Love What You’re Doing With Sheri Salata

 

What brings us personal and professional joy? Sheri Salata has learned that it’s handling what’s in front of you ….. with love. Sheri is the co-host of the popular podcast series This Is Fifty with Sheri and Nancy and co-founder of the media company STORY and Orange Dragon Productions. Sheri was also an executive producer of the Oprah Winfrey show where she gained a valuable piece of advice that informed her next twenty years: do the job she has and do it well and don’t worry about what’s next. Sheri says it’s not always the right advice for everybody, but her focus without expectation led to her running the Oprah Winfrey show. Learn more about Sheri’s beliefs about loving what you’re doing, creating resilience, and opportunities to pivot in positive new directions.

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Love What You’re Doing with Sheri Salata

I’m really excited to be here with you. More than even excited, I am so grateful. I feel really blessed that I have this opportunity. I don’t think there’s ever a day or a minute of the day that isn’t made better by my becoming present to how grateful how I am simply to be breathing and alive. In this moment, as we all do so much to be appreciative of, we’ve finished a three-day training. We do wonderful training for people who are wanting to become public speakers and wanting on TED stages to do TEDx Talks and things. We did such an incredible long three days where we filmed them during their legacy talk. We’ve been putting it out for days and days. I feel grateful that my body is resilient and that I’ve held up so well after emptying my cup in that way that I still feel so energized. There’s no accident about that.

I love what I do. I had a conversation with my friend Phil Town and he is a few years older than me and he loves what he does and therefore his energy is tracking probably more like a 30-year old energy. I feel the same way because when you’re grateful and you love what you do, even though there are challenges, we all have things that are difficulties and we get tired and all the usual stuff. For me, it seems that we bounce back more quickly. We have more resilience when we are both grateful and we are also in love with what we do. Not that it’s easy but we are actually in love with what we do.

I have a guest, a wonderful woman that you’ll get to meet and learn from. She’s got an incredible both personal experience and business experience that is very much indicative of that recipe of both gratitude and love of what you do and how it creates resilience and creates opportunities to pivot always in positive new directions. Her name is Sheri Salata. Sheri Salata is the co-host of the popular podcast series, This Is Fifty with Sheri and Nancy, where she and her soulmate friend of 27 years, Nancy Hala, are recreating the middle of life as they set out to make the rest of their dreams come true.

Sheri and Nancy are also co-founders of STORY, a media company producing print, digital and live event content and Orange Dragon Productions, developing TV and film content. Sheri’s current venture is the evolution from her 21-year-career with Oprah Winfrey. Her action-packed days as Executive Producer on the Oprah Winfrey Show were chronicled in the acclaimed docuseries Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes. Sheri also served as Co-President of Harpo Studios and OWN, that is the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Sheri, it is a pleasure to have you with us. That is a bio that most people would die for. People would love to have that be their legacy and yet as great as that is, I want to ask you, what’s not being stated there that you want folks to know. At the same time, I also want to state that while that’s a bio that a lot of people would live their lives to have, you are continuing to evolve and pivot into amazing new adventures. You are not settled or satisfied already to rest on that amazing bio. First of all, welcome to The Conscious PIVOT Podcast. Thank you for being here.

Adam, I am so honored that you are asking me. Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Let’s start with that question about what isn’t in the bio that you’d love for people to know about Sheri?

Since you asked me that question, here’s the answer that springs to my mind. It’s probably most accurate that I am the princess of pivot and the second headline to that in parentheses is up until probably the last year, I hated change. Being the princess of pivot for most of my life with some essential pivots and being a person who resisted change, that was a very interesting energetic dynamics going on within me as I marched through my life.

Talk about a dichotomy of fun interplay of both being the princess of the change manifestation thing and somebody that resists and hates change.

That creates a bit of an energetic swirl and I have some insight and perspective that’s very helpful for me about that now, but I can look back and see that I often used misery as my compass. I’m a mid-western girl, I was raised in Chicago. I have those mid-western lunch pail to work, punch in the time clock and give 10,000% of yourself DNA. I would often be in the wrong job and not thinking about I need to pivot here. I would wait until I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning or there was so much misery that the world looked dark and bleak and that’s when I would say I got to quit. That’s what I mean. I had some essential, crucial watershed pivots in my life and up until recently, most of the time it was like change or die. That’s how far I would push that.

