Ted Lasso finds resilience in comedy.

He prizes personal growth over winning.

He approaches problem-solving as play.

The show tempers optimism with realism.

Ted Lasso, the fictional expatriate manager of a floundering British association football (soccer…) team, is not in Kansas anymore. In the TV series that shares his name, his character tries earnestly to find his way as he helps others find theirs.

In a new country, in a new sport, in the ongoing tests of his crumbled marriage, Ted Lasso feels emotionally and culturally adrift. Yet flexibility fortifies him. So do curiosity, empathy, resolve, optimism, wit, and hope. At their lowest moments, he says to his team, “I believe in hope.” He hangs a hand-lettered sign over the team office door that says “BELIEVE.”

The character delivers wise soliloquies in affable Great-Plains cadences—to his discombobulated players, to his zany colleagues, and to his madcap bosses—without mixing a metaphor or resorting to cliché. (If you want platitudes or runaway similes, help yourself to NFL commentators at halftime.) You will not hear him say “when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” because he knows it’s all tough enough, even when it’s funny and heartwarming.

It is hard to remember having had more fun with background research than with this “Play in Mind” piece. And that is because, for starters, he approaches problem-solving as play.

When his team finds itself at sixes and sevens with performance anxiety, he orchestrates a pillow fight to relieve the tension that holds these grown men back.

When Sir Rupert, majority team owner, persistently rubbishes him at a pub, Ted Lures the aristocrat into a make-or-break darts........

© Psychology Today