Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge.. Today my guest is Iyanla Vanzant. Iyanla is one of America’s most acclaimed empowerment legends. Her body of work spans over three decades to include fifteen published books, five New York Times bestsellers translated into twenty-three languages, with sales exceeding eight million books, [and] CDs, television, radio, and onstage performances. Her latest book, Trust, explores mastering trust in self, in God, in others, and in life. Iyanla is the host of Iyanla: Fix My Life, a number-one reality show on the [Oprah Winfrey] Network. With Sounds True, Iyanla Vanzant has created several audio programs, including Giving Thanks, Living from Your Center, Giving to Yourself First, and Finding Faith in Difficult Times.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Iyanla and I spoke about what cultivates intimacy with God. We talked about her choice to be transparent as a public figure, and the idea that you are “as sick as your secrets.” We talked about the missing principles from our society, including truth, trust, forgiveness, integrity, and accountability. We talked about how everyone has a calling, and it’s that purpose that actually gave birth to you. And finally, Iyanla addressed the topic of finding faith in difficult times. Here’s my conversation with Iyanla Vanzant:
To begin with, Iyanla, I just want to thank you for taking time for this conversation in the midst of your busy schedule—to thank you and honor you. So, thank you so much for being willing.
Iyanla Vanzant: I appreciate it; thank you for having me.
TS: I would love to begin, if you would be willing, with an invocation. If you could offer us some type of invocation or blessing as a way to start this time together, to really call in as much support as possible and also to connect as much as possible with everyone who’s listening.
IV: OK. Yes. So, we begin just by taking a deep breath, becoming fully present to this right-now moment, to our connection through life, through our breath, through our willingness and desire to share this time of space and loving and learning together. We lift our hearts and our minds to say, “Precious Lord of the Universe, just now, we say thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to be together, to share together, to grow together.”
We ask that you open our eyes, our ears, our hearts, and every aspect of our being, that we may speak and hear that which we most need at this time, to access the deepest level of healing available. That we will be prepared to serve life, each other, and our individual highest good. That the greatest amount of ease, grace, and elegance [will be] available to us. We know now that our prayer has been heard, and as we ask and we allow, the Divine becomes—and for this we are so grateful. Now we let it be, and so it is.
TS: Thank you. Iyanla, in your new book, Trust, one of the questions you ask readers in the very beginning is, “Do you trust that you can hear the voice of God?” I imagined plenty of readers having the response of, “Well, I’m not quite sure. Sometimes I can’t discriminate and know for sure.” So, can you help us with that, for that person who’s not sure if it’s the voice of God or the voice of some inner rambling?
IV: Right. Well, you know, there’s a saying that the sheep know the voice of the shepherd. The sheep know when their shepherd—their guide, their source, their support—is leading them. So, what I talk about in Trust is the importance of having an intimate connection and relationship to the God of your understanding, so that when God speaks to you, you know it is God. You are the sheep, and you recognize the voice of the shepherd. I think that that is the most difficult thing for people because so many of us are taught to look for God, look to God, understand God from a perspective that was given to us and not one that we created—created through an intimate relationship.
So, that’s how we start off; looking at the need for an intimate relationship so that you can hear the voice of God when it speaks. Now, here’s the caveat: that voice will be your voice! [Laughs.] Which is where most people have a lot of difficulty understanding that it’s not gonna be a booming voice from the outside. If you’re a female, it probably won’t be a male voice. If you are male, it probably won’t be a female voice. It’ll be your voice, because God, the Divine, your Source, lives right where you are.
TS: OK. So, you’re basing this capacity to hear the voice of God in a sense by this quality of intimacy. I wonder if you can talk more about that, and what you have found cultivates that intimacy in such a strong way that you know it’s the divine voice.
IV: Well, it’s a relationship. You have a relationship with your mother, your siblings, your partner, your lover. So, when that person calls, you don’t have to say, “Wait a minute, who is this? Who are you?” You know that voice because you have a relationship. Well, the same is true of God. You have to have a relationship. You have to build that relationship. You have to spend time.
I call spending time a daily spiritual practice. If you don’t have a daily spiritual practice which takes you within to that place where you can connect with and recognize the presence of God—the Divine Source within you—then you’re really going to have a difficult time. So it’s the daily spiritual practice that develops the intimacy that allows you to hear and recognize the voice.
TS: In your own life, Iyanla—and you’re very public about it; you write about it in your books, and when I was reading online, several different interviews with you, you talk about your very public broken marriage and the pain and difficulty. Many of the difficult passages you’ve gone through in your life—the death of your daughter from cancer—and you even talk about two suicide attempts. You know, I was struck by that; first of all that you’re willing, and have been throughout your whole teaching career, to be very transparent with the difficult passages you’ve been through in your life.
