an open letter to oprah: thank you for permission…

Oprah,

there have been numerous times where i wanted to reach out and share an update on our progress. but i do my best to restrain myself. and i know you say you don’t care and i shouldn’t hesitate. but i just know how needy, suffocating and demanding people can be around you and i never wanted to be that girl. i’ve wanted to steward the access i have to you well because it’s you. i’ve been so mortified sometimes by our exchanges that when we’re done talking i delete the text thread because i can’t stand to look at it. whyyy did i text that?

in all honesty, i don’t watch a lot of your interviews with other people because they rarely bring revelations that i haven’t heard you say before. and i have the greatest hits memorized. it was part of my job. most times people are so grateful to be in your presence that they don’t push. but Keke is different. i really admire how she holds space and the way she engages her guests. i was excited to see what could happen between you two.

i first listened while doing my morning routine and feeding the dogs. i was so impressed with Keke’s balance of reverence, depth of curiosity and ability to gently, yet precisely push for a truer truth. i saw you light up in a way i haven’t seen in a long time. the recognition that you were in the presence of mastery. i felt the full bodied conviction in what you were saying, especially when you started speaking about your faith and the truth of what it really takes to live in expression the way you do. you leaned in. you were activated. it was very cool to see.

i immediately grabbed my phone to text you. there were so many different things i wanted to say…the internet is going crazy off that interview…we can do ALL things through Christ, no weapon formed against me shall prosper. you better preach O!... but again, i restrained myself and put my phone back down.

a couple hours later, Kevin walked into the kitchen to grab coffee. you haven’t met Kevin yet. he and I worked at Netflix together. we live together and he is the co-pilot in this work we’re doing to reimagine the culture of work. he’s the one who put the interview on my radar.

i asked him, have you watched the Oprah and Keke interview yet?

he said, not yet. why?...is it good?

i replied, it’s really special. and it’s especially affirming of the work we’re doing right now. it gets really good in the second half.

and so i watched it again with him. and the second time, a swell of emotion came up and tears started running down my face.

forgive me in advance for the long letter, there are many things that are on my heart that i was convicted to share…

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i’ve always felt a very deep connection between us. not in a fandom way. more in a calling kind of way. but i wasn’t sure if i was crazy or making it up in my head. you have this unprecedented ability to make everyone around you feel so seen. and not just the people who are in proximity to you, but anyone who’s ever had the privilege of hearing the sound of your voice. so i’ve questioned and wondered, is what i’m feeling real?

the feeling started young. my mom, like every mom, but especially Black moms, had your show on at 4p religiously. we would watch together as a family, but my mom always took it a step further and prompted us to talk about the topic that day. i remember watching you and capturing this visual and mental model of what a free black woman who’s in full expression looks like. and what that dynamic transfer of activated in my mom and women like her.

when i first moved back in with my parents after Michelle was born, i was 20, living in South Bend, 90 miles outside of Chicago. something in me knew i was going to work for you. so when Abe Thompson randomly showed up at my parents house and he asked me what i wanted to do. i told him, i want to get inside the oprah show. he said, oh i know Oprah. let me see what i can do. send me your resume and i’ll give it to George Burns. it was confirmation that what i felt was real.

when i started as an intern in publicity in 2007, i felt like i had arrived at the mecca of something. there was a kinetic energy that i still don’t have the words for. it felt like holy ground. but immediately, i knew i was not just there to do my little intern job of running errands, answering the phones and making copies. i was there to study something. i didn’t know what it was exactly. but the instinct was to start watching as much tape as i could.

i got my hands on the 20th anniversary dvd box set, the curation of the moments of the show that mattered the most to you and and context as to why. i came home every day after work, after putting Michelle down, and watched it. over and over and over again. i remember asking the guys in the tape library to print copies of every show from the 80s and 90s, adding to my daily playlist.

i reached out to nearly every executive to set up time to take them to lunch. and most said yes. i was curious about their role, what they did and how they contributed to this generational machine. and everyone was so kind. and so bright, both literally and figuratively.

when my internship ended in 2008, i wasn’t ready to accept it. my dad said that i should go to you and ask you for a job. i did and you said no. gracefully, of course. you told me that i was an audacious intern. you also told me to surrender it and that if it was God’s plan for me to be there, there was nothing you or i could do to stop it.

so later that year, when i got a random call from Harpo offering me a job, after wrapping up work with the Obama campaign, it was proof that surrender works. she was right, i thought.

