There’s a scene where Ted is talking about why he likes coaching and someone (I believe it was Trent) makes a really tense point that these athletes he’s coaching aren’t kids. They’re fully grown adults who are being paid a lot of money to do what they do.
And of course, they’re not wrong.
But.
The thing we all miss about Ted Lasso, and I really wish we would talk about this more is… adults do not have all the skills they need to actually be adults. (In fact, I almost called this post “You Are Adulting Wrong” because assuming someone doesn’t need to be developed because of their age or their level of success is one of the things I see stunting adults the most in this world.)
Those guys on Ted’s football team may have been in their 30s (or late 20s and 30s), but on the inside, they had moments where they were still acting like they were 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 year old kids.
Ted’s Developer (Strengths theme)—which is, by the way, arguably his #1 Strength—can see where they are missing skills in their skill chains, and he is the perfect person to come along and give each one of them (Individualization) what they need in order to succeed in their careers. (He’s also Woo, Positivity… I have other thoughts, but now is not the time…)
The most important thing about Ted Lasso is THAT message. Most of us are missing skills that could make us truly free and whole adults. Most (if not all of us) have skill chains that are not in tact for some pretty major skills we keep trying to use (and either failing at and holding ourselves internally accountable for being awful at the thing), or we just refuse to do them completely, and we blame other things for not doing them.
What all those guys needed was not yet-another-professional-football-coach because the ways some of them were “winning” were going to kill them in the long run. (Sam is probably the only one on the team who was in tact from the start, in his resilience and emotion skill chains, at least.) What they needed was someone to help them fill the gaps that they didn’t get from their growing up years. To help them acquire the skills (and to make it safe for them to both be professional adults and also to be little kids who needed a father figure, or young adults who needed the support of a romantic partner who wouldn’t abandon them, or adolescents who needed someone to accept their contrary nature and help them learn how to aim their constructive criticism).
Yes, it was a funny show. Yes, it was well written and acted.
But it’s one of the most psychologically profound shows ever made (second only to the movie Inside Out, for me), specifically because it models the kind of internal work almost all adults need to do in order to not do damage to people around us.
I had an experience with my therapist this week where we were processing something that had happened and she stopped me and asked, “how old are you right there?” when I was describing what I was afraid would happen if I raised prices on the Patreon. And when I answered, I was shocked to learn that it wasn’t 44 (my current age). I had a skill I was arresting on because when I was 14 years old, in order to cope with a situation where I lost my entire social circle, I taught myself that I was completely replaceable in anyone’s life at any time, no matter how close they were to me.
It solved a problem. (Trying to explain how it was possible for extremely close friends to just abandon me, one moment to the next.)
(By the way, it’s been a lot of hard work, but I’ve finally gotten to the point where the things I know logically and the things I know emotionally are starting to line up. Thanks to a lot of therapy, to some really amazing friends–you know who you are–and to an incredible community of people who are all here for the work together.)
But what I’d learned at 14 wasn’t correct. And that gap in my resilience skill chain has remained until this year, when I’ve been working on giving myself the skills I never acquired before or during that situation. I’ve had to Ted Lasso myself, and when I watched that scene again with Ted explaining why he loves coaching, I realized… that’s what the whole show is about.
Reparenting.
Some of us had amazing parents, and some of us didn’t, but whether we had the world’s best parents or not, we all need some help gaining resilience and/or empathy and/or intelligence and/or perspective. We all need to be Ted Lasso’d. We can be perfectly competent, completely professional adults, and still need to acquire skills. In fact, we can be successful and functional (from the inside and outside) and still need to acquire more skills to fill whatever skill chain gaps we have.
But in all the work we’ve been considering doing in the new year with this Author4Life program, I keep coming back to why I love Ted Lasso so much. I love this show because it reminds me that growth is the point. Sustainable success is on the other side of wholeness.
I am here for it.
Thanks, Ted.
– Becca