We are talking with one of the most creative accomplished producers in the world

Sherry salata, and we're talking about her new book the beautiful

No, now if you don't already know sherry you are in for such a treat. Here's her bio

sherry salata is a writer producer and co-founder of the pillar life.com and

Co-host of the podcast the sherry and Nancy show her current ventures are the evolution of her 20 year career with Oprah Winfrey

Her action-packed days is an executive producer of The Oprah Winfrey Show were chronicled in the acclaimed docu-series

season 25 Oprah

Behind-the-scenes sherry has also served as co-president of Harpo Studios and own the Oprah Winfrey Network

She's 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 sherry is a proud iowa hawk-i living happily ever

after in a magical town in Northern, California

Sherry salata, thank you so much for being on the marie forleo podcast woman

Marie I feel like this is the reunion of all reunions

Yeah, this this conversation has been a long time coming. I love and admire you so much

I have this memory of us. It was years ago

It was I believe at the right after the belief premiere and you were the one to ask me like Marie

Are you available on April 9th 2016 and I was like, I don't know but pretty much. Yes

sherry

Anything Sherry's asking me I'm gonna say yes to and I just I have this memory

without your super self session it was and you

Smile on your face and the warmth with which you invited me onto that stage. Like I will just never forget

How you've always treated me and I have so much love and respect for you. So I just wanted to say that to you and

Congratulations on this beautiful book the beautiful no and other tales of trial transcend this and transformation

I know I texted this to you, but you are such a killer writer and your storytelling ability. Oh my goodness

I'm so excited for folks to get their hands on this

Take me behind the inspiration behind this book. What's the why why this book? Why now?

Yeah, I mean

I think maybe my wise a little bit clearer now at the very beginning it was it was a creative venture

I had met a woman who?

launched an imprint with her per Collins who's my publisher and editor and she's in the middle of her life and she is

Like when I look at her life I go. Yeah, that's pretty cool

I she like started surfing at 40

so we kind of got each other and she felt like I had

This point of view and this perspective to share and then Marie off I went

For two years and and let nobody tell you that writing a book is easy

I mean, you know that the first year totally sucked and and I really I woke up, you know acro

There was a Christmas Eve over just over a year ago. When as I went to bed

I'm like I'm giving them their money back take your advanced back. I'm not doing this. Oh I'd who needs this?

This is way too hard. I don't really know exactly what I want to say. And then I woke up on Christmas morning

So this is this is a spiritual story

Christmas morning I wake up and I almost feel like it was my mom coming to me from the other side

he said do you know how many people would love a bona fide contract with a really good publisher and the

Opportunity to put words on paper and have people read them and I'm like, yes

There's many people and then I realized wow

What an amazing opportunity and if I so choose?

This can be a cathartic

Beautiful experience and and then all of a sudden it was so I had a great year writing it

Can I tell you how relieved I am to hear you say this because I believe people about my journey writing

Everything is figure out able which is not my first book, right the first book

I wrote was years and years and years ago

And I was so young and naive that I didn't know any better to be stressed, right?

I just sat down and did it by the way PS Josh reminded me. Oh, no, you stressed out over that one, too

You just forgot that you did. This one is different

But I want to say this to you sherry because I think it's important. You know, you are a

Brilliant writer and producer and you've been crafting stories for well over two decades and I consider myself

A pretty good person at what I do and I've been doing that his company writing these emails writing all the web coffee

You know creating programs being a teacher for almost two decades

And so I had this assumption I was like, well, I write all the time. It's gonna be a fairly easy process

I'm and meanwhile, I got my ass kicked right left and center by this book same thing

I had that thought I was like

You know do I really need to do this? And even though I didn't go very far down this thought train I

Absolutely considered I was like what would happen if I gave my advance back in just that whatever

The Oprah Talk, that's enough

But I want to say this for anyone listening who might be in the throes of writing struggling right now

You're hearing from two women who are accomplished at what they do and they found themselves thrashing around. Yeah

We you know, the best advice is keep going push through it. Just keep writing. Yeah

Yeah, eventually you do make it through that, huh?

So one of the things I love that you shared you said I had a dream come true career

But not a dream come true life. Can you tell us more about that Oh Marie. Oh my gosh

Well, that was my that was my really big Epiphany

So until until I had a moment until you know

The the first days after my Oprah career and I could I could kind of quiet myself for a minute and be like, whoa

It's like getting off of a speeding speeding train. That's you know, circled the globe

You know a million times and and and just say, okay, let's take a look at what we've created here

And that's when I had that that epiphany

That I had

Manifested a dream come true career, which believe me I wanted

I mean I didn't start with over till I was 35 years old

So I wanted a dream come true career and I had fully manifested that like what one of the most dreamy careers ever

But I had not manifested a dream come true

so there I am at 56 years old and

It's my life is completely lopsided

You know, I have all this achievement and all this accomplishment by you know

Cultural standards and my life itself, though

It's like all my little dreams are dried-up stuffed into drawers

and and virtually unlived and

Honestly Murray the only way I could take

a

sober

Truthful look at it was to find my tenderest. Most compassionate

Lens and my tenderest most compassionate voice and say okay girl. Let's go through it. How

have you done here and

Let's figure out what you really want

That's one of the things I find in my own work that can be one of the most challenging hurdles to overcome

For all of us is being able to identify and articulate

clearly what it is that we really want and

I love that he who found yourself in this space right after this mega career

And and let me I wanted to ask you this

Did you know?

