Starting to Take Charge of Your Life: Part 3

This will be the final installment of my three part series on starting to take charge of your life. There is more to write about it, but I'm not sure if there's any demand for it.

Would you like to know more? If you do, please feel free to let me know.

Here are parts one and two, if you haven't read it.

In the mean time, here's my post about the final thing you need to start taking charge of your life.

Tenacity

To recap: On starting on your journey to happiness, you've done two things: 1) you took responsibility for your own happiness and/or unhappiness and 2) you challenged the way things are right now.

Now comes the really hard part:

You'll have to fight for what you want.

Hard.

As if that isn't hard enough, you'll most often be fighting the very people who were supposed to support you. I wish it wasn't like this. When I pointed out to my mother that getting stuck behind an office table isn't what I want, we fought. Constantly. Every time one of us brought up what we thought I should be doing with my life.

For some reason, she seemed to think that my desire to go into the arts more was due to my chickening out of the hard work required to succeed in the business world.

Yeah... if that's what I wanted, I don't think I would have chosen to try and make it in art.

The point is, my mother had always been the one person who sacrificed the most to support me. She did a lot to put me through university. She sacrificed a lot... and the fact was, I don't think I should have been in the program I'd chosen. So of course she wasn't pleased when I pointed it out.

It takes a lot of tenacity to go after your dreams. Especially in the beginning. It took two things for my mom to take two of my dreams seriously. 1) Placing second in a short story competition and 2) Seeing me perform live as a soloist the first time.

After that, things went a lot smoother. It went even better when I managed to find a place in my life both for my commerce degree (I work for and own 25% of her company and am loving it) and for my artistic talents.

But before you can prove yourself, very few people in your immediate vicinity will understand you wanting to go after your dream.

In one of my fights with my mother, I went off about the fact that my soul was dying without my going after my dreams. Her response: a pitying smile and saying "But darling, hardly anyone gets to do what they dream of doing and they're all here."

My answer to that is what I'm going to finish with today:

I don't have to be someone who ever settles for second best in my life.

NEITHER

DO

YOU.

Never give up!