this time around i was meant to study how you were doing this. I was granted access into rooms, discussions, experiences and projects that most people who worked decades for you never got to see. how does she actually lead with intention? how does a company built on service actually operate? how does she manage through a crisis and respond to persecution? how does she translate this iconic brand of 25 years into different verticals and product lines? how does the work move forward? how does she hire? fire? give feedback? how does she rest and care for herself? how does she lead with integrity? how does she make decisions? what does she see that no one else sees? and why? how did this all happen?

i’ve realized recently that there’s only a few dozen people in the world who’ve gotten to witness this. i wasn’t sure what it meant for my life. but i knew I was supposed to be paying attention.

when we were in Maui in 2016 at the sales and leadership retreat, you invited us to take a sunrise hike in your backyard on your mountain. i was hungover from the night before and moving slow. everyone else was pacing ahead of me. you let me borrow your hiking stick and said follow me. we got to this spot, wayyy up high. out of breath. the sun was shining bright and water was glistening. you put your arm around me and you said, look at alllllll of this. all of this is mine. i am a Black girl from the dirt roads of Kosciusko, Mississippi. if I can do this, YOU can do this. and you kept moving. i remember pausing, wondering, what in the lion king just happened? i asked Bob Greene to take a photo of me because i felt like i was going to want to remember that moment. it felt like a divine signal that it was time to go.

on my last day in 2017, as i was walking out of the OWN offices with my stuff, someone ran downstairs and said Oprah is on the phone for you. you said thank you for everything that i gave there. we remincised about how i had grown up there and who i had become. you said it’s time for me to go fly and that you would put in a good word for me with Ted over at Netflix, and you did.

from 2017 to 2022, i was granted access at high levels to two very different kinds of workplaces. Netflix, the global leader in entertainment with a reputation for having one of the most iconic, most progressive work cultures in the world. and Clubhouse, one of the fastest growing tech startups that lived at the epicenter of Silicon Valley.

in their own distinct way, both made me feel like i had to shrink. over time, both suppressed the truth of who i really was. and both robbed me of the feeling of my worth. and there are wonderful people in both places. but now as i understand the roots and complexity of the modern workplace, their root systems were built on extraction, manipulation and chaos. something that i had never experienced when i was in your environment. something so bad, that it nearly destroyed me in a five year window, after spending almost 10 years at Harpo hq. i couldn’t believe that these were the kind of environments that everyone had been existing in all this time. it was alarming.

God called me out and told me to quit my job in March 2022. immediately, i started hearing this phrase, change the culture of work. change the culture of work. i didn’t know why, but as the quest was beginning, i felt like i needed to talk to you about it. so when you responded and we had lunch in the fall of 2022, i felt like i was coming back to headquarters to give an update on what i saw in the field.

i had the data that showed how bad the problem was. i shared that the average person spends 70% of their lives at work. so whatever their work experience is what their life becomes. and right now, it is the most stressful, extractive and unfulfilling part of people’s lives. it doesn’t matter how much therapy or SuperSoul they watched, it is not possible for them to get into the highest fullest expression of their lives, which i know matters very deeply to you. the revelation was that the fastest way to help people get into expression was to stop trying to build solutions around work and attack the workplace. i had some initial ideas on where to begin.

you were so encouraging. you told me that you thought the idea was revolutionary and to pursue it with everything i had. with my whole heart. i needed to hear that. and i needed that permission because i truly had no idea what i was doing or what lay ahead. you also asked what i needed. in which i responded, your wisdom. your voice on the subject. and some capital. you said, stay close. and keep me updated on your progress.

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i know i haven’t done a very good job of keeping you updated. watching your Keke interview felt like the culmination of a four year cycle since that lunch. It activated a reminder that after years of searching, we have strong hypotheses about how to solve it. so much of what you said confirmed the very revelations we’ve received about how to actually change the culture of work.

but instead of reaching for my phone to text or send a voice note, God told me to share this out loud. and you know it’s God, because this is the last thing i would want to do. but i am being, as you said in the Keke interview, obedient to the call. the substack’ers who see this know that God has told me that I need to be in practice of telling the truth of my story out loud, but i never saw this coming.

the last four years have felt like the most epic r&d phase. a constant cycle of testing, failing, rebuilding and testing again. 10,000+ hours, 25,000 pieces of user data, 150 facilitated coaching sessions, countless research from authors and experts, running cohorts, retreats + two failed tech startups.

here is what I finally know for sure about the intersection of getting into the highest expression of ourselves and the modern workplace:

we need the language for what our real work is.

