Next Play.

This weekend I am at Eastern Iowa Bible Camp for Fall Retreat with our SALT Co. group. We were split into 4 teams for the weekend to make the games a bit more fun, but the competitor in me of course has a strong desire to win. As our SALT Director, Jordan Howell would say, “I like having fun and winning is fun.” Of course, winning isn’t possible without having a highly engaged team, so my strategy to get our team engaged was simply to just have fun. We did that and won all but one of the rounds in the first game. The round we lost was sort of early on. It would have been easy to get down in the dumps and say, “Well, we tried.” But talk about throwing hope right out the window. To finish out this part of the story, we hyped the team back up and went on to win every other round and then, through that, the whole game itself.

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, in our leadership I think it’s so often that our energy is high when we are taking win after win, which is easy, but then when we make one mistake, one failing decision, or claim one loss, we decide that’s that. We might make a comeback later, but by that time the low energy response has already done its damage.

As we were walking off the field from playing that game, my good friend Ben Estling, whom you’ve likely heard me talk about before, stated, “And to take the W off of an early round loss? Talk about a team with next play mentality!” While this lighthearted comment was made with joking manner, it got me thinking. Next play mentality is critical.

I know I say this in almost every motivational blog, but the truth is that we are going to make mistakes, we are going to fail at times, and we are going to lose a couple plays. The win though comes when we have the next play mentality. If that whole game was to be thought of like a war, you could say we lost a battle. Truth is that at war, battles are lost, but no one talks about the team who lost a battle (unless you love history); they talk about who won the war.

The great thing about this mentality is it goes both ways. After you win, next play. Celebrate and move on to the next one, because just like one battle doesn’t lose a war, one battle doesn’t win it either. If you don’t perform past one win in a battle, the victory is going to be out of reach in no time.

Next play mentality wins wars. Losing battles is inevitable, but when we lose a battle it’s important to remember that the title for the war is still up for grabs. Wherever you lead, remember, Next Play.