Posted by | Ray Cornelius
Oprah Winfrey was honored recently for her outstanding career in media and television during The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment breakfast in Beverly Hills. The event recognized the recipients from the magazine’s Power 100 list and was attended by a number of A-List stars including Winfrey’s BFF Gayle King, Lee Daniels, Kim Kardashian and her fiancé Kanye West.
Winfrey accepted the prestigious Sherry Lancing Leadership Award named after the former Paramount and 20th Century Fox executive who broke barriers for women in Hollywood during the early 1980’s. During Winfrey’s speech, she reminded Lancing of how ‘powerful’ she was and what an inspiration she meant to her as rising reporter and anchorwoman in Baltimore.
“My favorite definition of power is ‘strength over time.’ That means strength times strength times strength times strength equals power. You gotta know who you are,” Winfrey said to the crowd.
Winfrey went on to talk about the lessons she learned about “power and leadership” while running her award-winning day time show and the advice she gave her staff.
“We have to run our own race. We can’t look at what the other guys are doing. When you take time to look back at what the other guys are doing—you lose focus, you lose energy and you lose power when you’re worrying about what someone else is doing. Just focus on yourself,” said Winfrey. Click here to see the entire motivational speech.
Check out photos below from THR’s Women In Entertainment issue in which Winfrey graces the cover. Inside she dishes about “forgoing motherhood, being counted out and the meeting that turned OWN around.”
“Gayle [now a mother of two] was the kind of kid who, in seventh grade Home Ec class, was writing down her name and the names of her children…While she was having those kind of daydreams, I was having daydreams about how I could be Martin Luther King.”
“When you’re the most successful person in your family, in your neighborhood and in your town, everybody thinks you’re the First National Bank,” she says, “and you have to figure out for yourself where those boundaries are.”
“If I had kids, my kids would hate me,” Winfrey contends. “They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.”
“This has been the great climb of my life,” she says of the past three years. “But I still have a long way to go.
Photo Credit: TheHollywoodReporter.com
