Gayle King is not hitting the brakes. She’s co-host of “CBS This Morning” and editor-at-large at The Oprah Magazine, O, but she’s among those people benevolent enough to share how she got where she is right now. King first became famous as Oprah Winfrey’s bosom buddy. Winfrey considered her “the mother I never had … the sister everybody would want” and “the friend that everybody deserves.”
In her own career, King has ascended the professional ladder from a production assistant to a network anchor, most recently impressing Twitter with how she conducted an unbelievable interview with R. Kelly. King remained calm and poised throughout the duration of the conversation.
We might not know anyone like King, but in her interviews, she has given advice on how we can all work more professionally and have better lives. If they help us become more like Gayle King, the easier things would be.
On practicing grace under pressure
“Don’t sweat the small stuff’ sounds like a cliché, but it takes a lot to get me really angry or freaked out about anything,” she said in The Cut in February 2018. “I’m a really solutions-oriented person, so you present me with a problem and I try to figure out, okay this has happened, what do we do, and how do we fix it.”
On not resting on your laurels
“I think it’s OK to take a risk. Don’t take a foolish risk, but I think it’s good in life to take a risk. I also believe that I don’t care who you are, how big you are, everybody always has something to learn,” King told USA Today in July 2018. “Everybody can always get better. So, I’m never under any illusion that, despite the success that I’ve had, that there’s never another rung I can climb on the ladder. I don’t know what that is, but I think that there’s always a way to get better and do better.”
On not taking everything so seriously especially herself
“I don’t mind making fun of myself or making fun of other people in a good-natured way, so everybody is always in on the joke. The other day, I split my dress when I was getting out of the car, so my butt was hanging out and I posted it on Instagram,” King told Adweek magazine in 2015. “People said, ‘Weren’t you embarrassed when you put that up?’ No, but my daughter was.”
King casually talks about herself on Instagram, from watching “Real Housewives” to working with her dress backward and recording her weight using the scale. And she is not embarrassed to divulge that.
“People say, ‘I can’t believe that you show your weight, I can’t believe that you tell your age,’ and I think number one, I’m so happy to be on the planet doing the job that I do, and as far as weight, I think people have eyes,” according to her on a Thrive Global podcast in February 2018. “I don’t see any point in sugar-coating things and I think so many people think that you have to present this picture that life is perfect and life is fine ― and I just don’t think that that’s a reality, I don’t. Life has a lot of warts and ups and downs and I try not to overshare, but I think that my life is pretty typical of what a lot of people go through.”
On not having any jealousy of other people’s success
“When [Winfrey] was making $50 an hour, I was making $27. Somebody said, ‘Do you ever feel lesser?’” King said on Winfrey’s talk show in 2011. “And I go, ‘No, it’s not a friendship based on money.’ I never feel like I’m competing. I never feel lesser than.”
Wishing to be Winfrey’s friend but not wishing to really become Winfrey has made King feel at home with herself and caused their friendship to work over the past 40 years, according to her.
“I’m very proud to be her friend, and she and I are very, very, very tight, and that’s never going to change, so I don’t feel overshadowed by her,” King said in a New York Times profile in October 2018. “But I feel like there’s only one of her and only one of me, and I kind of like me. I like me.