90% of people don’t have language for their real work or their why. we are constantly being told, find your purpose, get into your purpose, but there is no common format for or resource at scale that actually helps people do this. not at work, in our schools or in our churches. everyone is telling us to find it without offering any tools.

one of the most consistent things i witnessed about you is that you always had the language. i don’t know how you got it. but you brought this up in the Keke interview when you talked about Maya Angelou saying right now you are in showbiz, but one day you’ll be about your Father’s business. you note that the real work is about honoring the dream that Creation has for you, rather than just chasing a paycheck or surface-level success.

and for you, that was helping people understand that they matter, help get people into the highest fullest expressions of themselves, raise consciousness. that has always been the mission you served. you said it out loud in the very first Oprah show and you never stopped saying it. it was what was the operating system underneath it all. it informed your decisions, kept you in hard times and it also attracted others who are aligned with that same mission to keep advancing the work. and it always kept you in the posture of service.

Viktor Frankl said in Man’s Search For Meaning, that if you know your why you can endure any how. this is one of the reasons we are in a crisis right now. times are extremely hard and most don’t have language for their why. and when we don’t have language, we don’t know what we’re holding onto, or what we’re holding on for. and it’s impossible to be in a real posture of service when you don’t know who you’re meant to serve and what you’re meant to give them.

we found a framework. and it’s from Genesis, when God states his original intention for humans for the first time. we call it becoming, the true story of your best work. it’s a foundational frame that moves beyond the surface to ask, what is this person’s life an answer to? at the heart of the framework is an excavation of the consistent thread of pain. pain is what produces purpose. when we understand that, it can be used productively to alleviate the suffering of others. when we don’t, our pain is used to punish each other.

we must know our area of domain.

connected to the language of our work, is the truth about our territory. you said in the interview, that when we start operating outside of our territory, we have no power. and it’s when we start to compare ourselves to others. and this is absolutely correct.

your domain is storytelling. and you’ve never really deviated from it. even in working with other brands like Starbucks and Weight Watchers, the goal has always been to tell a deeper story in the way only you are designed to tell stories. it’s why you always brought in your storytelling team to execute in those spaces.

i realized that my domain is also storytelling through non-fiction stories about our work. and it made sense why God would have sent me to your territory to study under one of the greatest storytellers in the history of the world.

we were taught to build careers. we are oriented towards jobs and titles. not domains. once people have the words for their real work, the next step is helping to look back through the tape of their life to see what domain they were actually designed for. because when our real work is lined up with the right domain, in your words, nobody can touch us.

we have to constantly be in practice of telling the truth of our story.

i LOVED that Keke asked you about how you managed to create an ecosystem around your ideas and make your philosophy a scalable business. your answer matched with everything we’ve seen in our research too. the people who are able to get into the highest expression of their work based their business off the truth of their lives. but more importantly they constantly had safe spaces to practice speaking their truth first. and the truth of their story is what actually connects and transcends in the work, not the things they do or sell.

today, there are not a lot of places where people are able to speak their truth. we are at the highest levels of distrust we’ve ever experienced in this generation across every level. specifically at work, people are punished for telling the truth. so we are deeply conditioned to say what we think we have to say to stay safe.

as we work with people, we hear n almost every single session, i’ve never said this out loud before.

in the environment you created, we were proactively asked, what is your truth? what are you not saying that you need to say? what’s on your heart? what does your gut say?

these are questions most people have never been asked by another. despite being “connected” to more people, we are the loneliest we’ve ever been, what the surgeon general declared a health epidemic. so we understand that we have to create, somatically safe relational environments where people can tell the truth of their story.

in a world where every piece of knowledge is at our fingertips, our stories become our most valuable assets and are the original ip that we can build our lives on. and we have to get good at speaking the truth of them, because they are the doorway to everything else we desire and are designed for.

we must have a personal system of remembrance.

in the interview with Keke, you spoke about your love for hikes. you said, don’t focus on the distance ahead. that if we look at how far we have left to go, we will feel discouraged. instead, you emphasize the importance of looking back to see how far we’ve come.

what we’ve learned is that a system of remembrance is critical in the process of becoming our best work. that most times we don’t have a faith problem, we have a remembrance problem. and remembering the is what increases our faith that who we’re becoming is real. and that increase of faith produces works to stay on the quest. practically that means building a consistent practice where we track evidence in all the micro and macro ways that you are in expression of your real work.

