Lessons from 'The Nanny' - Thought Leader

I was lucky enough to be invited to the US Embassy in Cape Town last week to meet Fran Drescher of The Nanny fame, and to hear her speak. Yes, she does sound like she does in the show, and yes, she does laugh like she does in the show. But, what I didn’t know was that she’s pretty freaking inspiring. Drescher is a cancer survivor and a rape survivor and has published two books. Fran’s lobbying has done huge amounts for getting legislation that empowers women passed, and she suggested that her celeb status “didn’t hurt”. But that is not what this blog is about. What it is about is how “bad things happen to good people” and how to make the best of bad situations.

It’s true that most of us don’t get the break we deserve, and it’s easy to look around and see things going right for everyone around you. But at the end of the day, change starts with you. You can decide your priorities, and what you’re going to try and do to make your dreams come true. Yes, you will be limited by circumstance, by funding, by love and by the world, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up.

I guess my feeling for Spring is that we spend a lot of time looking outwards wishing we were someone else, with someone else, somewhere else, something else … and that is fairly depressing. It’s not easy to look at ourselves and see what we can change to make things better. It takes hard work and critical self-reflection. But it is possible to move past bad experiences.

I’m a firm believer in telling your story. Getting it off your chest and out in the open. You can tell it to someone, or you can just tell it to your diary or computer. But in telling that story you take away the scariness, the power of that story over you. I loved Rod MacKenzie’s blog this week because it talks about how difficult it can be to articulate how you’re feeling. And so writing it down can help.

The Nanny may have been a light TV show that we all watched in the 90s, but Drescher is one positive person who is doing good. I hope that we can do the same. I think the first step to that is doing good for ourselves, respecting our own story, and then working that good outwards into the rest of the world.