12 badass quotes by Michelle Obama

Becoming, an intimate and inspiring memoir of Michelle Obama released this year and has become a bestseller. We have curated 12 badass quotes by her. You may be an ambitious leader, a woman restarter, a manager with children or looking for a job, it would be unbecoming to not read becoming. 

1. I sensed already that the sacrifices would be more mine than his. 

2. I felt it every time we gathered, the collective force of all these women trying to do right by their kids: In the end, no matter what, I knew we’d help one another out and we’d all be okay. 

3. (As a mother) I was always aware of everything I could have followed through on and didn’t. There were certain small-scale projects I chose not to take on. There were young employees whom I could have mentored better than I did. You hear all the time about the trade-offs of being a working mother. These were mine. If I’d once been someone who threw herself completely into every task, I was now more cautious, protective of my time, knowing I had to maintain enough energy for life at home. 

4. Confidence, I’d learned then, sometimes needs to be called from within. I’ve repeated the same words to myself many times now, through many climbs. Am I good enough? Yes I am. 

5. I was being watched with a certain kind of anticipation, especially by women, maybe especially by professional working women, who wondered whether I'd bury my education and management experience to fold myself into some prescribed first lady pigeonhole. 

6. I was either hard-driving and angry or, with my garden and messages about healthy eating, I was a disappointment to feminists, lacking a certain stridency. Several months before Barack was elected, I’d told a magazine interviewer that my primary focus in the White House would be to continue my role as “mom in chief” in our family. I'd said it casually but the phrase caught hold and was simplified across press. The truth was I intended to do everything to work with purpose and parent with care. 

7. You may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be. 

8. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high. 

9. I can hurt you and get away with it. It was an expression of hatred that had generally been kept out of polite company, but still lived in the marrow of our supposedly enlightened society—alive and accepted enough that someone like Donald Trump could afford to be cavalier about it. Every woman I know recognized it. Every person who’s ever been made to feel “other” recognized it. 

10. It was precisely what so many of us hoped our own children would never need to experience, and yet probably would. Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power. Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities—in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal. Either way, they accumulate. We carry them everywhere, to and from school and work, at home while raising our children, at our places of worship, anytime we try to advance. 

11. 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 became a mother, but I still have a lot to learn from and give to my children. 

12. We need to remember the power of every vote. I continue, too, to keep myself connected to a force that’s larger and more potent than any one election, or leader, or news story—and that’s optimism. For me, this is a form of faith, an antidote to fear. Optimism reigned in my family’s little apartment on Euclid Avenue.

Michelle was a working mother. Think about how many eyes are on working mothers. The parents, in laws, husband, colleagues, just about everybody has an opinion. Now multiply them by a million. Those many people carefully watched each step Michelle took. She did all this gracefully. Her secret sauce for parenting and being a woman in the workplace is the book. 

Balancing worklife and safety concerns successfully, women in India are marching on in their careers. Becoming is a must read for every woman juggling five different lives at once.