Iyanla Vanzant recently made a stop in Detroit over Valentine’s Day weekend, or as she likes to call it, Love’s Holiday Weekend. She was in town to discuss the effects of love, healing, forgiveness and becoming a natural woman. She had an intimate conversation with an exclusive audience of several hundred women and a few men on the topic of “Who’s Loving You?” She started her conversation with a breakdown of Aretha Franklin’s classic song “(You make me feel like a) Natural Woman,” and engaged the audience in singing several bars of the song. She delivered her message with style, finesse and a sense of humor that the audience was able to relate to. Her conversational talk ended with a question and answer session where several members of the audience were able to ask personal questions.
Rolling out got the opportunity to go behind the scenes with Vanzant after the session to get an interview on the topic of remaining self-assured in the face of being alone on Valentine’s Day weekend and also on what inspired her to follow her passion for fixing people’s lives. Check out the interview below.
With this being Valentine ’s Day weekend and many single ladies out here without a special someone, what advice would you give women on remaining self-assured and not settling for less?
I’m so amazed that women are caught up in these holidays such as this Valentine’s Day thing. I didn’t know. I bought my own candy, I bought my own flowers, I bought me some crab legs, and some corn. I am so excited. What I would say is do what brings you joy. Find the things that make you happy. And when you’re happy, someone will come to bring you more happiness and share in your happiness. When you’re down and dragging don’t nobody want to be bothered with you.
We all love your TV show, “Iyanla: Fix My Life.” Where do you think the passion came from in you to want to fix someone’s life and how did you discover that it was one of your passions?
It’s not a passion. It’s a purpose. I am a minister. I am a spiritual life coach, I am a spiritual technician. An X-Ray technician needs people to operate on. A dialysis technician needs people to do dialysis on. I am a spiritual technician; I need people to work on, so they show up. That is my purpose. I am a teacher. I am a coach. I am a minister, so it’s not a career that I went out for. What it is is as I grew and perfected my skill, as I surrendered my life to service, what I was supposed to do and how I was supposed to do it showed up. I didn’t go looking for this. I’m a criminal defense attorney.
Photo Gallery Credit: Porsha Monique for Steed Media