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I didn’t know this at the time when we first met each other recently in Oahu, in a beautiful resort in Hawaii where we were attending a TLC meeting and you were one of the most amazing guests that we’ve had there. That was incredible. I know you’re good friends with Arielle Ford. I didn’t know it at the time that we were simpatico, but now it makes perfect sense. It’s obvious. That’s in essence what I did as well. I spent eighteen years and I wouldn’t say I was miserable for eighteen years. When people say, “Tell me about the pivot, tell me about the book,” and all that kind of thing, I said, “Where did it all begin?” I say,“The story begins with misery.”

The story begins with my waking up and putting my feet on the floor and feeling miserable to begin the day, to the point where the voice in my head that was saying, what the fuck are you doing? How long can you continue to wake up, look in the mirror and know that it’s a fraud? Taking care of your responsibilities is honorable and I did, amazing wife, amazing beautiful family, four kids, the houses, and all that stuff. I took care of my stuff, but ultimately it was at the cost of my soul. That’s what was eroding on the inside. That was a watershed pivot and it took misery to bring it about because I also am so addicted to certainty. I feel like you and I are twins separated at birth or something when it comes to that.

At the time it was one miserable experience after another where I would get an ill-fitting job and I did that for six years out of college. I try to turn it into a career and make it my life instead of saying, “This is wrong job. This isn’t a fit for you. Fill your soul and spirit.” Instead, I’m like, “I’m going to make this work, I’m going to be good at it.” Then it would be like, “I can’t get out of bed. I got to quit.” I look back and I can see that it was my soul literally grabbing me by the scruff of the neck and pushing and pulling me out of those situations because it wasn’t going to be my road. I had all these dreams and I was on the dreamless path and nothing fits for me.I look back on that self and I was circling in the airport for so long. What am I supposed to be doing? I feel like I have so much to give. When people hear the 21-year Oprah career, they’re like, “You’re so lucky, Sheri Salata. How did you get so lucky?” I’m like, “You don’t even know.”I circled that airport for years, eating peanuts and drinking bad drinks because I couldn’t land my own plane.

I’m breathing on that one. It’s close to home for me. How many other people are out there right now circling? Waiting for the landing instructions, either running out of gas. If you think about it, we’ve all been in planes that have circled due to weather or whatnot, and it’s like to be given permission to land and that permission is granted by us. We know that. In this situation, we’re at, not that we are any smarter than anybody else. I’m not smarter than anybody else, but I have learned some things. That’s one of the privileges of being around long enough, making enough mistakes and all that thing.

I’ve learned a few things and there’s no question that one of those things I’ve learned is that we give ourselves permission. In fact, somebody had an incredible breakthrough at our event because forever and ever her biggest issue is that she doesn’t give herself permission to land her plane and then take off again. Who’s to say how many times we’re supposed to be able to land and take off? Let’s call it a pattern. You had a pattern and at a certain point maybe the pattern has broken or maybe it hasn’t. You’re the go, go, crash or the go, go, can’t get out of bed or job, job, can’t get out of bed. It was a bit of that program, work hard mid-west, work ethic. Start us back away and then you want to get into where it is you ended up at the Oprah Show and where you started there and let’s take a little journey together.

I would start by saying I didn’t take my own life very seriously. I was lucky enough that I had parents who were willing to pay for my four years in college. It was totally assumed I would go. It wasn’t like I was going to be doing something else besides going but I didn’t take my own life seriously. I wanted a great business card. I wanted a career that would be admired. I wanted to feel significant, but I wasn’t willing to put the pieces in place. Upon graduating, I decided on a large move to Dallas, Texas, which was not a great decision for me. I knew nobody, I had no contacts or connections and I didn’t have a job. Right about the time where all the graduates are going into training programs, I’m at the employment agency and they’re telling me that there’s a job opening, typing legal descriptions at a title company. I need money now so I take it and then I try to turn that into law school.

