Leadership (and life) can require a short-term memory

Here’s some old thoughts from some teaching on the book of Romans.

It may not be exactly where you are at today, but the focus was/is on a healthy starting point for resiliency in life and faith. Temptation, struggle, mistakes, hurts and trouble, they all get us down. It is what we do next, and how we keep our focus, that says a lot about how we proceed when things happen.

Enjoy! Let me know what you think 😊

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“Whether you’re a quarterback and you just threw a pick, or you’re a corner and you just got beat for a touchdown, you’ve got to have a short-term memory, shake it off and play the next play.”

(Steve Mariucci, NFL analyst)

I love football. I watch NFL, CFL, and NCAA football when I can, and occasionally it may resemble an addiction! But seriously, there are some players and some teams that just get me sitting at the edge of my seat. Peyton Manning was just one of those guys.

A while back I watched an old game of his, from the middle of a season where he was in his prime, and he took a late hit. It was a hard hit, and it was an illegal one, one which the announcers even gasped at. It was a big enough hit that the commentators suggested the defensive player getting fined for it. (It was not as commonplace for that to happen at the time, as it is today) Manning got up slowly after the hit, holding his head, and just went to the bench to grab some smelling salts. He looked groggy and sort of like he shouldn’t get back into the game. But he did. And just kept throwing the ball and doing his thing, not worrying about the possibility of getting hit again. Tom Brady, playing for the Patriots, did something similar in the Superbowl that year. He was hit hard late in the game but kept his wits, calling for a time-out so he could bring his team together for the next plan of action. I realized that good quarterbacks don’t let a bad hit change their game, they just get up and keep going. They don’t let the bad play shape the entire game plan. It reminds me of how we handle problems in life and keep walking with Christ…or maybe how we could.

Over the years I’ve had a number of people come to me for help. It’s normal, given my role and personality, it’s just part of what I do. Some people just want to talk for a few minutes and not go too deep, others want to make weekly appointments, and for some, they fall into the category I call ‘intentional interruptions’. They did not expect to be sitting with me for an hour talking about life, but it just happens. I get a lot of those. For many people, they never expected to get into the conversation they just had, but it happens, and most of the time for the better. More often than not, people arrive at my office or somewhere in conversation with me with an issue to discuss that is not actually the issue they are struggling with. When a person needs to talk though, it doesn’t take much to find out what is really going on.

Most of the time the problem a person is faced with is their own mindset.

Oh, there are always external or outside forces at work on them, but that is not where the problem ends. You have all kinds of situations where people are hurt by others, or somehow must deal with someone else who may be making life difficult or impossible for them, but what happens next comes back to one thing: Where’s your head at? Resiliency and how we respond to life, regardless of the type of problem or obstacles, begins with our mindset. It is a key foundation in how faith is developed through life’s circumstances.