I’m bringing that up in this context because—I mean, would you say that your relationship with God has been one that has had periods where the intimacy wasn’t quite working so well, and then it became more intimate? How would you describe that, in terms of your relationship with God?
IV: Well, it wasn’t that the intimacy wasn’t working. It was that I got very human and I forgot that I was a spirit. [Laughs.] You know? I got very busy with my human life and running around and doing all of the human things. When you do that—just like if you’re married or you’re in a relationship—the relationship suffers.
So, my relationship with God has always been there, but there were periods when it suffered. What brought me back into the remembrance of the power and the strength and necessity for that relationship were the difficulties in my life. I can’t say that it was a problem with God not being there; it was a problem with me not being—making myself available to God—asking for the advice, asking for the guidance, asking for the support, or just being still and knowing that no matter what happens, God is there and I’m going to be OK.
TS: As I mentioned, I was impressed by your willingness to be transparent to the public, if you will, about having had these two suicide attempts—that that in and of itself really struck me. I’m curious how that is for you: being such a public figure and people seeing the underbelly, if you will, of your life.
IV: Well you know, there are no secrets—and you are as sick as your secrets. Trying to hide or cover up things that you find displeasurable or uncomfortable about yourself really doesn’t work when you’re trying to be in service to other people. What I’ve discovered is 99 percent of what I’ve experienced, what I’ve thought, maybe what I’ve said, what I’ve done in my life is shared by hundreds of thousands of people. So, if my learning through a difficult experience, whether the suicide attempts, or the broken relationships, or the catastrophic loss—if what I’ve learned is going to help somebody, I don’ t have the right to keep that in secret, to hide that. So many of us do that and create our own suffering.
So, my experience is that it’s going to show up somehow. [Laughs.] It’s going to show up in my inability to be intimate, it’s going to show up in my fears, it’s going to show up. What we hide becomes a hindrance to what it is that we want to do. So I figure, just put it out there and see what happens.
TS: OK. You’ve been hosting this very popular show on the [Oprah Winfrey] Network, Iyanla: Fix My Life. To begin with, I’m just curious how you’re experiencing that. How’s that going for you?
IV: It has been a very humbling and powerful experience. First of all, that people trust me with their deepest, darkest secrets—the parts of their humanness that they probably would hide from the world if they could. It’s very humbling that people trust me with that.
The second part of it is that it’s very powerful to be able to sit with a person in the midst of their fear, their trauma, their weakness, and know that they trust you to bring forth something that will support them. It’s also humbling that people have the courage to stand before the world in such a transparent, naked way, with the understanding that not only are they going to get the help that they need, but they support our supporting of the people in getting the help that they need.
So, that’s my first experience of it—that people are so willing to do that. The second thing is to be able to do this work in a medium that often doesn’t support our healing but highlights our brokenness—you know? Buy this drug, take this pill, eat this, don’t eat that. And then here we are, showing people, “Well, you may have this, but there’s a way to heal it; there’s a way to live above it.” So, all of that is just mind-boggling to me, and I’m honored to be among the people who get to show a higher way of being.
TS: Have you seen, now—having hosted the show for several years—certain themes that keep coming back up? Also, are there themes in your responses? Like, these are some of the classic themes that people present, and in my responses as well?
IV: I don’t know if they’re themes, but there are certain principles that I see are missing that create and contribute to certain experiences. OK? Principles, universal building blocks for life. I think truth is a missing principle in our society. Trust is a missing principle in our society. Forgiveness is often missing in our interpersonal relationships. Integrity is often missing from our personal development, and how we handle issues. So, there are common missing principles that I see, and I try to put those principles in place as I work with individuals and whatever their story is.
See, the story doesn’t matter to me. I believe that there are 10 stories, and we are each living some part of that story; we’re directing it, we’re producing it; we may have different characters, but there are 10 stories. Somebody hurt me, somebody betrayed me, somebody rejected me, I want love and I can’t find it, I don’t have the capacity or the money I need to create what I want, the world is out to get me, and I can’t find God. [Laughs.] I’ve found those are the stories that people tell themselves over and over and over.
TS: So, you’re pointing to principles that are missing, and you mentioned the first one: truth. What do you mean by that?
IV: We don’t tell the truth!
TS: You just mean like honest, speaking person to person? Truth-telling?
IV: Yes. You were asking me why would I be so transparent—because that’s the truth, and the truth will set you free. You just have to be willing to do the work and do the labor required to get free. Part of that labor, of bringing forth, birthing freedom, is telling the truth.