Then somebody says, “My brother has a toy store, you could be in the management program.”That sounded fancy, so off I went and did that and it wasn’t fancy. I definitely like managing people, but I could feel it wasn’t my calling. There I go onto the next toy store and now I’m higher up and I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to make a life of it. Then someone comes along and says, “There’s this 7-Eleven company here in Dallas and you’d be great in their management training program. That sounds fancy, that sounds substantive, that sounds something like I can call my dad and he’s going to say “Good for you, you’ve got benefits and insurance and a 401(k).” I didn’t realize the training program actually began by being in a 7-Eleven store and running it.

That was a time of great personal growth for me. There was a part of it that felt humiliating for me. I had a college degree and I’m putting on a smock every day and sweeping the parking lot and emptyingSlurpee machines. It was like adding layers to my life experience and meeting super interesting people but also getting very clear that where are you going here? I ultimately was given eight 7-Eleven stores to run, which was a whole lot of work and challenging. Then as they were getting ready to promote me to the big fancy job that I secretly wanted, I woke up one day and realized I needed to quit and move on. That you are going to be 60 someday sitting in this glass tower at a desk made out of what is that preform press wood and with your pictures on your desk and you are going to say, “What in the world? How did I end up here? This is not my creative touch point with the universe. This is not what I’m supposed to be doing.”

That was a huge pivot and I would say it was based on misery, but it was based on anticipating the future misery. 33 years from now, you’re going to be so mad at yourself that you didn’t get this right. At 27, when all the other kids are buying houses and stuff and I’m living in the basement of my parent’s house, of course, I felt like a huge failure. I move on from that. I get a lucky break and I’d become a secretary, which is what it was called at the time at an ad agency. It’s a big break for me. It was by my best friend’s fiancé, who was an executive producer and then I clicked in. I’m like, “I don’t know if this is it, but I know this producing thing feel. I’ve been producing since I was five years old, bossing people around and creating plays and songs and my first cousins literally run when they see me coming even to this day.”

I could feel like I’m on this treasure hunt and I found some jewels. We’re in the territory, we’re in this space, somewhere here is getting warmer and so off I spent years. I did ham commercials, I did Six Flags commercials.I did hairspray commercials and there was an external fanciness in that I’d have to go off to Hollywood for big shoots and I got to use all that creative Hollywood language. After a while, that ran thin for me. I began to know that if I did not have meaning attached to this wonderful creative process and this creative task that I had been trained in, it was going to be like everything else. You’re not going to be able to get out of bed. You’re going to be super miserable.

There was a show across town in Chicago that was getting national attention. It was called the Oprah Winfrey Show. I didn’t watch it ever because I was working, but I could feel a pull. I don’t know why it made no sense. I wasn’t a daytime television viewer, but it felt like something and it felt like more up my alley. I began to tinker with that idea. It would flow through my head and finally, I worked up the nerve to apply and they promptly rejected me. The message I got was, “You’re not what we’re looking for.”

Was that the actual message?

The words are emblazoned down in my heart, I’ll never forget them. The truth is I did feel like I was overstepping a little bit and I didn’t have a lot of confidence that I was the right fit. That rejection felt like, “I can’t believe I did that. How embarrassing. Of course, I’m not the right fit there.” I let that go. A couple of years later in a dark moment when I literally could not produce one more hairspray commercial, I was like, “I don’t care about this. My life’s a misery.” My friends were gathered around me, everybody’s worried about me, they’re making casseroles, they’re like, you can do it. I’m like, “I’m such a failure.”

I come home to a message on my answering machine and a woman says, “We were cleaning out an old closet here at the Oprah Show, we found your resume. Please come in for an interview.”That was the beginning and I was 35 years old in an entry-level position at entry level money and I felt like I had won the Power Lotto because I could feel in every cell of my body I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m where I’m supposed to be and I don’t care how junior my position here is and everybody who’s in senior roles is younger than me. I don’t care. This is it. This is where I’m supposed to be.

