By Ahad Sanwari

Copyright hellomagazine

Throughout her career, Goldie Hawn has been a fierce advocate for mental health and wellness. She took it a step further in 2003 when she created the Goldie Hawn Foundation, spearheaded by MindUp, a program dedicated to encouraging greater mental health awareness and development specifically in schools using neuroscience and the development of the brain as its main basis. Speaking at the 2025 Concordia Annual Summit on Tuesday, September 23, attended by HELLO!, the actress shone a light on the work of the foundation and her own journey with mental health.

When asked during her conversation with Concordia’s Matthew Swift about “emotional resilience” in her work and what that means to her, the 79-year-old opened up about a conversation she’d had with her youngest son Wyatt Russell during his early years as a hockey player. Wyatt, now 39, first made his way into the professional world through his love for sport.

He started playing ice hockey as a teenager, a goaltender, beginning a tenure with teams in Canada before playing collegiate hockey with the University of Alabama. In 2009, he moved to Europe to play professionally with teams in Germany and the Netherlands, but his career was cut short in 2010 due to injuries. Wyatt eventually began following his parents’ footsteps into acting.

Goldie remembered having a conversation with Wyatt when he was still a hockey player. “He had a concussion. I went to Toronto, he was sitting there in a black room, looking at his team win or lose. He couldn’t play. I took him to breakfast and I said, ‘You know what? The mark of a man is now how many times you get knocked down. It’s how fast you get up.'”

“And that’s what I look at,” she continued. “The grit. The ability to have resilience in the face of obstacle. And in the face of when things aren’t going well. But there’s no prescriptive for that, except a mindset. So when I look at what is our mindset, what is our state of mind today…that ultimately will lead you to the next thing you do, the next way you relate, and the world that you will create.”

The Private Benjamin star opened up about some of the early experiences that had influenced her journey into the world of mental health, starting with her “first” fear of the atom bomb as a teenager, which proved “traumatic” to her at the time. She then remembered a moment back when she was just 11 years old and asked what she wanted to be when she grew up and her response was simply “Happy.”

“And the question there is, why did I want to be happy? What was I thinking at 11 years old? That maybe when I grew up, I wouldn’t be happy? Or maybe there were aspects of me not wanting to grow up at all, keep the child in me, afraid I would lose that to become one of those grown up people that wouldn’t be happy? I don’t know,” she continued.

Goldie continued to look back on her legendary career, charting the points at which she’d truly been happy as a chorus girl getting her start as a dancer, before being thrust into an immeasurable amount of fame and scrutiny, which she couldn’t take. She eventually began working with a therapist, spanning eight years, to help heal from it.