We don’t tell the truth. “How are you?” “Fine.” Well, you just got beat up by your husband last night. How are you fine? Or, you don’t have the money to pay your rent. How are you fine? Or your son is hanging out with people that you know are smoking weed and you’re worried. How are you fine? We don’t tell the truth.
And in many instances, people who do tell the truth are villainized. You don’t tell the truth about race in this country. We don’t tell the truth about money in this country. We don’t tell the truth about politics in this country. We don’t tell the truth. And if you speak out in today’s world with social media, you can be villainized, you can be desecrated by other people who can’t hear the truth.
I say the truth is the light. And when somebody is sleeping, and you walk in the room and you turn the light on, what do they do? They pull the covers up over their head and they fuss at you for putting on the light. Well, it’s the same thing in our lives. Truth is light, and very often when we tell the truth, people pull the covers up over their head and strike out at us.
TS: Let’s talk about that, because as a public figure, of course you’re criticized in this way, that way, and the other, and villainized. How have you found strength to work with that, and the trust to keep putting out your truth in the face of that?
IV: Well, it’s not my truth, it’s the truth. I speak to my experiences, but the truth is found in principles, and that is consistent no matter what. It applies to everybody no matter how old you are, how young you are, what you know, what you don’t know. Truth is truth, integrity is integrity, respect is respect, honor is honor. These are principles.
But I know that the truth doesn’t need any defense; none whatsoever. So when I speak what I know to be the truth—and I’m not the holder or the creator of truth, but when I speak what I know to be the truth and someone challenges, attacks, or has another perspective, I don’t have to defend what I know. You can talk me out of a lot of things; you can talk me out of ordering ribs at the restaurant, but you can’t talk me out of my experience. I know what my experience is, and I have an experience of truth, just like everybody else does. But the distinction is: is it grounded in principle? Is your truth consistent for everybody everywhere at the same time?
TS: Well, let’s talk more about these principles. In the beginning of your new book, Trust, you talk about how important it is to understand what the laws and principles are of life. “How life works,” is the way you put it. So, what to you are the most important principles?
IV: Again, truth.
TS: OK.
IV: Trust. Accountability. Responsibility. Compassion. Love. Forgiveness. These are all principles, and I think that these things are very important. Trust is absolutely essential. But you won’t trust what you don’t understand, so the first thing you have to understand is your force of life—that which we may call God, Buddha, Jehovah—there are so many names for it.
TS: Sure.
IV: You’ve got to understand what that is, and understand its nature so that you can know—you will know that you can trust it. You’ve got to understand yourself in order to trust yourself. Here is what I teach my students all the time: if you know that you lie, you won’t trust you. So you say, “I’m going to diet; I’m not going to eat any cookies.” Everybody goes to bed, you go down and you eat some cookies, and you get up the next morning and act like you didn’t eat them. [Laughs.] You know you lie, so you won’t trust yourself to do the bigger things in life, like follow a dream or complete a project, or how you choose your partners. You know you lie, so you won’t trust you.
So, know your source, know yourself so understand who you are [and] what you are. Understand what that source is and the nature of that source so that you can trust it and then trust yourself. Once you do that, you’ll be able to trust other people.
TS: You know, in thinking about trust, the place that I find hard—I thought, you know, instead of Iyanla: Fix My Life, I thought, Iyanla, fix our world! Could you please? I can’t trust this world—a world where there are shootings like the one that recently happened in Orlando, and there are so many horrors. How do we trust our world, and could you fix it, please? How can I help fix it, too, in your view?
IV: Well, trust yourself. It’s not that we can’t trust the world; what we have to trust is that no matter what happens, you’re going to be OK. Even the people who lost their lives in the shootings, they’re going to be OK. And the ones who survived—they’re going to be OK. Now, is it a difficult experience? Absolutely. The shooting in South Carolina, in the church—was that a difficult experience? Absolutely. But the people who lost their lives, they are OK. And the ones who survived, they are OK.
Now, let’s tell the truth about the situation. Let’s tell the truth about it. The truth about it is you can tell from the way laws are passed or not passed that we have very serious issues around same-sex relationships. But we don’t really talk about it. We criticize it, we judge it, but we don’t really talk about it. And we can’t stop people from hating gay people, or black people, or handicapped—you can’t stop that. But what you can do is have honest conversation about it, and what we can do is know that when these situations happen, that impacts us all.