There’s this entry point here at 35 that it feels right and you ended up an EP in the show. When you say shocking, it’s a trigger word for me. It’s shocking, but what’s the journey? Give us a sense of that. What was it look like to go from entry level and you’re 35 in your entry level to becoming EP of the show and then ultimately the evolution leads you to even beyond that to be co-president of Harpo Studios.

The first month I was there, my old boss gave me the most valuable piece of advice that is literally the basis of what happened over the next twenty years. He said, “Don’t be worried about your next job or your promotion or where you want to end up there. You are in a special moment in time where you’re surrounded by opportunity. Just do the job in front of you really well.”My mid-western ethics kick in, “Just do the job you have and do it really well and don’t worry about what’s next.”It’s not always the right advice for everybody but for me at that time, because you’re so close to dazzling in a company with Oprah and the Oprah Winfrey phenomenon, that advice served me well because I only cared about what I was doing. I never looked ahead. I never expected to be promoted. I never expected to one day run the show and in the end, focusing on what I was doing was about deciding to be loved. I loved it and I wanted to give my best. I loved it enough to want to give my best in every moment and whatever I was asked to do.

It’s so simple and profound at the same time. This has been my own experience that when you handle what’s in front of you and you do it with love and to be loved, I so appreciate that you put that in there because this is an element of what brings us personal joy and what creates professional joy is to love. It’s where we started on some level where we started the show even with this idea of loving what you do and loving it enough to be present with it.

You’re not three steps ahead. You’re not manipulating to create some road to some higher thing in the business or sabotaging someone else or playing the political games that get played to jockey for a new position. You were present in the position you were at, loving what you were doing and putting 100% of you into it. As we know, other people peel off. That’s my experience. People peel off to the left, they pull off to the right, it’s not their mission, it’s not their purpose where they sabotage themselves or whatever happens. Lo and behold, you’re here and then you’re one step further. Was there anything else that was pivotal that happened during that career time? What time frame are we talking about between getting into the show and becoming EP?

I was a promo producer for eight years. I started in 1995 so that would have been about eight years later. That would have been like 2003. We sunsetted the show in 2011. I was AP for five years, from 2003 to 2006, that was like a rapid ascension of service to the show and to Oprah and to the EPs that were in position. What I want to say about that is I had a little bit of a luxury of being willing to go into that entry-level position at 35 years old. I know nobody else in my life who would have done that, would have given up a 401(k), a salary you built for a number of years because you know that what you’re doing is not your dream.

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I am the living proof that that kind of boldness is rewarded. I knew it then at the time, for all the other mistakes I made and I made a ton of them, I knew that what they were going to pay me and what that level was did not matter, that was the least of it. I knew that all of that would come around in good time. The real gift that I had at 35 that some of the younger people didn’t totally understand is I had had some jobs. I knew what it was like out there, working for companies and your life experience, your day in and day out is at the whim of others. I was able to bring, because of where I come from, such a deep reverence and appreciation and realizing that people make a mistake when they feel they get into a position at work and they start feeling entitled because being paid and being asked to join someone else’s mission, that’s a privilege. That isn’t I deserve it, it’s a privilege. It’s a privilege to be employed by somebody. I had such appreciation for that privilege that it informed my energy around it.

Did people more often than not take themselves out? I’ll call it sabotage. Your road was a combination of you being in love with what you did, coming from a place of integrity, keeping your head on straight. Looking at the road and taking your mentor’s advice which is to do the job that was in front of you. Was it that combination, other people that either peeled off left or right, sabotage themselves or something else that took you? That’s a meteoric rise from entry level to the EP of the Oprah Winfrey Show.

I have to tell you nobody peeled off. It was one of the most talented, skilled and dedicated producing teams I will ever know. I can’t explain it to you. I can only tell you what was in my heart and what I felt about it. I can tell you the results of it but I don’t know what that mystical and magical was.

Was there Pixie dust involved?

There has to be. I look back at that and I realized that time in my life, there were some very mystical things happening and I believe in Pixie dust, fairies and in magic. I can’t explain it. They’re the best in the business and they’ve been doing it forever and I will always have such deep respect for them. That was a team like you’ve never seen.

