Our Speaker Cheryl Bernard
At the age of 23, Cheryl started an insurance brokerage and propelled the agency to a multi- million dollar brokerage in just eleven years. At the age of 43, she helped Canada win a silver medal in curling at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games. In June 2014 Cheryl retired from competitive curling and now works with TSN as a broadcast analyst, she is the Ambassador and Spokesperson for Goodwill of Alberta and she spends much of her time doing motivational speaking for corporations sharing the lessons learned from sport and life.- Cheryl spoke about her journey and experiences surrounding the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver.
- The experience was amazing … playing for Canada, in Canada, in our biggest games ever was a dream come true for her team and for all those Canadian athletes.
- Wearing the red and white and entering BC Place to the roar of the crowd is still beyond words, the realization hit them that they were Olympians.
- Two weeks later, standing on the podium, they were so very proud. As the silver medal was placed around her neck, Cheryl saw more than a shiny piece of silver with a n incredible beautiful design … she saw all the effort and support needed to achieve it (coach, family, friends and hours of support). She also saw a choice, how was she going to choose to define the moment? Won the silver or lost the gold? In that moment, Cheryl chose for how her next chapter was going to be written and she chose to see the silver that she won.
- This led her to the philosophical question of how can our lives change is we are the author of our own future. When we realize that we all have the ability to write our own storyline by the choices we make, we then become the author.
- Resilience is Cheryl’s message and choosing the write that into your life story.
- Resilience is built in to each of us by the decisions we make, by our attitude we choose to start the day, how we choose to filter the opinions of others, and how we choose to deal with failures and setbacks.
- Cheryl shared 3 stories:
- First story is about choosing how we react to life issues
Athletes have to make and hit hundreds of targets to succeed. If getting to the top is difficult, staying at the top is more so. Complacency can become an issue. Stress and pressure is unrelenting … and it makes no difference whether you are talking about sports or careers or at home. Cheryl has been told many times how relaxed they looked and were the games stressful … “Hell yes, they were stressful.” A great sports psychologist who told them they could choose the 30 million Canadians as fans cheering you or as the pressure of the expectation of the team medaling (as a positive influence or as a negative pressure). They made the choice to view it as a positive. Just go out there and have fun … way easier said than done. They did make the conscious choice to enjoy every minute of the games. Cheryl’s belief is that life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we choose to react to it. Attitude can make or break a life, a home, a company, (Editor’s Note: or a Rotary club). “We cannot change the past, we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way, we cannot change the inevitable, but the one thing we can do is play on the one string that we have, and that is the understanding that we have the ability to choose”.
- Second story is about controlling the outside noise
Outside noise are comments, opinions, criticism that we all hear in our everyday life. At the time they won the right to play for Canada in the Olympics, Cheryl was 43 years of age, making her one of the two oldest Olympians at the games. The media loved it but Cheryl does not and has not focused on age. The day they checked into the Olympic village Cheryl did get a wakeup call ... checking in was with a room full of kids. Once to the counter Cheryl takes “candies” for her team. The candies turned out to be condoms, which caused a horrified look from the check-in nurse … Age had taught Cheryl perseverance as she had thought of giving up many times. Before they won the chance to compete for Canada and in spite of winning many events they had been called the best team to never win a major.
They still believed. Chose to ignore the media and the critics, and to write their own story.
- Final story talks about relationships
- Great teams and business leaders talk about the law of the inner circle (those people closest to you, those people you surround yourself with, will determine the level of your success – if you surround yourself with good people, they can help you do more and achieve more than you can ever do alone. Nothing is more important than the relationships you create. The importance of that message became crystal clear to Cheryl after one of the toughest losses of her career (The 2010 Olympic gold medal game). Venue was electrifying that day …Cheryl’s husband described it like Flames fans on two for one beer day. Sound was louder than a rock concert. They were up one point going into the 10th end. Feeling calm, threw last rock well, called to clean, but rock did not respond as expected … this allow the other team to tie the game, which they did. Team came together immediately after that with no panic, no worries, and said let’s just get them in the extra end. Cheryl had a final shot of a double take out to win a gold medal. Cheryl had been making that shot all year but this time she did not make that shot. Missed a gold medal my millimeters. Immediately after the game is mayhem out there with the participants being rushed so the media can get there quotes before the medal Ceremony. With officials pulling on them, the team still came together and hugged with one of them saying “I am really proud of us” (Editor’s note: during the Rotary luncheon at this point in Cheryl’s presentation and again while I was typing up my notes, this brought tears to my eyes). This is more amazing than anyone can understand … at that moment you are raw and vulnerable, and sometimes we do not see the best in athletes, but in front of the world they were able to show what team looks like. Immediately after the medal ceremony they are rushed directly to the CTV press conference in front of hundreds of media, the five of them (facing the hoards – editor’s words). Their team still had not had a chance to say anything to each other and Cheryl was barely holding it together. Media starts asking all their questions. They ask Cheryl about the medal, how she felt about the medal, about missing the shot (to this day one of the toughest things she has ever had to do). Finally one of the media asked Susan (the team’s third) how she felt about losing that game and as Cheryl describes it … Susan jumped across the media bench to answer and she said “I am so glad you asked me that.”. She said that they would not have won the Olympic trials or had a chance at a gold medal unless Cheryl had played like she did this year and made the shots she did. She also said there is no one they would rather have thrown that last rocks for us. It was that exact moment that Cheryl understood how amazing that team was, what incredible relationships that their team had created in the years leading up to that gold medal match. Cheryl is now a true believer that the measure of a person is more in how they handle their defeats than how they handle their successes (Editor’s note: the progressives movement to eliminate completion from kids sports has had the unexpected consequence of providing kids with less opportunity to grow by having dealing with defeat all the while having smoke blown up their backsides). Their entire team measured up that day. In sports and in business sometimes you are lucky enough to succeed, at other times you can be lucky enough to fail because at those time you are shown some incredible life lessons. Cheryl’s message that day was that the relationships were more valuable than any gold medal. Sport parallels human struggle. Who Cheryl is today is someone who is miles (Editor’s note: I am sure she meant kilometers) ahead of who she was when she stepped onto that podium. Resilience is defined as using your energy productively to emerge from adversity stronger than ever. People and corporations with resiliency take charge and move forward after losses, they learn and come back stronger and better than ever. Cheryl suggested letting yourself fail (big, glaring, confidence shaking errors) once in a while. Failure is a way to confirm you are putting yourself out there, that you are taking risks and giving yourself the opportunity to be better.
- One last story: sometimes you have to hear the noise …
The day after the gold medal game the team was a little down and asked their driver to take them for some Starbucks therapy to a nearby coffee shop. They were dressed in baseball hats and jeans and were fairly inconspicuous (or so they thought). They placed their order and were standing in line and suddenly the barista behind the counter starts to sing O’ Canada as loud as you can image all by herself. They were standing there stunned and one by one the employees joined in then all the customers stood up and joined in and people came in off the streets and they sang the entire anthem they were so proud. Cheryl’s team just stood there with tears in their eyes and realized they were very proud too. This incident led Cheryl to understand what the next chapter was going to look like, she saw that they had won the silver medal and made the country very proud.
Everything you become or achieve is based on your choices and your chosen paths.
- No one will know the strength of their character until it has been tested by adversity. Either take what life brings to you and learn from it an allow you to make you better or you allow it to tear you down. That choice does not belong to fate, that choice belongs to you. That is grit, that is resilience.
After a few questions from the floor, President Sid thanked Cheryl for her inspiration talk.