Like I feel like sometimes in our lives when a big change is coming

We almost feel it like it's in the distance. You know what I mean?

We know it's coming, but it might not be ready yet

And I'm curious if you sensed, you know, you might have been so busy that you didn't feel or you didn't sense it coming

In terms of you know moving on to a next chapter

did you feel this big change in your life coming or was it one day that you woke up and sometimes your life just feels

Rearranged you're like I need to make a change. This is time for me to move on

yeah, I mean I absolutely could feel that a change was going to come I

Think about the conversations I I'd have with one of my BFFs Nance in my back yard

Like on our second and third bottle of Chardonnay

and and it was dreamy like it was like oh

Can you imagine if we started our own company and can you imagine and what would it look like?

And what would we do would we do storytelling would it be a media company?

We would do branding work and also Marie quite frankly. One of the things that was getting me. All riled up was

meeting you and Chris Carr and others like you who are

megawatt entrepreneurs, you know, like of course Oprah is an entrepreneur and but you know,

She you know to me that felt like lightning in a bottle

And then all of a sudden I meet you and I'm like well, she's running an empire

Wow, okay, and it's her own empire and

you know, I was just starting to get this this little bit of a feeling like

Of

Incompletion and that and that's still unconscious about you know

My might how what state my health was in what state my love life was in all the things that were

That were had really been not been tended to but yeah

I was starting to like some dreams were starting to bubble bubble up for sure. Yes. Yes. Yes

Yes

And I think that that's so important for all of us to hear and to recognize because all of us go through so many stages

in our life where we maybe start to feel or sense a change coming on and

That's scary

It's very scary because we get in these patterns and we have these habits in these ways of being and of course

You know with a career which for most of us is the largest part of our lives

It's where we spend the most time day in and day out to make a major change like that

It can feel really intimidating

And sometimes you almost don't want to hear that a change is coming some time share when I'm feeling questions for marietv

you know, it's really a

common

place to

Feel at a crossroads and to go my goodness even for someone who's built their own business

Sometimes they say I don't think I want this one anymore. I think I'm ready for something else

And what does that mean about me?

So that's why I think there's so much value in your story and there's so much value in the book that you've wonderfully put together

because what you're showing us is a path ahead of hope and of creativity and an adventure and of

What we might encounter when we start to listen to those whispers of our heart, right?

So one of the things I love too that you wrote in the beginning was just about how our culture

Looks at women once they get past 50, right right, even from a business perspective the business lense of advertisers

It's like wow, we don't really give an F about any woman, you know once she gets past fifty five

I forget you probably know the demo better than I do. But yeah

It's 254 and yeah, like 25 to 54

Is is the big sweet spot?

I just Marie honestly

I'm just gonna tell you that whether I have no data to support this but really big

Juicy leading and edge brands are going to toss that out the window

It's gonna be a psychographic

It's gonna be like, these are the attributes of the people we're gonna advertise to as opposed to their age

I'm just sure of it because it's so frickin archaic as

The problem is for the people in in my group in. You know, I I

dubbed it Nancy and I call it the middle of life because we like that better and

Because it's kind of like, whoa, you still have a whole nother half to create

Yes, but super important to even if you're even if you're super

If you're well-read and you're well-educated and you feel like you're you know your own mind

it's really important to make sure that

you discover which cultural messages have landed in your bones that you're not aware of and

by that I mean, are you willing to see yourself at forty and fifty as

Just about in the middle and what else you gonna do?

We've all met the person who like had their glory days in high school or their four days in college and it's like it's over

It's all downhill from there, but it's ours to design. It's ours to design

So even someone like me who had whoa, you know these these twenty years of working for Oprah

I would like to think that those were the beginning of my glory days and and the

Real glory days are yet to be created?

Yes

That is where it's at and I will tell you as the years go by for me

I still have this inner sense Cheri that I am just getting started

Like that's how it feels for me and it feels that way year after year

And of course to my logical mind that doesn't make sense, but to my soul it really does

So this is something else I loved about

Your book so going back in time

I don't know if people realize this you mentioned it earlier, but I want to highlight it again

You didn't start at Harpo until you were 35 like you had an adventure after an adventure you were in Texas for a while you

Were trying all kinds of jobs

And the reason I want to bring this up

First is because so many times people put so much pressure on themselves

Like if they're not making that 30 under 30 list

right

If they don't have it all figured out if they don't have the big bank account or the notoriety or the clarity on their career

By the time they're 30. They think they're somehow behind I'm like, that's so not true all of us find our way