Love is a powerful force. It will drive you to soar and to crash, to elation and to despair, to push forward and to pull back.

It drove Joannie Rochette, the Canadian figure skater whose mother suddenly and unexpectedly died days before the Olympics, to compete to honor her mother and walk away with a bronze medal. It drove Edwin van Calker, the driver of the Dutch 4-man bobsled team, to withdraw from the Olympics, enraging his coach and dashing the Olympic hopes of his teammates.

Joannie is being hailed as a hero, a triumphant athlete who stood tall under tremendous adversity. Edwin is being branded a goat, a coward who has disappointed a nation.

This is unfair. Edwin watched the Georgian luger perish and saw 30 other competitors crash on that same track. He listened to commentators repeatedly expressing the view that this particular track was dangerous. He thought about himself, his wife, his kids, and he decided the competition wasn’t worth the risk.

Have you ever been in a near death experience? Have you ever witnessed a fatal accident?

Many winter sports have inherent dangers. The athletes who compete exhibit bravery every time they take to the snow or ice. Van Calker’s decision took a different kind of bravery.

So who is the real hero?

In their own ways, they are each heroic, for different reasons and for different people. Rochette is a hero to her family and her nation for her performance and achievement under adversity. Van Calker is a hero to his family for coming home to them safe and sound.

Canadians will honor Rochette everywhere she goes. That’s easy for them. How will the Dutch respond to van Calker? Will they lift him up? Will they honor him? Those who do are also heroes.

BTW, regarding yesterday’s post, the Leopard can stand tall, having beaten skiers from such snow producing countries as Sweden, Canada, USA, Switzerland, Russia, Norway, Italy, Finland, and Austria. Congratulations!

My wife didn’t like the closing line of my initial post about the Olympics. So today and tomorrow I will try to make up for my transgression.

Yesterday I read a short article about the “Snow Leopard.” Reminiscent of the Jamaican bobsled team, Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, AKA the Snow Leopard, is Ghana’s only Olympic athlete in Vancouver. Asked what he is trying to achieve he said, “My goal is to try and beat some other countries who have snow.”

His event, the men’s slalom, is scheduled for today at 10 AM Vancouver time. That is TV worth watching. I for one will be routing for the Leopard.

My mother-in-law is a genius. That’s not an easy thing to say, but I have to admit it. My daughters needed to get a shot. My mother-in-law suggested we bring Hershey’s kisses and the moment after the shot went in their arms pop the chocolate into their mouths.

So it became shotchocolate.

Instead of ow! Ooowwwww!!! OOOOOWWWWWWW!!!!!!

The sound was owmmmm.

It worked brilliantly. Afterwards my daughter wanted to know why we did this chocolate thing. So we talked about how the brain can only pay attention to so many things at a time. If you give it other stuff to pay attention to it won’t be as aware of the pain and you won’t feel it as much.

In the same way when you listen to music during a workout you are less aware of the pain of the workout.

And this concept plays out in all aspects of our lives. When you become aggravated, angry, bitter, sad, upset, what is your chocolate equivalent? What do you use to distract your brain?

I’m not saying you shouldn’t process or pay attention to problems in your world. But when you are fixated on the problems and focused on your pain, your brain becomes a super processor of negative emotion. It’s time for you to find some other input for your brain.

Now unfortunately I am stuck, focused on the painful notion that my mother-in-law is a genius. Someone, please, give me some chocolate.

EXTRA: Tomorrow I’ll share a related experience that has dramatically changed my life and eliminated one of my biggest regular fights with my wife.

The last two posts have been about everyday heroes - people who saw big problems in areas of safety and child support and worked to overcome them.

The essence of heroism is that you take action. You relentlessly believe you can influence a situation and you take actions based on that belief. But what happens when the influence you want is to tear someone down? What happens if what you really want is revenge?

Companies beware. This can happen too.

This is a cautionary tale for corporations and an inspiration for disgruntled customers. This video has received over 7 million views. United offered compensation once the video went viral, compensation that the musician refused and recommended that they give to charity. He is staying true to his promise to produce three videos about his experience of haggling unsuccessfully with the airline.

True, this experience hasn’t exactly hurt him financially. But before you view this as a quick cash grab, understand that he spent over 9 months trying to resolve this more amicably.

So yes, even vindictiveness can be heroic, especially when it is authentic and tongue in cheek.

Yesterday I wrote about someone I called a hero. I labeled him a hero because he took action to change something important. Armed with an idea he was welcomed by an organization he hadn’t previously known and created something beautiful that appears to be making a real difference.

Yet he also had experience as a director, know-how in movie making. What can you do if all you have is grit and determination?

Karen Silliter had just that. Her two kids were in college and her husband owed her years of unpaid child support, money she desperately needed. Meanwhile, he was living in a wealthy community in another state and had claimed to have no money.