See, we’re going to make this about that one guy who did the shooting, whether in South Carolina or in Orlando—but it’s about all of us! It’s about all the nasty little things that we say about gay people at the table and at barbecues and at the supermarket—how we roll our eyes and suck our teeth when we see it in front of us instead of having a conversation with the individual and saying, “OK, help me understand: who are you? Tell me what it is that you’re going for here. Help me understand.” We don’t do that.
So, the world is as the world needs to be to show us what work we need to do to make it better. We don’t talk about racism in this country. We keep acting like it doesn’t exist. We don’t talk about the abuses against women and children in this country. We don’t talk about white male supremacy in this country in a way that creates meaningful and lasting change. We don’t talk about it. The world is showing us what we need to talk about.
TS: Yes. And in a time when Donald Trump is running for the presidency, what kind of—
IV: You had to mention that, didn’t you? You had to mention that. [Laughs.]
TS: I did. I did. I know. I’m going to get you going. But you wrote the book on forgiveness, so you’re going to help us here! What kinds of truthful dialogues are you imagining? If you could wave your Iyanla fix-the-world magic wand, what kinds of dialogues are going to be happening?
IV: Well, the first thing I would say is, thank you Donald Trump for showing us the secret conversations that are going on in pockets of American society. Thank you for that. Because that’s what he’s showing us; that’s why he has all of this support. That’s why people now feel free to say out loud the things that they were thinking in their kitchens and bedrooms. Thank you for showing us that.
OK. Now, what do we need to do? What do we need to do? One of the open conversations that we need to have—because see, we wouldn’t talk about the level of disrespect that was leveled against the first African-American president in this country. We won’t talk about that. The names he was called—we dismiss that with political commentary. We dismiss that. Whether or not he was a good president will be measured throughout history, but the level of disrespect leveled against him simply because of the color of his skin—we won’t address that. So, now Donald Trump is saying it out loud.
The condition of women in this society—oh, but they’re police officers and they’re firemen and they’re in every avenue of society! Yes, but they’re still being beaten and raped at an unimaginable level, and you can commit a burglary and go to jail for 7 to 15 years; beat your wife senseless, and [you] do 6 months. We need to talk about that.
So, he’s showing us, and I’m grateful. He won’t get my vote, but I’m grateful.
TS: OK. Well, that seems like a good step one. I’m completely with you and I’m happy for you to speak it the way you’re speaking it. So now, we see what’s actually going on in conversations that haven’t been broadcast loud and clear, and it’s abhorrent to many, many people. What’s the next step?
IV: That we have to start having these public conversations. The same networks—CNN, NBC, Fox News, or wherever they are, that are having these wonderful conversations about how wonderfully he’s doing in the polls—those are the places that we’ve got to start having the conversations about racism, sexism, abuses, social injustices, economic disparities. We’ve got to start having those conversations in those same places that are talking about the aberration of Donald Trump. They’re not talking about the things that he’s talking about! [Laughs.] They’re not talking about that! Why not? They’ll talk about it on Sounds True.
TS: Yes. Have you found in your own life as a public media figure at OWN or in Facebook and everywhere else, that you communicate that you’re free to say what you want to say, no holds barred?
IV: That is my level of personal commitment that I do that. What my focus is, however, is giving people tools and information, and helping them develop the skills so that they will have the courage to do it. Otherwise, I’ll become a political commentator. If I start doing that, I can easily be taken off my track. People will want to hear it because it’s so unusual, but that’s not going to help people develop the skills, tools, and courage that they need to do it. I’m not a political commentator. I’m a teacher. I just know what I see. But if somebody asks me, I will say it, mostly to the horrification of everybody in my presence! [Laughs.]
TS: Yes. Well, you know, I read right in the beginning of your new book, Trust, you make this statement—you begin by confessing, “I’m on a mission to facilitate and support the evolution of human consciousness from a posture of victimization to one of conscious connection and choice.”
IV: Yes. If you look at the great spiritual teachers throughout history, whether it’s Jesus, or Buddha, or Martin Luther King, or Mahatma Gandhi, they were persecuted and they were dismissed as lunatics. And I’m a woman doing this [laughs], so here I come now in this twenty-first century, again focusing on the individual human consciousness. This is what we’ve got to do; we’ve got to tell the truth, and we’ve got to trust that it’s going to be OK.
And we’ve got to do it with compassion. I can call certain things and I can do it with compassion. I do it very often in airports, in stores, in places that I go, where I’m treated poorly because of the color of my skin. Happens all the time in the first-class line in every airport in this country.
TS: What happens and what do you do?
IV: Well, what happens is—my experience is that I will be questioned about my presence in the first-class line.
TS: Wow.