At certain point the show is going to get sunsetted is what you said. We were to put it on the shelf and move on to the next great thing. You moved with the show when the OWN network was created. You went along with that after the show ended.

The network had been launched in January and we were still finishing the show and that was all hands-on deck. That took every ounce of our beings to land that plane. That was the legacy of it, the enormity of what it meant to the culture, the sense of responsibility we all felt to Oprah. That was a 24-hour occupation. The network launched in January and then we were focused on ending the show and that was done and we all looked at one another and said, couldn’t have done it better, thank you Oprah. The Vice President at the time, Eric Logan and I went out to LA to see if we could help out. If we could help with ad, if we could try to infuse Oprah’s principles in it. It was a completely different business, really hard. Completely different from Harpo and the little world that we’ve created. It was tough and it was like learning on your feet as you need to get things done fast and for me it was wanting to protect Oprah’s legacy and help her have more of the dreams she wanted. There were lots in the day-to-day that was very challenging but the blessing for me was I got introduced to California.

Remember I told you even though I’m the princess of pivot, I don’t like change. I’m trying to think if I was 33 years living in Chicago by then I had a nice place overlooking the lake. My whole family’s there and that’s where my roots are and all of a sudden every other week I’m out in California and I’m thinking, “This is nuts. I like this energy. I don’t feel done yet. It is La La Land. There is a very dreamy, anything’s possible. There’s a magic out here that speaks right to my soul.”Over a five-year period, I’ve got to prepare for my pivot. I’ve got to get used to the idea of,“I can take a plane anytime and go back to Chicago.” Chicago’s always going to be there. Sometimes when you make a change like that, all of a sudden, it’s like you’re back on the rapids. You’re back in the game of life. You’re meeting new people, you feel more alive. That is why those pivots are essential to maintaining life force.

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You’re rerouting and that rerouting process is beautiful, it’s gorgeous and it’s also scary. Our pivot, more than six years ago at this point, we moved, we uprooted the kids and everything. I closed down a law practice that had existed for eighteen years and everything else in our family are all still on the East Coast. This is the thing with West Coast people, it is our whole mission to get everybody that we ever knew and everybody we love that still lives in the cold and still lives on the East Coast or in the mid-west to move out there. That’s our entire life’s mission now.

You know that story that people would tell about how superficial everybody in LA is. I think that is a tale to keep you from moving out there.

People are people no matter where they live. Five years go by, you’re doing the commuting thing and at some point, you decided to move out and where you live currently in LA. Then there is some old whisper. I started to hear like, it wasn’t even a whisper, it’s like a buzzing sound. I would wake up and I would hear this sound. I was like this little sound that says, “What are you doing?”Part of your pattern previously was to recognize that misery. I want to quote you. You said,“Misery is my compass.”At some point did it become a compass again?

I was unconscious so I wouldn’t say I was totally aware that my life was not dreaming, but I was forced to get conscious. I was jealous of all the young entrepreneurs I was meeting on the West Coast who are like, “I have my own company.” I am like, “What’s that like?”No matter how beloved the person you work for, you work for them, you report for duty, you’re not sashaying around doing whatever you want, and the higher you go, the more responsibilities you have, the more meetings like I’m chained to a boardroom all day long.

What it was is there was a moment, and it was a confluence of events. The moment is when I had to do a real reckoning. I had posted on my dreamy career for a long time and no matter what else was going on in my life, my health was horrible, super overweight, I hadn’t had a date in years, no romantic relationship, lots of great friends, great family but all those areas were so withered and all of a sudden I’m not 35 anymore, I’m 56. I’m having these Chardonnay conversations with my great friend Nancy who is also feeling very similarly and we’re like, “Is this it?”I was at least able to ding the career. I can check that box. I have the career people as you said, people would want to pluck out an eyeball for that career,” but the rest of it? Maybe I’ll get it on the next lifetime.

