We went bankrupt one time and lost everything. When I tell that story at my Women's Leadership LIVE conferences, people are shocked. I mean, our house was auctioned off and the car repossessed in the driveway. We had to start over again.

My number one philosophy for leadership is leadership by example. If you are not willing to do it yourself, how can you show others how to do it?

Being under the political spotlight is far different than anything I'd experienced before. Every word is a critical word. Sometimes you really aren't allowed to get your full thought out. A lot of it is about having a 30-second sound bite.

I have kids in high school that don't know how to balance a checkbook. We need to have that fundamental understanding of economics as we move forward to develop the next generation of young people.

I was an athlete in college - a quarterback, a leader - so people telling me what to do doesn't work.

As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold.

I don't think I've got a thick skin, but I've not felt particularly humiliated by the things which people think I would have felt humiliated by, such as losing my seat in 1997 and not being elected leader in 2001. In the second case, I felt relieved.

It teaches us how to run our lives individually. How to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all our public policy and everything in society. And that's the reason, as your congressman, I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I'll continue to do that.