[0:00]And here's the thing, I wrote this book is dismantling the rules that we've all been sold around these things. I honestly believe that we need desperately need more women in positions of power right now. And so I look at this and I say, you know what? If you are an ambitious woman, it is going to require some discomfort. If you want money, it's going to require some level of audacity. If you want a big, big career, you're going to need visibility and proximity. If, and it's not for everybody, but if you want a family, it's going to require some timing and it's probably not what we've been told. And if you want power, then you are going to need to take it because nobody is coming to give you power. And just like I said, we are desperate in this world for more women in positions of power right now. Hey there, everybody. Glad to be with you here on the Oprah Podcast. My guest is not just an entrepreneur, not just a businesswoman, she is an inspiring force, a modern day business mogul and visionary. And she's written a book called Start With Yourself. It's a new vision for work and life, and it should be your guide if you are starting a business, thinking about starting a business, already in a business, want to make a better business for yourself and want to be a better person in that business. I highly recommend, start with yourself, honey. Please welcome, Emma Grede to the podcast. Hi, Emma. Oh, hi Oprah. I am so happy to be here. I can't even tell you how happy I am. Forbes named Emma Grede one of America's wealthiest self-made women at just 40 years old. A wife and mother to four, she's worked with both Khloé and Kim Kardashian to co-found culture-defining global brands like Good American and Skims, now valued at $5 billion. She offers savvy business advice on her podcast, Aspire with Emma Grede. put yourself in the position of your customers and just listen to your intuition. It will never serve you wrong. She's also the first Black female investor on that ABC hit show, Shark Tank. and I've been toying in my head, I'm like, do I call her Miss Winfrey, do I call her Oprah? You call me Oprah. Then thank, thank you. You have to call me Oprah because I was reading in your book and I was so touched every time I saw my name, were you to say, and I'd go home and I'd watch Oprah. I mean, really, thank you so much. No, thank you. You have, and listen, I know that every time somebody meets you, they have this kind of explosive reaction to you and so I'm like, what? What do you do? What do you say that she hasn't heard before, and I'm not trying to say anything you haven't heard before. For me, there is nobody else that I would rather sit and discuss this book with because you have been in my mind as my fantasy mentor since I was 10 years old. And it's the truth because I had no other example of a woman that that was like you that had that level of integrity and spoke like that and behaved in a way. And so I feel like I have tried my best to emulate some of the behaviors that I saw in you for the longest time. Yeah, and I as I'm reading the book, I see some of my teachings. I see that. I say, oh, you're one of those students who paid attention. Oh, yes, I did. I really did in, in the most in the biggest and the smallest ways, you know, from thinking about gratitude to thinking about how you speak to people and what energy is that you give off. Yes, And so for me, it's really been in so many, so many ways. Yeah, you tell the story in the book about yelling at a deaf woman. Tell us that story. Oh, that we was sorry. I didn't want to start there, but because you said about the energy, that is such a classic energy story. Okay, so let, let me tell you, the truth of this is, and you will, I mean, my publisher from Shannon from Simon & Schuster will tell you this. I took that out of the book three times for one reason, because I said, if I ever get to meet Oprah, I know that she will pick up this story. Of course. And then I went back to your producers, I was like, no, no, and I took it out and then I said, you've got to put it back in, you've got to put it back in. Because it's so revealing, so truthful, and it is a story of you recognizing in your own self-awareness that I need to do better. So that's why, that's why I love the story. So here's the story, the story goes, like many people, I got up every morning and went to work on the tube, on the train. And I'm at the turn styles and you know, it's like I grew up in a place where my learned default emotion was anger. Whatever was happening, whatever wouldn't go my way, I would turn to anger. And so on this particular morning, I was frustrated because, you know, this woman was messing around in her bag and I was like in that mode of let me just get to work and I said, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. And when I screamed, excuse me, she said, I'm partially deaf. And I shoved this woman and asked her, well, are you blind too? And I moved her and I went down the escalators and I got on the train, and I am so filled with shame as I even recount the story. But it was in that moment that I thought, oh my goodness, you have to get a grip of yourself, you are never going to go where you want to be if this is the way that you behave. And so I immediately enrolled myself into like a community, anger management program. Anger management program. Yeah, and I, and I stayed in that program for a long time. But I'd never been taught that you could get a grip of yourself. That you don't have to behave that way, you don't have to immediately react just because something has happened. Yeah, and I, and that was the beginning of me understanding the level of power that I held within myself, because I was like, I don't need to be like that. I don't like her, I don't want to be her, and I have a choice. Well, you know, lots of people, I have seen particularly people of wealth and means, yell at their staff, yell at other people, yell when somebody's in their way, walking through life expecting everybody to adhere to whatever is going on with them. But they seem to have no recognition of it. That's why I thought this was such an important story, that in the moment you realized, this isn't the person I want to be. Yeah, and it means, it's possible for anybody to do that. Yes. You're absolutely right. And I, I think the important thing to say is that it doesn't go away, and there's a part of me, Oprah that actually has appreciated some of the aggression that lives inside me. Because I think it's part of, and this is going to sound crazy, but a little bit of part of what's made me successful. You know, I did the Hoffman Process, uh, I don't know, four years ago. And, you know, you know enough about the Hoffman, but for anybody listening, you know, you're, you're retraining your learned patterns that you learned as a child. We did a whole podcast on it. And, and I listened to it. And I, and that was after I went, so it was so nice to have that perspective. But you know, I, um, I remember saying to them like, don't, don't take that all out of me because I need a little bit of that. But it's understanding that that doesn't have to be the default and a big part of what I write about in this book is being a woman and having your emotions guide your decision-making is a really kind of like low vibrational place to be. That's right. And if you are going to, you know, live up to your higher self, as, you know, you have always said, then that can't be the way you make your decisions. Well, in Start with Yourself, which is just such a perfect title, when did you know that that was the title? I love that you say that. My working title was without apology, and um, I decided that that couldn't possibly be the title because it gives you the connotations that you need there's something to apologize for. Yes. Yeah. Yes.
