Perseverance can make or break people. When you persevere, you learn a lot about yourself and others. Spend some time now writing a few lessons you’ve learned about perseverance in each area of your life:
Lessons from family members
Lessons from education
Lessons from friends
Lessons from professional life
What two or three principles can you create to remind you of the lessons you have learned from perseverance?
I’ll share one of my stories with you.
I always knew education would be my ticket to a better future. So, I worked hard through high school. I earned a small scholarship through the Jr. Miss program (it was a scholarship program, pretty prevalent in high school, with many programs throughout the US), and qualified for some financial aid for college. I went to school my first year, and was told by the financial aid office at my university that I no longer qualified for aid because my parents earned too much money.
Regardless of what the Financial Aid office thought, my parents were not in a position to help me with school, and I was determined to finish my degree. So, I found a job babysitting a couple of kids for a woman who worked at my university, for about nine months, until I had been independent of my parents long enough to apply for FA on my own merits.
After missing nearly all of what should have been my second year of college, I was able to get some student loans and start classes, again. Because my loans weren’t enough to pay for everything thing, I worked. In fact, I worked three different jobs (cleaning the administration building at my school — part time thru the school year and full time over the summer, cleaning the home of one of the professors, and taking care of the live plants in one of the school buildings) while taking a full load of classes. While the jobs I held changed over the next three years, I worked my way through school. I know I was blessed to have access to financial aid, grants, and loans to earn my Bachelor’s degree.
While having a college education doesn’t guarantee anyone a good job or a successful career, it has certainly opened a lot of doors for me. In fact, in many cases, it was the required minimum to even be considered for some positions. And, after I had been working in my field for several years, I started missing new job opportunities because the level of positions I was becoming qualified for stated “Master’s degree preferred.” Not required, just preferred. Nonetheless, I missed a number of job offers, because the positions were offered to someone with a Master’s degree. So, I realized, if I wanted to move up, I would need to go back to school and earn my Master’s degree.
This wasn’t a daunting task for me, as I love learning. In fact, if I could be in a learning environment all the time, I would be there in a heartbeat! So, I did go back to school. This time, the money wasn’t the biggest challenge; I was working a full-time job and attended school several nights a week, plus some weekend workshops. It wasn’t always easy and it wasn’t always fun…but I persevered and emerged from that time in my life victorious!
I am proud to list myself as Laura Prisc, MSC (Master of Science in Communication).
Try it…you’ll like how you feel about yourself when you finish what you set out to do, and especially if you had to persevere through difficult times.
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