Sometimes It Takes a Team
Confession: Ted Lasso was my favorite show of 2021. In case you didn’t catch any of it, I’ll give you a quick summary. A woman named Rebecca who owns and manages a soccer team hires a football coach from the United States named Ted Lasso to be the new coach of her team. In other words, he’s never actually coached soccer before (a sport that everyone else except us Americans agree to call football). Here’s the rub. Rebecca is actually seeking to sabotage the team by hiring Ted as a way of getting back at her former husband who always loved the soccer team more than anything. But Ted’s actually a really, REALLY good coach. And he brings Rebecca mysteriously delicious biscuits every week. And the team is actually starting to work together well! What on earth could possibly go wrong with this situation?
There’s another element to the story I won’t dive too deeply into here because, hello spoilers, but I do want to mention it. There’s an athlete on the team, a man named Jamie Tartt. Jamie is very, very good at what he does. Unfortunately, he’s also let it go to his head. He’s rude, arrogant, and regularly makes fun of his teammates by humiliating them or putting them down. Nobody likes him. A huge part of Jamie’s plot line throughout the show is learning the lesson that no matter how good he is, sometimes that isn’t enough. Sometimes it takes a team. Sometimes you need to pass the ball instead of taking the shot yourself.
It’s a valuable lesson that could apply to each of us as well. Of course it’s easy in life for us to pursue things that bring us glory or that show off our talents, but how are we at taking one for the team? Do we ever step back so someone else can have a turn in the light? Or do we ever do the right, hard thing without worrying about whether or not anyone will notice or give us credit for it?
Sometimes, if we’re going to continue to mature and grow, we need to learn to set aside our own personal goals for the goals of the group. There are times when our individual dreams can actually get in the way of what everyone is trying to accomplish together. That’s a difficult sell in a culture that tells us all we should each be brilliantly unique and shine as brightly as we can all the time, full stop.
If Ted Lasso’s character has taught us anything about goals throughout the two seasons of the show’s current run, it’s that there is far more to life than just winning. In fact, in the big scheme of things winning isn’t really that important. There is far more that we can accomplish than merely setting our personal goals and then meeting them. There’s the beauty of helping others meet their goals, and of meeting goals with someone else. Sometimes, we just have to change our goals in order to make the goals that really matter.
Challenges/Points:
The show, Ted Lasso, is full of examples of how personal goals can cripple a team.
Instead of considering ourselves (and our goals) the most important, sometimes we need to make accomplishing someone else’s goal the ultimate goal.
Individual goals aren’t a bad thing, but if they exist to the exclusion of goals shared with another person or a group, then we aren’t achieving all that we could.
Questions:
How do your goals stack up? Are most of them centered around you?
When was the last time you did something specifically to benefit someone else?
Do you feel pressure to be unique and to stand out? Where do you think that comes from?
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