E-mail a friendArianna Huffington
airdate October 10, 2006
Named one of Washington's most influential commentators by Newsweek, Arianna Huffington started her political life as the darling of the right. She now describes herself as a progressive populist. She does political commentary and has written numerous books, including the new release, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging. She's also co-founder and editor in chief of the news and opinion Website, The Huffington Post, and co-host of Left, Right & Center, a public radio political roundtable program.
Arianna Huffington
Tavis: Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist and best-selling author who is the cofounder and coeditor of 'The Huffington Post,' the influential political weblog. Her latest book, and it is her eleventh, called 'On Becoming Fearless: In Love, Work, and Life.' Arianna, as always, nice to see you.
Arianna Huffington: Great to see you, Tavis.
Tavis: Glad to have you here. Can I start with some new stuff before I jump into the book right quick?
Huffington: Of course.
Tavis: Since you've written about it on your blog, and everybody else is talking about it, what's your sense, as we get closer to midterm election day, of the impact of this Foley scandal?
Huffington: I think it's gonna have a big impact, because it's part of the narrative of trust. It's not really just about sordid IMs and sex. It's about the fact that it fits into that narrative. We can't trust them on Iraq; we can't trust them on Katrina; we can't trust them on tax cuts. What can we trust them on? We can't trust them on values; we can't trust them with our children.
And so, it can get to the tipping point, which is really all that we are talking about. It's going to be a closely contested election anyway, and that can take it over the top for Democrats to win the House, and maybe even the Senate.
Tavis: If I were a Republican, you know I'm not. (Laugh) This is hypothetical. If I were a Republican, my argument would be that, and I'm starting to hear this now, that's one guy who clearly had issues. How do you put a noose around all of our Republican necks because of the malfeasance, misbehavior, of one guy? If that were the case, the Democrats, come on. (Laugh) If one guy (unintelligible).
Huffington: Yeah, of course it's not about the one guy. It's about what the leadership did; it's about the priority being power, rather than protecting the pages, and by extension protecting our children. It's about hypocrisy, it's about trust. That's what it is about. And politics, and especially elections, are basically in the end coming down to the prevailing narrative. And the narrative that we can't trust them is beginning to really win.
Tavis: Finally on politics, at least, your sense of whether or not the Democrats - I was gonna say can win. Everybody knows they can, potentially, ostensibly. Will they take the House?
Huffington: Well, if the election were held this week, I would say yes. But the election is not held this week. (Laugh) And as we know, two weeks, even, is a very long time in politics. And so I'm not here to look into my crystal ball, but to say that certainly, things are looking very, very good for Democrats.
Tavis: Okay. To the book, 'On Becoming Fearless: In Love, Work, and Life.' I've known you for a lot of years, and when I saw this book come across my desk, I had to look at it a second time. (Laugh) 'Cause I don't wanna say Arianna's getting soft, but - it's a good read, don't get me wrong. It's a very good read. But it is a departure from the political stuff that people have come to know you for.
Huffington: But you also know me in a personal way.
Tavis: Absolutely.
Huffington: You know my daughters.
Tavis: Absolutely.
Huffington: And the book is dedicated to my daughters, who are 15 and 17. And it's dedicated to them because I saw them as they entered their teenage years begin to express the same kind of fears that I struggled with. Am I pretty enough, am I smart enough, will people like me.
Tavis: I can't imagine you ever fearful of anything, but that's another issue. Go ahead.
Huffington: Oh, yeah, well, the book is full of my own fears, because first of all, I believe that we all have fears. And fearlessness is not the absence of fear; it's the mastery of fear. As you say in your new book that I've started dipping into, it's not that we do things when we are not afraid. We do things while we are afraid. And that's really what I'm saying here.
Whether it's at work or in relationships, that's my message to my own daughters and to every other woman, and man, too. Do it. Say it. Even while you are afraid. And in the process, you build what I call in the book the fearlessness muscle. The more we take those actions, the more we say what we believe in, the more that fearlessness muscle gets strong, and the easier it becomes the next time.
Especially if we have some people around us that I call our tribe. You and I are very tribal about our families, about our friends. So our little fearlessness tribe can be with us, whether we're succeeding or failing. Because every life includes both.
Tavis: My mother birthed six boys, of which I am the eldest. I'm trying to figure out how my mother talking to me and my seven younger brothers, or five younger brothers, about fearlessness differs from Arianna talking to her daughters about fearlessness.
Huffington: Well, the way I talk to my daughters is the way my mother talked to me. My mother is the big presence, the big fearlessness, heroine in this book. Because she basically said to me, embrace failure. If you're going to do anything interesting in your life, you're going to fail. Don't be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to be criticized. And above all, watch the voices inside your head.
Because the worst critic is what I call the obnoxious roommate living inside our head that puts us down, that makes us doubt ourselves; that makes us question if we can do something. So if we can learn to silence that roommate, to take charge of those voices, then truly we can try for anything, and we can achieve anything, if we believe in ourselves.
Tavis: You tell a great story in the book about - I'm just gonna put it this way, when the cops came knocking at your mother's door, and a lesson that you learned on this particular day about her fearlessness. Share the story.
