What If You Could: Chasing Your Dreams Just As You Are - Hardcover

Ardern, Jacinda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593692217 ISBN 13: 9780593692219

Verlag: Philomel Books, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

From the former prime minister of New Zealand comes a guide for young readers on chasing your dreams and embracing the unexpected qualities that truly make a person strong.

When Jacinda Ardern became prime minister of New Zealand, she was one of the youngest people and, at the time, the youngest woman leading a country. Many people thought she would never succeed—herself included. Wouldn’t her insecurity, overthinking, worrying, and kindness stop her from being able to achieve her goals?

As she soon learned, though, it was exactly those attributes—as well as caring and wanting to listen to and serve others—that made her into the empathetic, adaptable, and effective leader that she was.

While sharing her own experiences and challenges as a young person, and then as prime minister, Jacinda Ardern asks readers to realize that true strength, success, and power come from embracing ourselves just as we are—imposter syndrome and all.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

The Right Honourable Dame Jacinda Ardern was elected the fortieth prime minister of New Zealand at the age of thirty-seven, becoming the country’s youngest prime minister in more than 150 years. Since leaving office, Ardern has established the Field Fellowship on empathetic leadership. She continues to work on climate action and is the patron of the Christchurch Call to Action to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online. Ardern also works on a number of projects that support women and girls but considers her greatest roles to be those she will hold for life, including that of mom and proud New Zealander. You can follow Jacinda Ardern on Instagram @JacindaArdern.

Ruby Shamir is an author, literary researcher, and book adapter who has worked on numerous New York Times bestselling and award-winning books. She lives in the Bronx, New York, with her husband and three children. You can visit Ruby Shamir online at RubyShamir.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

What If You Could Listen

You could drive for thirty miles in the Kāingaroa Forest and wonder if there’s anything left on earth besides trees. That’s the view: radiata pines, each standing one hundred feet tall, as far as the eye can see. The forest is as vast as it is dense: tree upon tree, row upon row, mile upon mile. The sameness is broken by only two things. First, the road carving through the shadowy landscape, and then the radiata shoots, popping up sporadically and defiantly. These smaller, wilding pines look like the Christmas trees of my childhood—joyful but a bit pathetic, each with just a few sparse branches, enough for only a single string of tinsel that will never quite hide the exposed trunk.

Although Kāingaroa is man-made—it’s the second largest timber plantation in the southern hemisphere—it is easy to feel isolated there. It’s a forest that has been known to swallow up hunters and hikers who get lost among the pines. Damp mists are common, and light struggles to break through, especially after the sun dips behind the green peaks of the distant Te Urewera mountain ranges. Needles and cones collect on the forest floor, and the air is thick with the scent of resin and pine.

But an hour into the journey, just as you become certain you’ve reached the middle of nowhere, there is a break in the trees, and signs of human life return: A run-down forestry building with a rusted sign. A timber motel with small, neat rooms. Then, around the corner, a service station with three gas pumps that marks the entry to a town called Murupara.

As a young girl, I made that trip through the forest countless times. Today, when I close my eyes, I can still take myself there: the twisting road that gives way to the long stretch of blacktop, the gray mass of the mountains, rough trunks piercing the sky.

The first time I visited Murupara in 1985, I was four years old and sick with the flu in the back seat of my family’s Toyota Corona. In those days, I was also prone to car sickness, which was almost certainly made worse by my brown corduroy booster seat, little more than a wedge of dense foam covered in fabric. It gave me height, but it also exaggerated every turn in the road. Next to me sat my sister Louise, just eighteen months older than me, each of us clutching our teddy bears. She was also in a booster, and queasy, but not so much that she would stop asking questions of my parents:How much longer? Why can’t we stop? What if I need the toilet?

