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"I absolutely refused to make out with the gorgeous male model. It was 1992. I was 28, still green from the red-dirt roads of rural Georgia, working on my second album. Life had gone from slow motion to runaway-train speed overnight. My first single, &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s in Love with the Boy,&amp;quot; had skyrocketed to number one, making country music history; a new female artist had never done that before (though the feat has been repeated several times since). I&amp;#039;d signed on as a spokesperson for Revlon, and I found myself in a New York City studio, shooting a commercial for Wild Heart, a perfume I&amp;#039;d had a hand in developing. Everyone on the set was dressed in black, except me. I&amp;#039;d brought some of my clothes from home, including a red sequined blazer, my first custom-made piece of clothing. I was so excited! The stylists took one look at me, turned up their noses at my wardrobe, and brought in a pile of their size-2 runway samples. I felt completely out of my league. After much debate, we all settled on...my size-12 red blazer and a pair of black leggings. (The director actually loved my blazer!) I felt relieved that things had been decided without my having to take a stand. My upbringing did not create a healthy affection for confrontation. I&amp;#039;d love it if everyone always got along, and nothing ever got tense. I especially like it when everybody likes me! Until that point in my career, I hadn&amp;#039;t run into much opposition. And if I did, either my manager spoke for me or I would meekly go along with what others wanted to avoid trouble. Once the filming started, I realized that the director and I had very different ideas about what this commercial should be. Earlier he had instructed the gorgeous male model (who looked like a cross between Paul Newman and the Marlboro Man) and me that this was to be a very romantic scene. I was OK with that. But the director&amp;#039;s notion of romantic and mine were completely different. He really wanted me to suck face with this guy! I&amp;#039;m not a prude, and the guy was really cute, but my gut told me that there was more at stake here for me than a perfume commercial. I was establishing a public image, and I had to think very carefully about how I should be portrayed. With the success of my first single had come a big bunch of young female fans, many of them under the age of 12. I found myself thinking about those girls and how they might feel about my kissing a stranger. What message did I want to send them about me, about relationships, about women&amp;#039;s roles \u2014 heck, about perfume and TV commercials? My manager hadn&amp;#039;t arrived at the shoot yet \u2014 and that turned out to be one of the best things that&amp;#039;s ever happened to me. Though in those days I would rather have pulled out my fingernails with pliers than make a fuss, I just couldn&amp;#039;t do something that didn&amp;#039;t feel good. Despite the butterflies in my stomach, I stood my ground, and shut down the shoot. And in that moment, when I stood explaining to the director why I couldn&amp;#039;t do what he was asking \u2014 that this wonderful opportunity was a tiny slice of a bigger pie, and that it had to fit with all of the other pieces \u2014 I grew up a little. To my amazement, the director backed down. Eventually, we got a flirty, fun commercial; Revlon and I had a great working relationship; and I learned how to take care of what was right for me. It was a turning point in my life. Recalling this got me to thinking about other moments that shaped and changed me. Traveling through the past looking for turning points has been clarifying. It&amp;#039;s a great way to see what&amp;#039;s made you the person you are, how far you&amp;#039;ve come, and where you&amp;#039;re headed. I highly recommend it! Sometimes it&amp;#039;s knowing the right person at the right time in your life that has a profound impact. When you grow up in a small town like I did (Monticello, GA \u2014 population 2,500, give or take a few), you end up being raised not only by your parents, but by the whole community. I don&amp;#039;t know if I was a good kid by nature or if I was well-behaved because I realized that if I did something wrong, my parents would probably know about it before I got home. One of my favorite community watchdogs was Miss Betty J. Maxwell. Miss Betty was a role model for me \u2014 a confident, independent woman. She never married, traveled the world, was even the mayor of Monticello for a time, and had a wicked sense of humor that she carried with her all of her 77 years. When she met my husband, Garth, she still had a good eye for a handsome man. After he gave her a big hug, she looked as if she&amp;#039;d fallen in love. I expected her to tell me what a nice young man he was, but all she said was, &amp;quot;Patricia! You didn&amp;#039;t tell me he had such a good body!