Huffington: Yes, well, I was nine years old when my mother told me the story of how in the second world war, she was in the mountains, they were with the Red Cross, protecting two Jewish girls. And the German soldiers surrounded them, and asked them to surrender the Jews they had. And my mother went forward with complete authority and fearlessness and said, "We have no Jews here."
And she said it with so much authority that the Germans moved on and let them stay there. And that is really the way she approached life generally, with a lot of gusto and a lot of trust. Trust that somehow, things would work out. And also a sense that you should follow your passions. Don't do everything in life, she kept saying to me, don't try to do everything.
Do what you really love. And she had given me a little saying on my desk that said you can complete a project by dropping it. (Laugh) And (unintelligible). So often, we're involved in so many things that we're not really passionate about. She said, "Do what you really love.' And then even if you are afraid to do it, do it, and you'll get out the other side, and you'll see how empowering that is.
Tavis: Something else I know about you, given our friendship over the years, is that your work is not confined to the west side or the White side or the wealthy side of this city or for that matter, any other city. But one watching the program who happens not to be a well to do White woman could very easily say what does Arianna know about fearlessness or about fear in the way that everyday, working class women of color know? So what do we say to them about fearlessness?
Huffington: Well, that's terribly important, and that's why the last chapter of the book is 'Fearlessness and Changing the World.' And the last story, because the book is a collection of a lot of other women's stories of overcoming fear, is from Deborah Constance, who's a woman I've worked closely with for years who started a place called Home in South Central, dealing at the moment with over 2,000 at-risk children and teenagers.
And her story of moving from fear to fearlessness is a story that any woman, Black, White, of any ethnicity or color can take with her, because it's really overcoming obstacles of any kind. That we have the power in us, and especially together, to overcome all those obstacles. To rise beyond our circumstances, beyond how we're born. And in a way, my own story is like that. I was brought up with no money in Athens, Greece.
And I went to school at Cambridge in England because my mother believed I could do it. Nobody else believed I could do it, that I could leave Greece without any money and go to a foreign university. And then she gave me that same feeling in terms of leaving relationships that don't work. I write about being crazily in love with this guy in my twenties who didn't want to marry me, didn't want to have children.
It was hard to find the courage to leave that relationship. And then change my life completely and get to the point where I can be here now, talking about my eleventh book. It's all little steps, and with a lot of failures along the way that I chronicle in the book, so nobody thinks it's some kind of golden life.
Tavis: You know what's amazing about it is that I think that even with the preponderance of people who are stepping forward with courage and conviction and commitment like yourself to share these stories of becoming fearless in life, love, and, and work, it's not lost to me, though, that we live in a world where people are more fearful. We live in a world where some could argue, I think legitimately, that certain folk are even peddling fear.
They're selling fear, they're marketing fear. Juxtapose those two things for me, trying to tell folk to be fearless on the one hand, but knowing full well that we live in a world where they're being peddled fear every day, and that fear works, that fear sells.
Huffington: Absolutely. In fact, I really believe that the more we can build our personal fearlessness, the more we'll be able to resist the fear-mongering. From Washington, from the White House. Because truly, it is like an epidemic of fear, and an epidemic of fearlessness, to see which one is going to get to the tipping point faster. Because in the same way that fear is contagious, I really believe, Tavis, that fearlessness is contagious, too.
And you can feel it when you go into a room and you're surrounded by people who will do the right thing even while they are afraid. It catches. It rubs off on you. And that's what really I'm hoping to do as I'm traveling around the country speaking to a lot of young people as well as older people. To sort of, to be a positive carrier of fearlessness.
Tavis: Are you encouraged about the future of your daughters as juxtaposed to where you were at their age?
Huffington: I really am. This morning, just before I was coming here, my daughter called me on the phone. And I could feel myself immediately moving into fear, because she never calls from school, right? So I said, what's happening? She said to me, why are you afraid? She teases me now. (Laugh) And she said to me, remember what you said in your book? There were many terrible things in my life, but most of them never happened.
(Laugh) So just the fact that they've read the book, in fact, Isabella, who painted a picture for you, remember, she's now 15. And she told me that she wanted me to write about her story of fighting an eating disorder. Of the beginnings of anorexia that she went through, and she wanted me to write about it, because she wanted other young women to understand what she went through, why she bought into those messages from our culture about thinness being the only way to be beautiful. And so they were very involved in the writing and the editing of the book, and I think the messages have penetrated.
Tavis: Well, the book is empowering. You tell Isabella, by the way, that I still have her picture of the bunnies that - Arianna's daughter painted some bunnies for me. They're the most beautiful bunnies ever. And people walk in my office to this day and ask me, why does Tavis Smiley have a picture of bunnies (laugh) by obviously some young artist on his wall? So tell her I said thank you again.
Huffington: She's better now; she'll paint something else for you.
Tavis: Tell her to send me something else, I'll put it up. 'On Becoming Fearless: In Love, Work, and Life' is the new book by bestselling author Arianna Huffington, of the 'Huffington Post.' Arianna, nice to have you here.
Huffington: Great to be here.
Tavis: Nice to see you. Up next on this program, actor Damon Wayans. Stay with us.
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