I'm not trying to snowboard for other people anymore. That just kind of comes with age and growing up. That's helped me a lot. Some of that started right after the last Olympics (in Vancouver).

I think I've done a pretty good job of not compartmentalizing my life. I take my core values and I live them out at home like I would in my snowboarding like I would at church with my friends.

People ask a lot about how I can be a believer in a culture that perhaps is counter cultural to what you believe in. I've come to the conclusion that I'm able to be in this culture and in this industry and fruitful because I don't look to my circumstances to determine what I believe to be true about God.

Make your relationships more important than your accomplishments .

2006 Games -by then, my identity had started to shift. Before that, my identity was in snowboarding. That's how people knew me and that's how I knew myself. That's where I got a lot of my self worth. That began to shift and I started to understand that I didn't get my worth from people or from the things that I did. It was from Christ. If I hadn't had that shift in my life, I think my world would have come crumbling down.

We're not meant to do it on our own. We're meant to do life with God and with each other. I've been fortunate to have friends that are willing to invest in me even on the days when I'm not able to invest back into them. I'm thankful for people that have that selfless attitude and have helped me become a successful person and a successful athlete.

I thought being a Christian was about following rules and going to church and being good all the time, but this girl helped me understand that it's about having a relationship with God. That was where things shifted for me.