&amp;quot; I still smile when I remember that. When I was 15, Betty introduced me to her lifelong friend Shirley Jones. (Yes, that Shirley Jones, the singer and actress.) They got to know each other when Betty&amp;#039;s sister, Dot, married a man from Smithton, PA (population 450), Shirley&amp;#039;s hometown, where Betty would visit. Shirley was 13 and Betty was 16 when they met. I think they bonded because Betty could drive! Everyone in Monticello knew that I aspired to sing professionally. One day Betty called and said, &amp;quot;Come up here to the house and sing for Shirley.&amp;quot; Now, when Miss Betty told you to do something, you did it. I was scared to death, but Daddy drove me up to her house, and I sang for Shirley Jones. Shirley may not remember the sound advice she gave me, but it stayed with me and it&amp;#039;s something that I tell young singers today. &amp;quot;Get your education,&amp;quot; she said, &amp;quot;and if you see small opportunities, take them. Each one could be a stepping-stone to something bigger.&amp;quot; She was right. I finished high school, moved to Nashville for college, and set out to break into the music business. Every night when I called home with news of my experiences, my mom and dad would encourage me to keep taking those small steps. Getting hired to sing background vocals on a demo \u2014 a song that publishers and songwriters record as a &amp;quot;demonstration&amp;quot; to interest artists and record labels in their work \u2014 turned into a big break for me. Doing those first background vocals led to singing lots of demos for other writers, and that meant being heard by every influential producer and record-label executive in Nashville. The small steps Shirley talked about ended up opening huge doors for me. And I never would have met her if it hadn&amp;#039;t been for Miss Betty, who offered an example of strength and independence that I&amp;#039;ve drawn from all my life. Another defining moment was reading All the King&amp;#039;s Men as a high school senior, in Mrs. Charlotte Crawley&amp;#039;s Advanced Placement English class. She was the toughest teacher I had in high school, even tougher than some of my college professors. We spent the year analyzing poems and books, writing papers on subjects like &amp;quot;Underlying Themes in the Poem &amp;#039;Kudzu,&amp;#039; by James Dickey.&amp;quot; Give me a break! I liked English, but at the time, I couldn&amp;#039;t see the point in figuring out what made kudzu tick! I was happy when we moved on to Robert Penn Warren&amp;#039;s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. That was when the light started to shine for me in a lot of ways. First of all, I began a love affair with reading that continues to this day; if you ask anyone who knows me what one of my favorite pastimes is, they will say sitting in a corner with a cup of coffee and a good book. And my perception of the world was dramatically changed. Until I read All the King&amp;#039;s Men, the story of a southern governor who&amp;#039;s an idealistic populist turned corrupt, I took everything people said at face value \u2014 I believed that they were speaking the truth. That&amp;#039;s how I was raised. But as I analyzed the characters in the book, I started to understand that people aren&amp;#039;t necessarily who they seem to be. The book showed me that the truth was much more complicated than I&amp;#039;d thought \u2014 a big aha! moment for a high school senior. You might call it the seed of cynicism, but I see it instead as learning to look at the world optimistically \u2014 but with caution. One turning point came when I was finally able to forgive myself for being divorced. Sometimes I look at my personal life and want to pretend that I was never married before Garth. Divorce is so common and accepted in America that beating myself up over it may sound ridiculous. But I was raised to believe that divorce wasn&amp;#039;t an option; to me, divorce equaled failure. I wasn&amp;#039;t able to change that equation until I found myself in the right relationship. I grew up in a place where most people thought that if you weren&amp;#039;t married by 21, you were an old maid, and I absorbed some of that mentality. Like a lot of young people, I found someone I enjoyed being with and thought, &amp;quot;Marriage is what people do.