoyable by focusing on thinking about it differently.
I’ve created a PRINTABLE which I now have pinned up in my office. Four simple words that allow me to stop when I’m feeling overwhelmed and telling myself “I can’t do this”, “I’ll never get it done” or “it’s too hard” and interrupt those thoughts with a new mindset that I can choose to ‘let it be easy’.