IV: Oh, absolutely. I’ve seen airport employees walk past three or four people in the first-class line and come to me and ask me, am I in first class? I’ve been on planes [where] I’m the only person of color in the first-class section, and if I’m not recognized as being a public person, the airline employees will ask to see my boarding pass.
TS: And how do you handle that skillfully, as a—?
IV: It all depends on where I’m at that day. Usually what I say to the airline employee in the line, is, “Why are you asking me that? Why are you asking me?” And they’ll make some comment, and I’ll say, “The sign is clearly marked there. Hooked on Phonics really does work.”
TS: [Laughs.] OK. So this idea, to facilitate and support the evolution of human consciousness from a posture of victimization—you know, it’s one thing to say, “I feel a victim in this relationship,” but what we’re talking about here is feeling like a victim in terms of where we’re at culturally—in terms of cultural evolution. So, if [you could] just very directly state, how do we move out of that posture of, “I’m a victim of the news media that profiles this, that, and the other thing,” et cetera? How do we move to conscious connection and choice?
IV: Again, that has to happen on an individual basis as well as a much broader basis. But individually, if I don’t or you don’t or we don’t call people out on the little minor infractions, sometimes people just aren’t aware. They just aren’t aware that this is what they’re doing. Sometimes they know what they’re doing, and they’re embarrassed about it, so they’ll lie about it. I don’t think that the airline employees are saying, “Let me get this black woman out of the line.” I think it’s just a condition of society that black people don’t fly first class! [Laughs.] So, if they don’t recognize me, they come to me and ask me the question, and it’s my responsibility to educate them in the moment.
That’s what we have to do: educate one another in the moment. If you do something or say something that is off-colored, out of line, that feels a little imbalanced for me, I have a responsibility to support you in being clear about how your behavior is impacting me. We don’t do that anymore, so we’ve got to start there, individually. Calling things out, questioning, bringing awareness. That’s a very simple thing, but we don’t even do that.
TS: So, when you were talking about the principles and the laws that support an empowered life, if you will—and I would use the world “virtuous,” a virtuous life—you were talking about truth, forgiveness, integrity, trust. And then you used this word “accountability,” and you gave a powerful example of sneaking down to the kitchen and then eating cookies in the middle of the night—and whether it’s eating cookies or all of the other ways that I can think of that I disappoint myself or disappoint my aspirations as a person—there’s lots of them, and I’m sure you’ve heard this quite a lot on Iyanla: Fix My Life. People come up with all kinds of excuses for why they didn’t follow through on their exercise program or their savings program, or on and on and on. How do we each work with our own set of ad nauseam excuses?
IV: I know! Understand the power and the importance of your word. It starts there. Everything is energy. I think it was Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor that said you are responsible for the energy that you bring into the room. So understand the importance of your word—the word you speak; understand the importance of your thoughts—the thoughts you think. So, if you say, “I’m going on a diet, but I’ll never lose this weight,” that’s a problem. You’ve created some negative energy that you’re going to have to work through. So, accountability is about holding yourself accountable for every thought, every spoken word, and every action that you take. Day by day, moment by moment—let’s start moment by moment, because 24 hours is too much to manage. Moment by moment: that I do what I say I was going to do; that I do it with love; that I do it with excitement, that I do it with energy. Let me hold myself accountable for that.
I just did a show for Fix My Life where I’m looking at the myth of the angry black woman and showing these women, OK, some of that anger that you hold, you bring it with you. So, when you bring it into the room and somebody responds to you in a negative or less than loving way, you brought it with you. We have to become accountable moment by moment for every thought, every spoken word, everything that we do. When we put out good energy and negative energy comes back to us, or hurtful energy, or unkind, unloving energy comes back to us, then we have to take responsibility for how we respond.
So, you called me out on my name. How am I supposed to respond? I have a loving response for people who do things like that. I say, “Beloved, I did not give you permission to speak to me in that manner.” Or sometimes I say, “Please forgive me for anything that I’ve done that made you think you had permission to speak to me in that way. Please tell me what it was.” [Laughs.] I’m holding you accountable for the way you speak to me, the way you handle me, the way you address me—I’m not going to get upset with you because you did it.
TS: OK. But even just in working with ourselves and holding ourselves accountable to our word, moment to moment—as you say, I’m sure many people will find themselves falling short in all different kinds of ways. Do you know what I mean? “I’m addicted to cookies!” It might not be cookies—it might be whatever our habit patterns are, and I’m sure you’ve seen it all. So, what happens then? I confront this fact like, “Wow, I’ve got a problem. I’ve got a problem here. I keep saying my word and I keep breaking my word to myself.”
