“The bear is what we all wrestle with,” says Lopez. “Everybody has their bear in life. It’s about conquering that bear and letting him go.”
In the fierce industries in which Lopez works, she has come up against numerous obstacles that have both tested her commitment to her goals and challenged her resilience. As an aspiring singer and actress, Lopez confronted numerous audition rejections and years of having to work as a backup to others who were actually living out their dreams. Even now that she has achieved such a large measure of success, she is plagued with many of the difficulties that come along with fame.
“I think crossroads come at many times during your life,” says Lopez. “Up to this point, I’ve had several. You get to a certain point in your life and you’re like, am I supposed to be doing this? And it’s usually in the face of some failure – something that didn’t work out the way you wanted it to. And you’re faced with a decision: do I keep trying to do this or do I give up?”
In Lopez’s case, she kept trying. She shed some tears, she let out some laughs and she continued on her course. After one particularly tough rejection, Lopez called her usually supportive mother for comfort. “I thought she’d offer me some sympathy,” recalls Lopez. “Instead, she said, ‘Don’t you ever call me crying again! You wanted to be in this business, so you better toughen up!’ And I did.”
That was a turning point for Lopez, who from then on out decided she would be strong enough to handle whatever was thrown her way. It didn’t mean that Lopez would never feel the pain of rejection or the sting of a critic’s harsh words, but it did mean that she was committed to her goals and that she would try, to the best of her abilities, to carry on no matter what. “You all know things have gone wrong for me,” says Lopez. “Everybody has laughed, everybody has had a knock at me. It hurts, it always does…the easy thing to do would be to walk away.”
But, Lopez didn’t walk away. Instead, she decided to endure the setbacks. “You laugh it off, you get upset for a little while, you’re human and you let it go,” she says. And, she quickly discovered that with time, it got easier for her to deal with the challenges of her career. “I'm at a different point in my life right now,” says Lopez. “I'm a little but older and I like to think a little bit wiser and more mature and I like to think I've learned from those experiences.”
Now, Lopez ensures that she makes time for herself so that when the hits come, she can be ready to handle the blow. “You just start kind of clearing out space to have time to just be by yourself, to go over things,” she says. “You have to really mark out the time…because you can get very bogged down with the everyday things that come up in all of those different ventures that I’m involved with.”
Lesson #2: Bear With It
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