&amp;quot; (Even though my gut said, in a very tiny, easy-to-ignore voice, &amp;amp;lt;&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not sure this is what I should do.&amp;quot;) And my communication skills were pretty horrible back then; I had trouble saying what I was really feeling. I had role models to show me what marriage was supposed to look like \u2014 my mom and dad, happy for the 45 years they had together; my grandparents Winnes and Lizzie Paulk, madly in love their entire lives \u2014 but until I found the love of my life, I didn&amp;#039;t know what it actually felt like. Feeling deep, true love made me a little more compassionate toward the young woman I used to be. From the safety of the right relationship, I was able to look closely at my past and realize that back then, I didn&amp;#039;t yet know what I needed to know in order to make better decisions. (I&amp;#039;m not knocking my previous relationships. If anything, I&amp;#039;d like to say I&amp;#039;m sorry for causing another person to make a big mistake, too. Hopefully, we&amp;#039;ve learned some good, though hard, lessons from what we&amp;#039;ve been through.) It took me 40 years to figure this all out, but better late than never! After learning to forgive myself, the biggest lesson from being divorced is about trusting my gut. Finding love led to another huge turning point in my life \u2014 becoming a stepparent, or &amp;quot;bonus mom,&amp;quot; as I like to call it, when I married Garth four years ago. Before I moved to Oklahoma to live with Garth and his three daughters, I&amp;#039;d only been responsible for myself and my dog. Now, granted, I took really great care of Roseanne, a chow/shepherd rescue dog who lived to the ripe old age of 15, but I learned quickly that it&amp;#039;s not the same. For one thing, dogs are more forgiving if you forget to wash their soccer uniforms. The job of raising the girls fell to Garth; their mom, Sandy; and me. I really didn&amp;#039;t know a thing about parenting. I never even babysat as a teenager! I vividly remember the first time I was alone with the girls. Garth had gone into Tulsa on an errand, and I volunteered to hang out with the kids for a couple of hours. There I was, trying to impress them with my coolness and wit, and they were staring at me as if to say, &amp;quot;What do we do now?&amp;quot; Luckily, I liked to color as much as they did! They made me feel comfortable immediately by being accepting, a trait that I&amp;#039;m proud to say they&amp;#039;ve carried into young womanhood. That day I learned to jump in with both feet and not be so scared of making a mistake. It was the day I became a parent \u2014 the most important turning point in my life so far. I&amp;#039;ve grown up a lot in the past 10 years. You have to get to 45 to admit that you didn&amp;#039;t know everything at 21! There&amp;#039;s no time limit on becoming an adult; some lessons take longer than others. A simple yet huge one: My happiness is up to me. Wow, what a concept! It&amp;#039;s easy to blame everything that goes wrong in your life on someone else. It&amp;#039;s a lot harder to look in the mirror and say, &amp;quot;What am I doing to create this situation, and how can I change it?&amp;quot; Garth helped me a lot with this lesson, telling me that if I say to myself that I can&amp;#039;t do something, then I can&amp;#039;t. He&amp;#039;s taught me to see obstacles as challenges. For example, I want to be fit and cute, but I don&amp;#039;t want to work hard to do it. For years, I blamed everything and everybody but me for my own laziness. When I started taking responsibility for my own actions, I started getting healthier. When I started telling myself that I could run a mile instead of telling myself that I couldn&amp;#039;t, I ran a mile. In fact, I ended up running my first 5K this year! I hope \u2014 I know \u2014 that some of the most valuable life-changing moments haven&amp;#039;t happened yet. It&amp;#039;s that openness to the next moment that keeps things interesting and exciting. I don&amp;#039;t spend time wondering what might be next; I just focus on trying to savor every day. Maybe that&amp;#039;s the biggest lesson of all. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/inspirational-stories/interviews/a18821/trisha-yearwood-life-changing-moments/>