IV: Right. Then, the next thing you do is forgive yourself, and you recommit. Commitment is another principle that is absolutely essential. You have to commit. What I say [is] the way to commit is not only to make it a thought and a spoken word. If you’ve got to write it down, then get somebody to hold you accountable. If you really want to get something done in your life—if you really want to energize your commitments to yourself, to the world, to someone else—get somebody else to hold you accountable. So you get an accountability partner, and that person you have to confess to every day, or every hour. “OK, I didn’t eat any cookies, I didn’t smoke a cigarette, I didn’t drink a soda, I didn’t cuss, I didn’t shoot up, I didn’t have a suicidal thought,”—whatever it is. And you get somebody to stand in it with you, because where two or more are gathered, there the presence of God shall be.
TS: That’s very helpful, Iyanla. I’m curious if I can ask you a personal question about accountability with yourself, and if there’s any area of your life where you still find that difficult.
IV: Yes! Going to bed on time. [Laughs.] I wake up at midnight. You know, that’s when my day starts. So, if I’m not into bed before midnight, I will be up till three or four o’clock in the morning. Now, I’m very, very productive, but at my age and for the work that I do, and for the health of my body, I need to go to bed the same day I wake up. If I get up on Tuesday, I need to go to bed on Tuesday. And I am notorious—my staff, my family, my children, everybody says, “What were you doing up at 2:43 this morning sending out emails?”
TS: And who wants to be your accountability partner at 2 AM? They’re sleeping! They’re sleeping!
IV: No, they call me on it. They will call me on it. And they’ll tell me, “You know what, when I see the time of your email is after midnight, I’m not gonna read it. I’m not gonna read it. So don’t ask me, ‘Did I see the email?’—no, I didn’t see it.” And I’ve asked them to do that to hold me accountable. The way I hold myself accountable is I know if I get on my computer any time after 10:00 at night, it’s a wrap. I’m up till three or four o’clock in the morning. So I’ve been training myself to not get on the computer after 10 PM. Sometimes I have to talk to myself: “Don’t go in that room. If you go in that room, you’ll get on that computer, and you know you’ll keep going.” Sometimes I literally have to throw myself into bed [at] 9:30, 9:45, 10:00, 10:30 just to avoid being on the computer. That’s my—I don’t even know what to—my nemesis.
The other area of accountability I have is eating. I don’t eat. I’ve traced it back—I wrote about this in Peace from Broken Pieces—I’ve traced it back to the fact that my mother was an alcoholic. She drank throughout her pregnancy with me, so my body wasn’t nurtured and nourished. I brought into life an aversion, if you will, to nurturing and nourishing myself. It was a form of self-hatred, but now I know what it is. But I will go all day, all day without eating. Ten o’clock, I’m looking for breakfast—10 PM I’m looking for breakfast.
So, I’ve had to make myself accountable. I don’t care if it’s a banana, two crackers, and a piece of cheese, before noon, I have to eat something. Some days I do very well, and some days I don’t.
TS: Yes. I mean, I can imagine someone listening who’s thinking, “Gosh, these are really minor things—eating before noon, going to sleep . . .”
IV: Eating is not minor!
TS: Yes, I know. But I think what you’re really pointing to is this idea of having confidence in our word and how important that is, and how that changes everything.
IV: And building it and training yourself. Imagine: I have to train myself to eat three meals a day. Imagine. Now, I can write a book of 284 pages, but I have to train myself to eat. Not because it’s food, but because my body—I have to respect and honor my body.
I had to train myself to tell the truth because I lived a lie; my whole life was a lie. My mother wasn’t my mother, my father was never there, people told me all manner of wonderfulness that really wasn’t the truth. I was a liar. I lied about everything—to myself, to you, to the IRS, to everybody. I had to train myself to tell the truth.
TS: How did you do that? How did you make that shift?
IV: Make the commitment to myself. You know, the number one reason people lie is fear. That’s the number one reason. Fear that what they have to say isn’t important, fear that they’re going to get in trouble—which was my Achilles heel, fear that I would get in trouble. I’d be beaten or punished in some way. So, I had to make the commitment that moment by moment, I was A) going to ground myself and get centered within myself to eliminate the fear; B) love myself even when I had to say things that were unpleasant and uncomfortable, not just for me but for other people; and C) speak it and deal with the fallout later. I had to train myself to do that.
TS: Yes. I’m extremely interested in that process, because when you said, Iyanla, “truth is light,” everything in me lit up, so to speak, and I wrote that phrase down, and I thought, “That’s what I’m going to call this conversation—Truth is Light.” You know, Sounds True is called Sounds True because of that feeling.
