J Lo shares with Red the advice she lives by
DON’T BE AFRAID TO FIGURE YOURSELF OUT
‘I feel like I’m in my second, third, or fourth act. I feel like I’ve lived several lifetimes already and I’ve had to figure myself out along the way, work out why I felt a certain way; or got into relationships that didn’t serve me. And I finally realised, “It’s me. It’s all me. I got to fix some stuff. I need to understand my own worth and value.” And I know people think that’s crazy: “She’s famous!” But that’s not inner happiness; that’s not inner peace. Fame doesn’t give you self-worth or self-value. You give yourself worth. You give yourself value; not people or things or accolades or money. Nobody can tell you how great you are. You have to understand how great you are. You have to find that out yourself. And it took me a while to get to that place.’
SPARE YOUR DAUGHTER THE FAIRY TALE
‘I grew up with the fairy tale. “A prince is going save you”, “Wait for true love and that’s what makes you happy”, “If you’re not married, you’re not happy”. Well, let me tell you, my daughter is eons ahead of me already. She said to me when she was eight, “I don’t know if I want to get married, Mommy.” And when she said that I was like “Yes!” because I’ve been teaching her to love herself since she was little. I’ve had to learn that as an adult, and she is doing it right now! You don’t have to be afraid to be alone. You can be happy on your own. You can know you’re okay. It was such a relief.’
AGEING IS ALL ABOUT ATTITUDE
‘I find myself thinking about being youthful and timeless at every age. At some point, ageing is going to happen, but until then, you decide how strong you’re going to be. How much you’re going to move. How much you’re going to work. How active you are going to be in your mind, with your life, with your body. You decide. And you can keep it strong. You can keep it good. There’ll be a time when I will slow down and that will be what I want. But right now my goal is to only get better day by day, and not to get to a certain point – like they want to do with women and have us fall off a cliff. No! To deteriorate. No! Old ideas. We are getting richer and richer by the day.’
WHEN YOUR FITNESS REGIME STOPS WORKING, CHANGE IT
I don’t kill myself, like I used to when I was in my 20s. I used to work out before I got to set. I used to get up at five in the morning and go to the gym. I don’t do that any more. Now I work out three times a week, do hot yoga and some of the dancing and that’s it. But I keep it up. I do want to keep getting better. I don’t want to plateau and I don’t want to start going downhill. You have to find out what works for your body; everybody is different and if you plateau, you have to change. You have to say, “This is not working any more,” and do a bit more, or do something different.’
LISTEN TO THE ADVICE OF OTHERS
Louise Hay [American motivational writer] helped me so much. I met her before she died, having read all her books, and she gave me a tape just after I got divorced [from Marc Anthony] that helped me get through the first month. She said, “Listen to this for 30 days.” I was saying to her, “I just feel like I messed up. I failed.” And she said, “You know Jennifer, when you are learning a new dance, when you mess up a step, do you beat yourself up? Do you stop? Do you give up? Do you say, I’m not going to learn this dance?” And she goes, “No, because you know you can do it. You just keep on dancing until you get the dance right. It’s a new dance. Right?” So each act of your life is a new dance. And I love that.’
FIND A PARTNER AT THE SAME LIFE STAGE AS YOU
Both Alex and I are Latino. We are both self-made. He was always the hardest-working baseball player that was – me, the same. We have that in common. We have the same work ethic. We also appreciate and know that coming from nothing, we always want to try to help and give back and teach our kids that. Because our kids are growing up differently as well. They’re growing up more privileged than we did. So they need to see us work hard and they also need to see us give back, so they know that it is an important part of life.’
YOUR KIDS CAN MAKE YOU A BETTER PERSON
‘Once I had my kids, I realised I had to be better, I had to do better. So I started doing a lot of work on myself. I started searching spiritually, religion, all of it. Self-help, life coach, meditation, yoga, more meditation, different types of working out. Just trying to find how I could be the best me. You’ve taken the knocks so your kids can be better, right? And that’s the evolution of life. You can prepare your kids. You can prepare them in a different way than we were prepared. Not to get political, but even these kids who are standing up against school shootings and things like that, I look at them and look at my kids and I have hope for the world.’