By Candice Richardson
The Seattle Medium
Dr. Iyanla Vanzant, the New York Times Bestselling Author and star of the hit Emmy Award winning show, “Iyanla Fix My Life,” on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network, is going on tour for the first time in 18 years, bringing “Get Over It! An Evening with Iyanla Vanzant to the Paramount Theater on April 21st. The tour is promoting her new book, Get Over It! Thought Therapy for Healing the Hard Stuff.
“I’m going on tour for two reasons,” says Vanzant when asked why bother touring at this point in her career. “For one, I want to connect with people in a more intimate way. People see you on television and there’s that distance and separation and they can make it be about what they’re looking [at] and not about themselves. So, I want to have a more intimate connection. And the other thing is that I think since the last election people have so much anxiety and so much fear and so much “againstness” and people are really upset and they’re giving away their power day by day by day because of the results of one event in their lives. But I realize that that’s what we do in our life. We do that in our marriage, we do that in our family, we do that at work. We give away our power and we don’t recognize the power of our minds.”
Vanzant says her new book was originally supposed to be strictly about relationships and center around “dominant negative thought patterns,” which she says often subconsciously controls the way people think, respond and react to each other; but after witnessing reactions to the 2016 election the focus shifted.
“When I saw how people were responding to the election and the doom and the gloom and the hatred and the anger, I said, oh wait a minute, we need to do something about this,” says Vanzant.
Recognizing that people must be empowered to help themselves, Vanzant says Get Over It provides the instruments that help people move forward in life.
“What makes this book different from the others is I’m giving you the process because just like I say on ‘Fix My Life,’ I can’t fix you,” she says. “What I can do is give you information but it’s up to you to use the information. So, with this book I’m giving the information and I’m coming to give instruction.”
The instruction included in Get Over It! involves Thought Therapy, which Vanzant says is designed to address mental, emotional, and spiritual issues.
“Therapy is the treatment of ‘dis-ease’ or disorder. And I believe that many of us have disorder in our minds. How we see ourselves, how we think, how we hold things. So I’m coming to give you the treatment for any mental, or emotional, or spiritual disorder,” says Vanzant. “I’m going to give you the tools…This is such a powerful time but people are feeling so disempowered.”
That observation of seeing others in such a disempowered state is what Vanzant says fueled her desire to go on tour and get in front of her audience. So what does a live Iyanla theater show look like?
“It looks like Iyanla Vanzant Live in the Theater,” Vanzant says with her hearty trademark laugh. “We get to go through the process together, we get to talk to each other. Yes there is music, yes, there is fun. Hopefully there’s some dancing, and some interaction but it’s a very intimate experience in a very public way.”
The Get Over It! tour will take Vanzant to 17 cities across the country including Seattle. After 20 years in the spotlight, with more than 8 million books in print, and an audience of millions, Vanzant says there is one thing that still continues to surprise her about humanity: people not realizing and living in their own power.
“People don’t acknowledge, honor, respect, or utilize their power – all over the world,” she says. “They think they are what happened to them. They will acquiesce their power in the face of something or someone they think is more powerful. [People] don’t respect their power, or their thoughts or their words, so they use it carelessly, negligently…They think that somebody or something can be more for them that they can do for themselves.”
Personal power, she says begins with the mind.
“Everything begins with a thought,” says Vanzant. “We’re on the phone because Alexander Graham Bell had a thought. We got on clothes because this designer or that seamstress or somebody had a thought. Every single thing begins with a thought and some thoughts we make up, some thoughts we inherit, some thoughts we pick up, so we got to get a grip on that. We got to get control of our minds and it begins with the thinking.”
So much of our thinking and thought patterns are passed down to us from families, says Vanzant who has made Family a core theme of “Iyanla Fix My Life,” this season. Whether to break them or not depends on if they’re benefitting us or holding us back, particularly in the African American community.
“We have such a powerful legacy and history as people of African descent,” says Vanzant. “Just because we now have cell phones and social media and own our own townhouse, doesn’t mean that we’ve lost that connection to that history, that legacy, the power of those people and I just want to encourage us to really remember that and utilize it.”
“The dedication in Get Over It is to our greatest greatest greatest greatest grandmothers whose power, and whose dignity and whose elegance and grace is the reason we’re here today. And to our greatest greatest greatest greatest grandfathers whose ability and willingness and capacity to stand as men is the reason that we have a community and a family today. It’s them. We have to remember that we are standing on their backs, on their shoulders, and stop acting like every wind that blows by can take our wig off,” she adds laughing.
“It’s all about getting the tools, it’s about having the information and the tools, and then commit to do the work. And that’s what the tour is about, that’s what the book is about,” concludes Vanzant.
Get Over It! An Evening with Iyanla Vanzant will arrive in Seattle on April 21st at The Paramount Theater – 911 Pine Street, Seattle, WA 98101). Doors open at 7pm. Show starts at 8pm. Tickets are available via Ticketmaster.