I was reflecting as we were talking. I was like, “Why is it so hard to get the truth out of people?” Even sometimes here, the people that I work with at Sounds True—there’s a hundred or so employees. Sometimes I feel like I have to pull teeth to get the truth out with people. Like, please just tell me! But yes, they’re afraid
.
IV: Yes. They’re in fear, and particularly—not specifically Sounds True—but most of our work environments are fear-based because it’s very difficult to tell people the truth when you think they have something that is essential to your well-being—whether it’s a paycheck or your position, or they like you, or whatever. So, it’s very difficult to muster up the courage to tell the truth all the time.
It’s not just telling the truth, it’s how you tell the truth, and then knowing how to respond when the truth isn’t well-received. Somebody will say something, “Do you like this dress?” And you say, “Oh God, if I tell my mother I don’t like that dress, what is she going to say? If I tell my boss that her butt is too big for that dress, what is she going to say?”
[Both Tami and Iyanla laugh.]
IV: You know? I have to say, my assistant said to me one day [when] we were going out and I had this really wonderful, comfortable pair of shoes and we were getting ready to travel. I had the shoes on, and she looked down at my feet and she said, “What level of spiritual maturity are you attempting to demonstrate in those shoes?” [Laughs.] I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, they’re just not reflective of who you are as a divine spiritual being.” Not another word needed to be said—she talked to me like that, you know, but I definitely went and took those shoes off! [Laughs.]
So learning how to speak it, too, with compassion and kindness and love—and here’s what I always teach my students. Number one: does something need to be said? Number two: does something need to be said by you? Three: does something need to be said by you now? And four: can you say it in a way that you would need to hear it? Four simple steps.
TS: Very good. OK. There was another part of your book, Trust, that really got my attention, and it was focused on people who stayed the course even when they faced tremendous setbacks. You wrote, “Trust is a muscle that grows with the hard work required to stay the course.” You gave some very famous examples: Michael Jordan, who was cut from his high school basketball team; Walt Disney, who was fired from a newspaper job for supposedly lacking ideas—hard to believe. I’m curious to know: what quality is that in people who face some type of being put down, and yet they bounce back and they keep going? You’ve experienced that a lot in your life—had tremendous setbacks, and here we are, you’re hosting this very popular television show.
IV: I think it’s the call—what I would say is the call, of that thing in your life. I can’t speak for Michael Jordan or Walt Disney, but I know in myself, having gone to beauty culture school to be a beautician, having aspired to be a nurse—I went to nursing school for one day, and I saw the frog in the jar, and I knew at some point that frog and I were going to have to interact with one another!
[Both Tami and Iyanla laugh.]
IV: And I left nursing school the first day. “What are we going to do with that frog?” So, I left nursing school. And then, having gone to law school—from welfare to law school, and practicing law, man’s law, every day, getting a paycheck that was—one paycheck was like full welfare checks for me.
But this call to teach universal law and spiritual principle never let me go. I knew I had to do it, and I knew I would do it no matter what. I think for me, the first step was—and I could almost guarantee you this is true for Michael Jordan also—being willing to do it whether they paid me for it or not. Being willing to do this thing because the call was on me. It’s like a cloak—a clothing where it just won’t let you go. I think that once that call is awakened in your heart, once that call is on your life, and once you surrender to the call, that you will find the strength, the courage, the energy, the information, whatever it is that you need to answer that call. That’s what it is. I think that’s why so many people are miserable in their jobs, because they have jobs, not callings.
TS: I believe you, and certainly in the kinds of cases we’re talking about, it’s clear that these people have a calling, and it’s clear to me at least, your calling is very clear. Now, do you believe everybody has a calling?
IV: Absolutely. It’s your purpose, and that purpose gave birth to you. I think where we get confused is many people try to get a paycheck out of their purpose, and that’s not going to happen for everybody. Some of us are lucky and can get a paycheck from our purpose, but that’s not going to be the same for everybody. It’s your purpose, that calling, that’s what you’re good at; it’s what you love doing. That’s what you wish you could make money at doing. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t, but everybody has a call. Yes, everybody has a purpose. I believe that.
TS: So some people’s calling might not be money-making, so they might have to spend 40, 50 hours a week not doing their calling? That sounds painful to me.
IV: Well, no, absolutely not. You take someone, for example, that maybe loves to cook, but doesn’t necessarily want to do catering. But, they can feed the family, the neighborhood, the church folk. They can feed people, and they’re always looked to to provide the food to nurture people’s bodies. But they work as a nurse, or they work as a teacher, or they work as a trash collector. But that doesn’t mean that your call can’t bring you joy.
