In a candid conversation with Lewis AI, former First Lady Michelle Obama explains how she maintained a grounded sense of self while under intense public scrutiny during her eight years in the White House. She emphasizes that personal identity should not be defined by others' opinions, noting that everyone projects their own biases onto their view of you. To stay level‑headed, she relied on a disciplined information‑filtering process: using her communications team to deliver only the essential, objective facts she needed, and avoiding direct exposure to raw media commentary or social‑media comment sections. Obama describes developing a "third‑hand" information habit, where her comms director summarizes relevant articles and feedback, allowing her to focus on the substance of her work—evaluating whether speeches, programs, and initiatives are effective—rather than being swayed by praise or criticism. This approach helped her keep her ego in check, prevent criticism from clouding her judgment, and let the impact of her work speak for itself.
Chapters
You cannot base who you are and how you think of yourself on what anybody else other than who's at this table and knows you thinks, because everybody's bringing their own stuff to their opinion of who you are. So you have to do the work and let your work speak for itself.
That's fascinating because if you're at, you know, the position you're in for, eight years during that time, how are you able to keep the core nucleus of your closest friends and family to just only focus on what they think of you rather than what the world thinks of you? Both at the extreme high, high and others extreme critical. Like, how did you not own your own hype of half the world or whatever, or most the world, and then the extreme criticism?
Like, you can't listen to either.
Interesting.
And so that's not to say that I didn't look at any press, you know, especially when you're campaigning, you can't help but know what things are. But what I learned was that I have to filter it. You know, so the beauty of being in the White House is you have a comms team, a communications team. And I just get to the point where tell me the things that are objectively are things that I need to hear. And I just had to, Practice and I wasn't always good at it because I'd need, I'd look through the clips, I'd look at stories every now and then I dig a little too deep, you know, good and bad. Yeah.
Feed the ego and then also the criticism, ah, that doesn't feel good.
Exactly. And it's like, well, I can't believe one and not the other. So let me just do the work. So I tried to develop a habit of getting my information, not firsthand, but thirdhand. So my comms director, Tell me in this meeting what I need to know, what I need to be paying attention to. If there's an article or something about the girls or something that I need to know in preparation for this speech, give me that information. So I do what I tell young people to do. Do not read the comments section. You know, just don't go there. If you're in social media and you're doing this work, do not let that stuff feed you. You have to be disciplined enough to just put your head down and do the work and let the work speak for you. So I would read things about the work. You know, did the speech work? Is the program working? Is it having impact? But all the other stuff, the op-eds and the commentary, it's like good and bad. I can't take it in because it would cloud the work.