in the work environment you created, daily remembrance was built in. there were 600 real humans that came into the studio every week that mirrored the truth of what the work was becoming, it produced faith in all of us to do greater works and keep elevating in expression. that is the feeling of fulfillment. not just knowing what the work is, but knowing that the intention is being fulfilled in other people’s lives.

in the modern workplace, there is no positive system of remembrance or experience of fulfillment. not only do we not have language for what our real work is, we are constantly told what we were not doing, what more we need to do and given complaints on what we’ve done wrong.

but most importantly, we can’t live undivided lives if we are meant to be in expression.

our identity, faith and work cannot be separated. God is the Creator of each of us and we must seek Him diligently and constantly for answers to reveal the work. you shared in the interview how consistently you were asking, why am i here, why am i here? and that we are constantly in co-creation with Him.

in the interview, you said you really thought Jesus was your Father and you really believed that you could do all things through Christ who strengthens you. clear identity in God and then sunrise faith are the two foundational prerequisites for our highest expression. Identity without faith leads to a fear based life. faith without clear identity produces selfish ambition disguised as service.

your work environment was the living proof of this framework. faith wasn’t just welcomed, we were actively championed to seek God and create from our unique identity from our own level of understanding. we prayed, meditated, and spoke of God constantly, honoring every distinct expression of faith in the room. you deeply integrated the truth that what is impossible with man is possible with God. we operated with a genuine ‘God advantage’ and the result was fruit that went far beyond anything we could ever ask, think, or imagine. the fruits of the Spirit were present every day. and because we were in your atmosphere, we all became beneficiaries of that overflow, and we all were abundantly blessed.

but the modern workplace, where people spend 70% of their lives demands division. the design of work as we know it were inspired by plantation principles. the men who designed it owned slaves. the original intent, the roots, were to maximize production and create efficiency for profit. so in order to do that they had to homogenize, conform and strip people of their individuality and creative expression. it’s not efficient and gets in the way of the money. so as a result, everyone has to operate from a sustained state of suppression. and while an individual can be clear on identity and their faith, the collective body is not in alignment, creating a profound spiritual friction where people must choose between their livelihood and their soul.

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since 2022, the data around the state of work has gotten much worse. the current crisis has seen hundreds of thousands of Black women systematically pushed out of the workforce, with even more choosing to leave on their own volition. a seismic breaking point is happening. as we grow more conscious as human beings, the weight of systemic suppression becomes heavier, sparking an earthquake-level shift. the contract we as a society once had with work is no longer valid. and it’s not sustainable, let alone feasible, for Black women to step into full expression or live out their true purpose within the architecture of the modern workplace. the current system is literally killing us.

we cannot depend on structures that do not want us and were never designed to work for us. we must build a new ecosystem. we must create an architecture where people can become creator-led brands, where their unique stories serve as the currency and entry points to products, services, experiences, and content. a system where we can remain whole and well in the process, step into our absolute highest expression, and finally experience the abundant promises God has for us and that you’ve shown us is possible.

we have to build more systems and environments like the one you built.

through this journey, i realized that this is the work i’ve been called to do. that i am a voice of restoration and an architect of stories. i’m here for a time such as this to create immersive environments of context and permission for those of us who unconsciously allowed ourselves to be abused and manipulated out of worth by the cultures and systems that were intentionally designed to suppress us.

i do that by telling the truth about what’s really going on, producing stories people can see themselves in and providing architecture to move us forward, so that the greatest among us, the servant visionary creatives, are clear, cared for and convicted to answer the call and keep becoming the best work of their lives.

i realized that i was created for a time such as this and you have been one of my key teachers, core helpers and my main workplace muse. God has revealed a generational vision, something we hope will out last us. and we are just beginning the lifelong journey of what it means to bring something like this forward and all the ways God will surprise and delight us in what he has in store.

so a few things i realized today:

1. the environment you created is one of our core blueprints for the future. and as an architect, i’m clear on plans and how to help replicate it for others. this interview was confirmation of what was revealed to us too. and it will become a canon in our library as we help others. thank you for answering the call and saying yes to your work.

2. i wasn’t crazy. that feeling i’ve had that our lives are deeply connected was and is real.

3. that moment on the mountain in Maui was a go be about your Father’s business moment. you have been one of the most influential and consistent voices in my life that has consciously and unconsciously always given me that permission.

and that permission was so poignantly on display in the Keke interview, to show us what’s possible when we are about our Father’s, i believe, is your best work.

sending u so much love,

m