The 111 Files: Challenge is how to respond

Basketball stars like LeBron James know what it takes to overcome obstacles. Photo / File

Unlike Richie McCaw, LeBron James is not a household name in New Zealand.

However, both are highly successful sportsmen who have achieved at an extraordinary level in their respective sports.

Some of you might have seen James on television the other night, pulling off a "buzzer beating" long shot in the last second of a basketball game to secure a victory for his team.

James is now one of only two players in the history of professional basketball to win a game by scoring a long-range, three-point "buzzer beater" on three separate occasions. The other player is James' childhood hero, the legendary Michael Jordan.

Jordan and James have a lot in common.

Both developed an understanding at an early stage that, if they were to be successful, they were going to have to overcome a lot of disappointments and setbacks.

Jordan once summed it up this way.

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career.

"I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

Every day police officers interact with people who are going through a rough patch.

The daily challenge for every police officer is helping people navigate a way out of whatever difficulty they have been caught up in.

It's not an easy task, as the problems are sometimes complex and long-standing.

In my experience, one of the biggest hurdles to making progress is getting people to believe that things can get better and encouraging them to find the strength to start moving forward.

Or to put it another way, hope.

Everyone faces challenges and tough times. Some of us have to confront more than others, but life gets difficult for all of us at some point. I believe there are two things we need to keep in mind in order to get through the hard times.

The first is about choice. Even in the most extreme situations; even when it seems like everything has been taken away from us, we still have a choice about how we respond. Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl described that "choice", that decision about how we will respond, as "the last of the human freedoms".

We can choose to hate and become resentful; or we can choose to forgive and let go. We can choose to be bitter, or we can choose to get better.

The key to the success of Michael Jordan, LeBron James and countless others, is that when they were confronted with opposition and difficulty - they didn't give up. They chose to carry on and to overcome.

Rotorua is an amazing place with huge potential. It is also a community that has some challenges we need to confront and overcome.

Family violence is one of them.

My closing thought is from Steven Pinker.

"We will never have a perfect world, but it is not naive to work toward a better one."

- Inspector Bruce Horne is the Rotorua police Area Commander