What Oprah does when strangers cry in front of her

read time: 2 minutes.

the story

Last month I was in the same room as Oprah ( yes, OPRAH! ) I was one of 100 people packed onto a rooftop in Cannes, 42 degrees of French Riviera sun. For an hour we drank in her wisdom on living and leading intentionally, and during the Q&A strangers stood up and told her what she had meant to their lives. She received every single one like it was the only conversation happening on earth. No clock-checking, no waiting for her turn to speak; somewhere in that hour it landed that the most powerful person in the room was also the quietest one in it.

the shift

Most of us learned power as dominance: getting people to agree, comply, follow. That kind is loud, and you can watch half the internet kicking and screaming for it right now, mistaking visibility for authority. It is also the cheapest kind, because it has to be re-won in every room; the moment you stop pushing, it stops working.

There is another kind, and you have felt it. Someone walks in and the room recalibrates. People speak more carefully, prepare harder, bring a better version of themselves to the table, and nobody told them to. That person is rarely the one talking the most. They are the one everyone else adjusts around. Oprah built the most influential career of a generation on it: presence, listening, curiosity.

the move

Three questions:

How do you want to be experienced? In all of the roles you play.

What does your presence say before you speak?

Who gets the undefended version of your attention, and who gets the leftovers?

the line

Power is what happens to people in your presence. Do they settle, rise, or shrink?

go deeper

 📖 Read the full essay → [Substack ]
📚 Pre-order Chasing Enough → [ Here ]

Leadership that lasts,

Mandy

P.S. Chasing Enough arrives September 20 in Canada, and pre-orders get the full audiobook on August 1, seven weeks early. [Pre-order here.]

The Well Letter: one story, one shift, one move, one line. Every Sunday morning. Forwarded this? [Get your own here.]