TS: OK.
IV: But your purpose may not always pay you. There are some calls—the call to ministry, the call to music, the call to teach—there are a lot of callings and purposes. I’m a teacher. I am a teacher. Now, had I misread the calling, or had I not been in deep connection with my source, I may have thought that that teaching was in a classroom. I did—I studied education in college, and I lasted maybe three weeks with a kindergarten class. [Laughs.] Three weeks. That was it! I couldn’t do the classroom.
TS: Longer than with the frog!
IV: Yes, longer than with the frog, but what happened was I think my voice is too heavy, and maybe I would have done well in middle school—I actually did teach dance in middle school, but I scared the children!
[Both Tami and Iyanla laugh.]
IV: There was one little boy, his name was Ryan, and I don’t know what Ryan was doing—he was sticking a pencil in something, I don’t remember what it was, but whatever it was, it looked very dangerous to me, and I said, “No!” Like that. And Ryan was reduced to tears. Now, in kindergarten, when one child cries, all the other children have the obligation to do the same thing. They don’t know why Ryan’s crying, but he’s crying, so let’s all cry! Then they all came to me—Ryan’s crying and they started crying, so I looked around and it was me and 16 kindergarteners sitting in the middle of the floor crying. They were crying, I was crying, and I said, “This is not going to turn out well.” [Laughs.]
I went to the principal and I said, “I can’t do kindergarten. Can’t do it.” So, that ended my classroom teaching.
But just know that yes, there is a call on your life. That call is your purpose, and that purpose gave birth to you. Find what it is that brings you joy. Find what it is that brings you joy, and first do it because it brings you joy, not because it’s going to bring you a paycheck. If you can expand it to the degree that it does, then so be it. And if you can’t, find a way to do it on the weekends, in the evenings, for your church, for your community.
You know what some people’s purpose is? To pray. That means they may live in the projects, praying for peace in the streets. Praying for the lady next door. Praying for the people who are abusing substances. Praying that the young girls who go out get home safe. They may have to live in the projects and pray. That’s their purpose. And nobody’s going to pay them for it.
TS: What I love is this phrase you’ve used: “that your purpose gave birth to you.” I think people think, “I was born and now I have to come up with my purpose.” Oh no. Your purpose gave birth to you. That’s beautiful.
IV: Yes. It’s what you’re good at, and what brings you joy. It’s just that simple. Arnold Patent wrote about it in You Can Have It All. Yes. Your purpose gave birth to you.
TS: OK. I just have one final thing I want to touch on here, Iyanla. You created four different audio programs with Sounds True: this Inner Vision audio series, and one of them is called Finding Faith in Difficult Times. I just want to talk to that person out there who might be listening now and going through a hard time. Even the idea of accountability—it’s like, “That’s a little, I don’t really have the energy for that right now, I’m going through a very difficult time in my life. Iyanla’s written a book on trust. I’m supposed to trust the world with all of its difficult-to-trust aspects and its current evolutionary state. How do I find faith during this difficult period I’m in?”
IV: Well, this is what I tell my students: the best students get the hardest tests. Because when God gives you something to do, you can’t just do the parts you like. You’ve got to do the nasty parts; you’ve got to do the hard parts. And that means that you’re going to be tested.
So, when you’re going through a difficult time, understand that you are building a muscle for something yet to come. Losing my daughter built muscles. Ending a 40-year relationship built my muscles. Filing bankruptcy and turning over the keys to my first home built muscles. That builds muscles because the hardest students get the best tests. So understand, if you’re being tested, that’s because you’re a good student. Pay attention; take copious notes. Stop complaining. Do your lesson.
TS: Iyanla, I have really enjoyed talking to you. you’ve been so straightforward and just a searing truth-teller and light-bringer! Thank you. Thank you so much.
IV: Thank you. Thank you for having me. And thank you for paying such close attention to Trust. You know, I do interviews very often and people have barely skimmed the book. I really get a sense that you went through it and got something out of it, and I really appreciate that.
TS: You’re welcome—and it’s true, I did, and it’s something I care a lot about: trusting. So thank you, thank you so much. I’ve been speaking with Iyanla Vanzant, and with Sounds True, she’s created four audio programs: Living from Your Center, Giving Thanks, Finding Faith in Difficult Times, and Giving to Yourself First. She’s the author of the new book, Trust, and it’s just been great to have you on Insights at the Edge. Thank you so much.
IV: Thank you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: Many voices, one journey. Thanks for being with us.
