“Books that changed my life”
Lisa Rinna, (Real Housewives of Beverly Hills) appeared on the YouTube show Books That Changed My Life to talk childhood, career & Power of Positive Thinking.
LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, March 17, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — In conversation with host Chris “Bulldog” Collins, Lisa describes the bullying she faced growing up in Medford, Oregon, her faith, and her growing concerns about the impact of social media on women and girls.
Bullied in Medford:
Rinna traces her struggles with self-confidence back to age seven, when her family relocated from Newport Beach, California, to Medford, Oregon. Arriving deeply tanned and dressed, well, like Lisa Rinna, she stood out immediately. The contrast made her a target. “Kids are mean,” she tells Collins, “and they were mean from the second grade all the way through seventh grade.” Rather than recognizing the experience as unusual, Rinna says she simply accepted it: “I just thought that’s how life went. I just thought that was sort of what happened to everybody.”
The bullying left her, by her own account, without a stable sense of self well into her early career. Recalling a pivotal critique from an acting teacher at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, Rinna says she was told point-blank: “You have no opinion. You have no point of view. You have no idea how you feel. You better figure that out, or you can never be an actor.” She credits that confrontation, and the books that followed, with setting her on a path of genuine self-discovery.
The Book That Changed Her Life:
Lisa Rinna found The Power of Positive Thinking in her twenties, newly arrived in Los Angeles, in what she calls “a dark hole of limbo” — a disintegrating relationship, professional uncertainty, and a growing sense of displacement. “That was the first one,” she says of the Peale book, “and then it was The Road Less Traveled. Those two books somehow got me out of the situation I was in and saved me.”
Faith, Rinna explains, has been inseparable from that transformation. She describes a childhood of sneaking into Catholic Mass with a neighbor’s large family, marching up to take communion at age eight without permission, and finding in church something she has been chasing ever since: a sense of belonging. “Am I religious?” she muses. “I love the sense of positivity and belonging of the message I got when I was in church.”
Protecting her Family from Social Media:
Rinna also describes her effort to shield her daughters from the corrosive effects of social media. She describes holding off on giving them phones until around age 11 to 13, noting they were among “the last group to kind of scoot through” before social media became fully pervasive in young people’s lives. When it did arrive, she says, a deeply personal experience accelerated their disillusionment.
A show she was appearing on generated significant online negativity, her daughters were exposed to it, and Rinna watched them arrive at their own conclusions: “That’s not good for me to read. That makes me feel bad. So I’m not going to do that.” Today, she notes with some irony, she is on her phone more than they are.
You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It:
The conversation also touches on Rinna’s forthcoming memoir, You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It, a pet phrase of hers. She describes the book as a collection of meaningful “flash points” rather than a traditional cradle-to-present narrative — candid, funny, and, by her own admission, vulnerable in ways that have made her nervous. “When you open yourself up and show parts of yourself that you don’t normally show, that’s scary,” she tells Collins.
“People are judgmental. But we all have that girl in the skirt who went to Medford and didn’t fit in somewhere inside us. Hopefully in my vulnerability, I will connect to people and somehow change them, make them think, make them curious, move them. That’s why I’m an actor. That’s why I am a performer. I want to move people, make them feel something, and bring joy.”
The full conversation is available now on the Books That Changed My Life YouTube channel.
About Books That Changed My Life
“Books That Changed My Life,” hosted by bestselling author Chris Collins, is a YouTube show exploring how great books transform us in profound and unexpected ways. Each episode features a special guest who shares a book that shaped or inspired them, sparking deep conversations that unearth profound personal stories.
Recent guests include R&B icon Eric Benét, former covert CIA officer Andrew Bustamante, Country music star Jordan Davis, American Idol alum David Archuleta, comedian and writer Adam Conover, Dancing With the Stars pro Jenna Johnson, and television superstar Kelsey Grammer.
Matthew Heinemeyer
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