So what did she do? I’ll give you the short story. Her efforts brought her to the DMV, real estate offices, voter registration, the tax office, the county registry of deeds, the Department of Revenue, newspapers, the DA’s office, banks, the courts, her Senator’s office, and more. There were warrants, letters, and faxes. There were dumb blonde routines (her words) and unexpected helpers. There were liens, subpoenas, and flight risks.

In the end she discovered that he had covered his own wealth by starting and running his business under his new wife’s name so he could maintain his unemployed status.

So what did she do then?

She changed the law. With a heroic effort she worked with attorneys and legislators to change the law so that anyone who conspires to help a delinquent parent hide their assets will be liable for the same fines and jail time as the delinquent parent.

They even had a signing ceremony with her, the Senator, and the Governor.

None of us needs any special talents to be heroic. We don’t need superpowers. Just find your grit and determination and that can be enough to take on the world.

If you haven’t seen this, it’s well worth watching. Posted less than a month ago it has well over 1 million views.

The writer/director has no affiliation with the organization that sponsored this video. He doesn’t work for any traffic safety organization.

Daniel Cox simply had an idea and wanted to help. His concept turned out to be a good fit for what this organization wanted to do. This video is the result.

US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (for whom my alma mater was named) said, “Most of the things worth doing in this world had been declared impossible before they were done.”

Maybe no one told Daniel that this video was impossible, but he could easily have told himself that he was powerless to do anything about an issue as big as seatbelt use.

Instead, he chose the heroic path.

Someone told me recently she had hit rock bottom. The source of her anguish was difficulty at work. Her family was fine – everyone was healthy. Her finances were in great shape – no problem there. She had no physical malady. Yet her view of her life was “rock bottom.”

Most of us know that the way we speak shapes our reality. The more we talk of “rock bottom” the more our life takes on the characteristics of that lowest depth. So why do we do that to ourselves?

I think part of the problem is that we don’t know what we should be saying. We take a convenient term that fits the thing we are noticing at the moment and we place the label. Since it seems to fit we use it over and over, not realizing that every time we say it we make it more valid, more solid, more a part of our reality.

My boss is a jerk.
This job sucks.
I can’t.
I give up.
Why is nothing easy?
My child is a difficult child.
I’ve hit rock bottom.

So what’s the alternative? If our words shape our reality, what should we be saying? Try these on. Pick one that works for you. If it fits, use it over and over until it is your reality.

This is nothing.
I’m better than this.
I can beat this.
I can do it.

Or one of my favorites:

Wow! I am so unbelievably lucky.

So you failed. You made a big mistake. Now what?

There is a wonderful story I heard in grad school about a small paper goods company in Pennsylvania in the 80’s. One of the Vice Presidents of this company made an error that cost the company over $10,000,000 (a lot of money at that time). The CEO was asked after the fact why he didn’t fire the VP. His response, “I just spent $10,000,000 to train him. Why would I fire him?”

Not all bosses would take that view. So here are two questions.

If you are the one who experienced failure, how do you clearly show (a) that you’ve learned and (b) what you’ve learned.
If you are the boss (or the parent), how do you show the person who failed that it’s okay to (a) admit it and (b) discuss what they learned.

If you never make a big mistake it’s because you never take a big chance. If you make mistakes and cover them up you’re more likely to make them again and the people around you are more likely to make them as well.

It’s not true that you’ll never know until you try. Or at least it’s only partially true. You can learn a lot by trying, but you can learn even more by failing. You can learn:

What causes failure
How to react to adversity
Who your real friends are
How passionate you are about what you do
Who you really want to be
That you can be imperfect
That you can bounce back

So it’s okay. Go fail. Even fail gloriously. Just make sure you learn along the way.

Yesterday I wrote about a system for receiving feedback. Today I’ll expand on that a bit with a warning for how NOT to receive feedback.

How much do you love feedback? Isn’t it awesome? It has to be the best invention since ice cream. Right? No?

How about when the feedback is wrong? Even better, how about when the person giving you the feedback is really the one causing all the problems? Then it’s fantastic. Right?

You just explain to that person how their feedback is flawed and then give them the feedback that they so clearly need and deserve. It works every time. Right?

No?

There is no such thing as a great feedback exchange. It doesn’t work. I know you’ve envisioned it. You’ve probably tried it too. They make their point - tell you about the mistakes you’ve made. Then you explain how completely wrong they are and point out how in fact they are the ones who made all the mistakes. It culminates in their humble and impressed admission that in fact they were wrong the whole time and you were right. Perfect! Astounding! And of course, complete fantasy.

Feedback is a gift. And this gift cannot be mutually given. It is uni-directional. As soon as you try to give a similar gift back the feedback becomes defensive, competitive, and antagonistic.

This is a question of timing. If you are overly concerned with the past, then being right and standing up for what you’ve done guide your actions, create the feedback exchange, and result in anger and frustration for both parties.

If you look to the future, then feedback becomes a window into the other person’s psyche and how best to manage that relationship going forward. It doesn’t matter what’s happened. It only matters how you can make the most of that relationship. No feedback exchange necessary. No fight. Life is good.