The windows were rolled down just enough that I could hang my fingers over the top and wiggle them in the open air. Beneath my dangling feet were the items that my mum made sure accompanied us on every long car trip: an old towel and an empty, half-gallon plastic ice cream container, in case we needed to throw up. She never threw anything away, and even this container would likely later be repurposed to store home-baked blueberry muffins. Between me and Louise, trapped inside a carboard box with small holes at the top, sat the most uncomfortable passenger of all: our gray rescue cat, Norm. The sedative from the vet was wearing off as he pressed his face up against the top of the box, whiskers sticking out through the holes.

It was moving day. We had left behind friends and family in the city of Hamilton, more than two hours to the northwest, because my dad had just taken a new job, as the police sergeant in Murupara, a place I’d never seen.


Dad had grown up in a large family in Te Aroha, a farming community in the shadow of mountains along the Waihou River. Like every region in New Zealand, Te Aroha was settled first by Māori, who’d navigated their way from Polynesia in waka (canoes) using stars, ocean swells, and sea life as their guides. These Māori tribes had lived on this land for hundreds of years before any European even knew it existed. Legend had it that the great chief Kahu climbed to the peak of a mountain to orient himself and was so moved to see his home from this vantage point that he named it Te Muri-aroha-o-Kahu, te aroha-tai, te aroha-uta, meaning “the love of Kahu for those on the coasts and those on the land.” Now it’s known simply as Mount Te Aroha, the mountain of love.

By the time my dad was born, the population of Te Aroha was majority pākehā, New Zealanders of European descent. My dad’s family ran the local drain-laying business, and Ardern and Sons had dug most of the drains in the area. As a boy, my dad had helped out, but when his family converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or what many know as Mormonism, Dad left Te Aroha to attend the Mormon boarding school. There he set his sights on doing something other than laying drains. He joined the New Zealand Police at age nineteen, serving first as a uniformed officer in Auckland and then as a detective in Hamilton.

Dad was endlessly interested in people; he always wanted to know about their lives. As a police officer, he didn’t simply want to know what crimes had been committed; he also wanted to know why. I would often hear him say that the police can’t arrest their way out of everything. He believed if you wanted to fix crime, you had to understand why it was happening in the first place. This isn’t to say he was soft. I doubt you could say that of anyone who investigated the brutal crimes my dad did: murder, robberies, and gang violence. He just looked at problems differently.

Policing is also different in New Zealand than in many countries. For one, officers don’t routinely carry guns. And while they have the power to make arrests, they use a British principle known as “policing by consent.” The idea is that police are essentially citizens in uniforms, and their authority stems from the approval and cooperation of the community. Although not everyone has always policed with this approach—and there have been examples of abuse of power in New Zealand’s police force—policing by consent is the model that officers are expected to follow, and it was what my dad believed in.

Dad was an excellent detective. He asked good questions, and people talked to him, sometimes sharing personal details. It wasn’t unusual for someone my father was questioning to pause and observe, “At least you’re listening to me.”

I remember as a young university student, sitting with Dad in a booth at Burger King in Hamilton. My back was to the counter when I looked up from my Whopper to see my dad lock eyes with someone he recognized. I flicked my head around in time to see a solidly built man lifting his eyebrows and nodding his head at Dad—a greeting in New Zealand we call the “east coast wave.” Dad did the same in return.

“Who’s that?” I asked, assuming it was likely someone he went to school with.

My dad started to unwrap his burger, and casually, he said, “Just a man I’ve arrested a few times.” Dad’s approach made an imprint on me, though I had no idea then that listening to people tell stories about their struggles and their lives would wind up being a big part of my own.

Dad enjoyed the work in Hamilton, but he wanted to run a station rather than just work in one. So, when I was a toddler, he began studying for his sergeant’s exams, which was no small effort. He already had a full-time job and a young family, and he was active in the Mormon church. To prepare, he rose before dawn, getting in an hour or two of study before the rest of us woke up. Then he would study again after dark.

But even when Dad passed all his exams, there was still the issue of finding a place that needed to hire a sergeant. Sergeant jobs...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Philomel Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593692217
• ISBN 13: 9780593692219
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar