Stedman, it is good to have you on the show.
We know each other a little bit.
We're neighbors up in Montecito.
Yeah.
I saw you at a store buying some food.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, we ran into each other.
It was great to see you.
It was good to see you.
I was surprised that you were eating a little snack--
Oprah claims that she loves to cook and bake for you--
and that you were buying, like, a store-bought baked good.
Don't tell her.
Well--
No, she's a-- first of all, she's a great cook.
I mean, among other things, she loves
to be able to go out and cook whatever she wants to cook.
She was kind of natural at it.
It's a beautiful thing.
Right, but you were at a store buying some other stuff.
Anyway-- anyway, and we're going to get to the book.
I want to talk about the book.
But just real quickly, with what's going on-- for a while,
there was a talk that Oprah was going to run for president.
I know that she's not going to run.
You know, but you think she would be a great president.
Oh, yes.
You know, you can trust her, number one.
She's smart.
Yep.
She has a photographic memory.
Mhm.
She works very, very hard.
And so, she has qualifications to do it.
And she's very successful.
Right.
OK, so let's talk about Identity Leadership.
Explain what that is to everyone.
Well, Identity Leadership is self-leadership.
And it's based on the philosophy that you
can't lead anybody else until your first lead yourself.
So it really is focused on self-mastery,
self-efficacy, self-empowerment.
It's the greatest thing I discovered for myself,
to be able to work on myself, so I
could define myself, as opposed to having the world define me.
Right.
And so, how would you say you do that?
Because basically, you're talking about self-confidence,
that you don't let somebody else veer your opinion, or who we--
Yeah, you don't let someone else put you in a box.
So what happens when you can't define yourself,
the world defines you by your race.
It defines you by your house, your car, your money,
your title.
It defines you by your gender and tells you
you can't make it because it's a man's world.
And it's kind of socially constructed and designed
to control your own development.
And so I created this process that
starts with identity as the foundation for organizing
your growth.
It allows you to shape your own future.
It allows you to understand your talents, your skills,
your abilities, and your purpose.
So everything starts with a purpose.
And then, you have to create a vision for yourself
to basically organize a vision that's
bigger than your circumstances.
And then, you organize a plan.
So there's a step-by-step process for self-actualization.
So I mean, obviously, you've been
doing this for a long time.
You've written a lot of books.
And you've been with Oprah for a long time.
And I think that relationships are difficult sometimes.
And I think it would be really-- unless you really know yourself
and feel confident in who you are,
it would be very hard to be with someone like Oprah.
Well, you know, the thing about our relationship
is, I want the best for her.
So you know, I'm dedicated to her happiness.
So that's great for her.
And I want her to be the best she could possibly be.
And she's done a pretty good job of doing that.
[APPLAUSE]
That's what anybody wants in a relationship.
Yeah.
And so, for me, I've been able to find my own happiness
and to find my own skills, my own talents,
and my own abilities.
And I'm satisfied with that.
I'm real happy with that.
And so, the combination-- when you have a good partner that's
able to self-actualize their potential,
and you're able to self actualize yours, then one
and one equals about six.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
And I think that's the best-- that's so well said,
because it's really about wanting the best for the person
that you love and wanting them to be as big as they can be
and not feeling diminished by it or if they
get too much attention or something like that.
Absolutely.
Yeah, and in the book, you talk about starting
with writing your obituary.
What would you want for your obituary to say?
Which I think is really interesting,
because it's just the legacy of your life.
Yeah, mine would be to try and get
people to understand how to remove any label
that they were given--
family labels, racial labels, gender labels, class labels--
by taking control of their own destiny
and realizing that the process of success
is the same for everybody.
The difference is, some people know it and some people don't.
So to be able to teach that process all around the world
to anyone, so they can take information and make
it relevant to their development in the 24 hours
that they have every single day, which is what makes us
all equal-- everybody has 24 hours.
So the questions become, what you do with your time and how
are you able to maximize your potential based
on who you are as a person?
And as you said, we all have 24 hours.
It's just what we all do with it.
Stedman's book is called Identity Leadership.
It's available now, and you're all going home with a copy.
And we'll be right back.
[CHEERING]