Nancy had freelance to put a roof over her head and raise these two amazing children and dreamed of other bigger things career-wise, but she’s in her 50s. Is she done? Should we go and start doing those travel trips that 80-year-old women go on and start to wind down? Of course not. If I take advantage of modern medicine and take care of myself, I could possibly live to 100. If I’m in the middle-ish of life, I better get serious about creating it and creating the life I want. If I had to answer the question, “Are you living the life of your dreams?” The answer was no. I’m a producer, what’s next? I’ve got to produce the life of my dreams and that means that I had to make a radical pivot, redefine work, reset all of my priorities and decide how I’m going to spend the rest of these years with love and appreciation for everything that’s come before, but I want more. I want the life of my dreams. I don’t want to say I had an amazing job.

Settling is tough. At some point I’ve said this to people from the stage or in some other way that whatever we have in our lives is what we’ve settled for. Somebody said that to me once and I thought, that’s true and how true it is for all of us that the things that we have are the things we’ve settled for. If there’s more that you want, then you can’t accept the status quo for very long. Change is constant. That’s one of the great paradoxes or oxymoron, that change is a constant in the universe. It’s everywhere, our seasons changed, day to night, cold to hot. It’s changing constantly and then when you add the human experience into it and the advances in technology and everything else, disruption and change is happening at a greater pace than it ever has.

Every day it’s exponentially greater. You have to get great at change at a certain point or your only defense to it is to hold on tight. Like white knuckle the whole ride, wanting it to stay the same because at least, that you can count on. We all know that that doesn’t work. Status quo or stagnation only leads to death ultimately. Things get toxic pretty quick. Water standing still gets toxic pretty quick when it doesn’t move. We have to move and yet at the same time it’s scary because it’s all dealing with the unknown. You face your unknown. You face that thing, like you said, even though you are a princess of pivoting, changed scared the daylights out of you.

I don’t know if I totally love it yet, but I’m saying I do because I’m going to seek that into my bones. I’m going to say, “I’m so excited to see how this comes out,” instead of, “How’s it going to come out?” I’m so excited to see what I create next instead of, “What am I going to do?”

Tell us about what you’re up to.

This podcast world is a crackerjack surprise to me. Coming from spending my career in TV, it is so delicious and engaging and in this new world of content where we are literally becoming our own individual networks and cherry picking what we wish to consume, I find it so specialized and uplifting. You can create amazing learning and energetic content from the podcast world. I’m loving doing our podcast, This is Fifty with Sheri and Nancy. We’re having a ball with that. As we speak, I am in the midst of a book that’s about this experience I’m having where my latest pivot, the only work I need to do is the radical self-care that I’m committed to day in and day out for every breath that I breathed for the rest of my life. That’s what I’m up to.

It is such an important topic and I speak about it so much. It’s so redundant and I never get bored. I’m never bored of it and I’m hoping as I say this, I’m having a little moment inside where I’m thinking to myself, “Are our audience right now going, ‘I wish he would not mention this every single time?’”It is so important that we get how we create resilience. Resilience is what allows us to have new chapters. The pivots that we have in the future are the result of our ability to be around in the future. Taking care of yourself is the key.

You are now preaching to the choir because there was a time I would’ve said I was doing it because I love to talk about all those things, but now we’re speaking early in the morning and I have already done half a dozen things that are a part of my daily ritual and things that contribute to that quality of life, the dreamy life I want to live. I make sure that does not get swept aside because I have a big call or an interview or a meeting or an appointment or I should get some social posts up, that comes first before anything else. I never could say that in the past.

What are the non-negotiable aspects of your morning ritual? This is where people would love to learn something.

Meditation, meditation, meditation. I will confess that I’ve talked about it more than I’ve done it. If you look at the total minutes of my life I love talking about meditation, but I will say in the last many months here in my dream quest, I’m a TM meditator. Twice a day without fail, twenty minutes and it changes everything. There’s that. I called my dad because I have an area of friends and family that I want to make sure unconsciously touching every day. I think about, I don’t want that feeling of I really should. I feel like that is a stressful feeling. That’s unproductive energy. I take the bull by the horns and I look through different areas that matter to me in my life and say, “Have I meditated? Did I read something spiritual?” I might do a little chant. I’m going to have a healthy smoothie. I’m going to do a little daydreaming in my day, vision questing a little bit and juice that energy of creation of possibility. I’m going to connect with somebody in my life that matters to me. I’m still calling my soulmate love in so I do a little daydreaming about him and how I’m going to feel in that relationship. Those are now my non-negotiable rituals. After that, I’ll do a conference call. I’ll do some other things that are meetings or furthering creativity and innovation, but that is not my first priority.

