BEVERLY — Elizabeth “Libby” Moore left the crowd with three pieces of advice Saturday: Look in the mirror each day and say, “I love you.” Pause, and take three deep breaths each day. And think positively, thanking the universe, before every hard conversation.
Moore, who was Oprah Winfrey’s chief of staff from 2000 to 2011, gave the keynote address at the inaugural North Shore Women’s Inventure at Endicott College Saturday. The event was hosted by the college’s Angle Center for Entrepreneurship and the Spark Collective, an organization that seeks to help women meet their personal and professional objectives. With forums and workshops, the event sought to empower the intergenerational gathering of women to be the architects of their futures.
“It’s not about what you are, it’s about what you feel,” Moore said to a full auditorium.
To inspire the attendees, Moore drew from her personal experiences and shared her story. Moore, a former Marblehead resident, grew up in Maryland, and graduated from Endicott College in 1986. She was an ad woman for WFNX Radio, Marblehead Reporter, and WNSH Radio, and briefly a concert reviewer for The Daily Item before she moved to New York and worked as Maury Povich’s assistant.
In 2000, she met Oprah Winfrey at a “fancy hotel,” and applied to be the massively famous personality’s chief of staff. In that interview, which happened on a Friday-the-13th, Moore was quite blunt with Winfrey.
“I couldn’t believe me, Libby Moore — academic probation, Berlin, Maryland — was meeting Oprah,” Moore said.
“I told her, ‘If you leave here and don’t hire me, that’s okay because it’s God’s plan. And if this isn’t what God has planned for me, I can’t wait to see what’s next,'” she said.
She got the job, and spent the next 11 years traveling the globe with Winfrey. They went places like Hawaii together, and Moore was one of five people Winfrey invited to attend while she was bestowed Kennedy Center Honors, before Moore eventually left the position when Winfrey founded her own television network.
Moore now runs LoveX Global, providing life coaching to workers at companies like Chobani Greek Yogurt. Her love-yourself philosophy stems from her childhood ambitions, which, she says plainly, were to become a surfer, cowboy, and 18-wheeler truck driver.
Moore, 53, is an intermediate surfer, and while she never became a cowboy or trucker, she travels, wears blue jeans and boots, and feels as if she did become the western wrangler of her childhood imagination. It’s important, Moore said, for women to tap into their childhood imaginations, which never go away, in order to reach their goals.
“I do things I want to do since I was a little kid,” Moore said.
Another piece of Moore’s philosophy is a person should be open about themselves in addition to loving themselves. Moore knew she was a lesbian since adolescence, when her friends were having first-boyfriends, and she’d hear words like “dyke” and “faggot.”
She hid her sexual orientation, and attempted suicide at age 21, when she was drunk driving and purposely pinned the accelerator to the floor around a hairpin turn in Beverly. At the last moment, Moore thought, “What am I doing?,” and swerved, totalling her car but surviving. At age 27, Moore finally came out, and she credits working with Maury Povich and his open guests as helping her do so.
“When you get to that dark point in life, it’s a passing, it’s a cloud passing,” Moore said.
Meghan Fennel, founder of the Spark Collective, said Saturday’s forum took place at “such an exciting time for women to come into our truth,” with women seeing more personal, economic, and political opportunities.
“I believe at my core each time women gather in circles, the world heals a little bit,” she said.
The event also included a yoga and meditation session, as well as talks and workshops on topics such as public speaking, goal setting, and understanding personal identity.