[7:31]And so to me, start with yourself was everything because it's about not blaming anything that's happening on the outside and knowing that everything that you do, all the success that you have, and all the hardships that you have, and the way that you choose to walk through the world, it all starts with yourself. So when I landed it, I was like, that's it. That's the one. And I, and I love the way it looks, you know, on that. I love the way it looks, and people, beautiful, people say you can't judge a book by a cover, but yeah, you can. Yeah.
[8:03]A friend introduced me to this book and as soon as she dropped it off, I went, I love this book. Yeah. Very she couldn't sit in your beautiful surroundings. Yes, that's right. And it goes with everything. And people, I don't want my face on there either. Excellent. Excellent, excellent. I love when you say this in the book, If a fortune teller had taken a look at my destiny when I was growing up, she would have predicted I'd become a DJ's girlfriend or a footballer's sidepiece or marry a gangster. That seemed to be the predetermined path for all the women in my life, women who put everyone ahead of their own dreams. So how did you manage to pivot around the life that you saw had been prescribed for you? How, how, how did that come about? You know, I was a real dreamer, and I've always been in my head, and I would have what I now know are, you know, visualizations. I don't think I thought about it that way when I was a kid, but I'm, I'm somebody that could take themselves off into a dream. And in, you know, when I was a kid, I used to be obsessed with fashion magazines, but I would take myself into the magazine, like into the show, into the advertising campaign, and I would create collages, and I would imagine my life if it weren't in Plastov, if it weren't where I grew up. And I just knew that I could do better. I knew that the sadness and the heaviness around me wasn't my destiny. You could feel that inside yourself. I, I don't know what it is. You could feel that inside yourself. I, I knew it, I was like, this is, I'm not supposed to be here. Yeah, that's why I appreciated your book so much, because I start started to feel that around 4 years old in rural Mississippi. You just feel like this is not going to be my life, and I don't know how. So, you're having a moment. You are having a moment. You're like a history-making turn as the first black female shark on ABC's Shark Tank, and your podcast, Aspire, is just really resonating with so many thousands of people. You're co-creator of these powerhouse fashion brands like Skims and Good American. Do you think that you manifested this moment through your own strategy or something else happening? Like I've said many times, God can dream a bigger dream, the life force has dreamed a bigger dream for you than you did even for yourself. What is happening? That's a very interesting, that's an interesting way to look at it, and I think about it as a culmination of all of those things. You know, my strong belief is that you can't manifest your way alone into anything. Manifestation has to meet really hard work, and I have been in practice to be the type of woman that I wanted to be since I was 10 years old. Whether that was emulating you, or it was just getting up and delivering those papers, I wanted to be somebody that was going in a different direction to what I saw around me. And so I think it's a combination of putting myself in really difficult situations, honestly. You know, because I've been in places where, you know, my first apartment, I didn't have a fridge, I didn't have a way to cook, and so I used to put, you know, the milk on the balcony. But I knew that if I didn't, you know, if I didn't live there, I wouldn't be able to get to college. And if I didn't get to this college, then I wouldn't be able to, you know, have the type of job and work experience that I want. So everything has led to something, and I think I've been planned and purposeful about all of my moves. I've always thought. Planned and purposeful. Yes. All the time. You know, we recently did Jim Collins on the show, Jim Collins who did Good to Great, and now he has another book called What to Make of a Life. And in that book, he talks about that it's not necessarily what you're good at, but what you're encoded for. And so when I started to read your read your book, I thought, you were encoded to become the woman that you are now. You were encoded for entrepreneurship. You were encoded with a business mind. What, what do you think that is? What do you make of your encoding? I totally agree with you because I think that, you know, I grew up, I'm the eldest of four girls, and my mom, you know, raised us as a single mom. And for so many people, that could have felt like hardship. For me, it felt like, this is the baseline of what I can tolerate. Like at 10 years old, I could cook a meal for those kids and I could iron all their school shirts and make their packed lunches and just get everybody. Because you were the oldest, you were responsible for taking care of the rest of the kids while your mom was working. Yeah, my mom was working. It's like my mom's the dad, I'm the mom, and we've got three kids together. That's the dynamic of my family, and uh, love it or loathe it, but that's, that's the way it is. But to me, I feel like such resilience at a from a young age. And so when I think about where I come from, which is this place, East London, where you had to be so truthful. You had to make sure that whatever you said, you were going to do. There was this like moral baseline of the place that was an expectation of how you should behave, and that set me up to be the type of businesswoman that I am. And so I do think that I've been coded from a young age, and all of these experiences, and I think the important thing is that. Don't you feel too, don't you feel too, this, Emma, that, that nothing was wasted? Nothing was wasted. Even, even the time with being the older sister and taking care of the family, that all of that has now come into play now. 1 million %. And I think the important part is that my mindset never saw it as something that was dragging me down. I was like, oh, I'm just going to stand on all of these things. Like I'm a tough girl, I have a thick skin. How else can I use that thick skin? And in the introduction, you write all women are exhausted, while it's very easy, and we see this all over our culture, to blame men and inequitable systems, that's not how I roll. Nothing is fair, it's true, but I don't have time to wait for equity, I'd rather make it. I take full responsibility for my life, and I create my own future, regardless of what comes back at me. And I want to ask, how do you take radical ownership of our lives without gaslighting ourselves or dismissing very real barriers that we know exist? How do you hold both truths at the same time?
