“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child – What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time.

Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids. They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.

For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.

I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.

Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.

Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.

It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.

We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.

When they go low, we go high.

We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.

Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an angry black woman. I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it angry or black or woman ?

Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.

But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. And for me, it felt like that’s exactly what she was planting—a suggestion of failure long before I’d even tried to succeed.

They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.

Real beauty is when you’re centered, when our mind is with the truth. That is how every baby is beautiful because they are centered.

You never really understand your personality, unless you have a Mini Me who acts the same way

I’m a natural-born boss, I have to say. I just like to be good at things. Even as a child, I was boss of my family.

I think that from the time you start playing sports as a child you see that your responsibility to your team is to play the best that you can play as an individual. And yet, not take anything away from being part of a team.

One thing I teach my children and want everyone to know that even if you happen to be on a pedestal you should have the capacity to turn around and say, ‘I don’t know’. We are scared to go wrong. Downfall is part of life.

By no means could I play at the level of these kids who play in the NHL now but as 50-year-olds go, I feel really good and I feel blessed that I’m still healthy.

Treat your kid like a darling for the first five years. For the next five years, scold them. By the time they turn sixteen, treat them like a friend. Your grown up children are your best friends.

We played in an era where you were taught to hate your opponent. But life changes. I raise my kids differently than my mom and dad raised their kids.