“Being on the air for the past 25 years, I’ve learned a lot about myself,” Oprah Winfrey says. “You learn from what worked and what didn’t work. And I made the big mistake about, oh, 10 or 12 years ago of calling what we were doing on television ‘Change Your Life TV.’ ”
Critics immediately began razzing the slogan. And Winfrey’s team, she told the TV winter press tour, “felt immediately the pushback.”
But then she realized, the critics might have a point. “I thought, yeah, there’s some truth to that. Who am I to say that I am actually changing your life? And what I realized is that’s not for me to say. That’s for somebody else to say.
“So that was a big lesson I learned,” Winfrey says. “Don’t go around telling people you are going to change their lives. Let them tell you if that’s what their experience was.
“Years ago, I wrote in my journal I was going to create mindful television,” she says. “It’s much better if I can listen and not try to tell.”