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I am so appreciative that you shared that with us. I can tell you that the Next Pivot, which is the next book for us is called the Next Pivot, it’s an exploration of exactly what you’re up to. This is an invitation for us to play in that arena. I’d love to interview you and have this bit of a case study on it because it’s the key. I’ve enjoyed our conversation so much. I know I am only in a minority of those that are either sitting in their car, on the treadmill or wherever they’re consuming this, which is so cool, probably some people at work as well and hopefully it’s juiced them. I love your language. I love the way that you put words together. Your presence has been divine and a real gift to us. Sheri, thank you for being on the show.

Thanks, Adam. I enjoyed it.

I want to bookend the conversation as we always do. We started with gratitude and there’s no end. This is a continuous beginning. I want to share with all of you what my hope is, my prayer and my hope and my wish and I get to do this because I have this microphone in front of me which gives me this wonderful ability to express an intention and set it out into the ether for all of you, for you, Sheri, for myself as well that tomorrow we get to wake up like we did now. What a blessing, what an incredible gift that we get to wake up and my prayer is that we all get to wake up a little bit more tomorrow than we even were now. That is to wake ourselves up physically, mentally, emotionally, even spiritually, that we’re a little more conscious, and if we can do that, if we can simply be a little more conscious tomorrow than we were now, we’re doing something right in our lives.

The trajectory for our lives is in a great direction and in that moment when we are taking that breath, we know that there are things going on in our lives. Not everything is something that we are embracing at that moment and yet taking that breath, you can be aware that other people in that very same moment are taking their very last breath in that moment that you’re taking your first conscious breath of the day and also there are babies being born who are taking their first breath. That moment is sacred in so many ways. At a minimum, it is something to be grateful for, the three parts to my ritual that take a few minutes, that’s all it is, is to wake up.

Thank you. I am in gratitude and then from your bed, if you want or when you hit the floor, it’s,“I love my life, I love my life,”declare out loud,“I love my life.” That is my solemn wish. Have a beautiful day. Bless the rest of your day or evening, wherever you are. Thank you for that. If you’ve not yet subscribed to the podcast at AdamMarkel.com, you can do that. Subscribe, leave a review on iTunes as well. Our Facebook community is magnificent. We’d love to have you check that out and join us at the Start My PIVOT Community. People just like Sheri, just like me, just like yourselves who are pivoting into something and recognizing that we don’t pivot once. We’re pivoting pretty well continuously from the beginning to the end and the only question is whether we can do it more elegantly, more gracefully, and even in a more effective way. We’re pivoting into things that we love and that’s what this is about. Start My PIVOT on Facebook. You can get there by going to PivotFB.com. That’s it for now. It’s been a beautiful show. I wish you a wonderful rest of your day and we’ll see you again soon. Ciao for now.

Important Links:

• Sheri Salata
• This Is Fifty with Sheri and Nancy
• STORY
• The Conscious Pivot podcast on iTunes
• PivotFB.com

About Sheri Salata

Sheri Salata is cohost of the popular podcast series “This is Fifty with Sheri and Nancy” where she and her soulmate friend of 27 years, Nancy Hala, are recreating the middle of life as they set out to make the rest of their dreams come true. Sheri and Nancy are also co-founders of STORY, a media company producing print, digital and live event content, and Orange Dragon Productions developing TV and film content. Sheri’s current venture is the evolution from her 21-year career with Oprah Winfrey. Her action-packed days as Executive Producer on The Oprah Winfrey Show were chronicled in the acclaimed docuseries Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes. Sheri also served as Co-President of Harpo Studios and OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network. Sheri has been named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment Power 100 and the 2017 Feminist Press Power Award winners. Sheri is a University of Iowa alum and mama to her English bulldogs, Bella and Kissy. She lives in Los Angeles.