Ted Lasso Was Right: Stay Curious, Not Judgmental

What do sports, healing, Ted Lasso, and the nervous system have in common?

More than you might think.

In this episode, I unpack a conversation that has been sitting with me for weeks—a discussion about professional sports, collective emotion, and whether something can be both deeply beautiful and deeply flawed at the same time.

We explore why humans have gathered around sport for thousands of years, why shared experiences regulate our nervous systems, and why anything powerful enough to unite us can also expose what's unresolved within us.

This isn't really an episode about sports.

It's an episode about human behaviour.

About collective healing.

About learning to think beyond black and white.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why humans are biologically wired to seek community and shared experiences
• The history of sport as a tool for peace, grief, and social connection
• Why sports don't create emotions—they amplify what's already there
• The difference between healthy passion and dysregulated group behaviour
• What domestic violence statistics during major sporting events really tell us
• Why removing the "vessel" rarely fixes the underlying problem
• The importance of supporting organizations and communities that align with your values
• Ted Lasso's greatest lesson: staying curious instead of judgmental
• How to participate in any movement without losing yourself to the crowd

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Come join the conversation over on Instagram @alannacrawford_, or share this episode with someone who loves understanding why humans behave the way we do.

If you're enjoying The Summit Effect, don't forget to follow the show, leave a rating and review, and share it with a friend. It helps more than you know.

Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next week.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Summit of Deck, where science meets soul and you don't have to pick one or the other. Hi, I'm your host, Elena Crocker, osteopathic manual practitioner and wiking after teacher. On the pod, we're talking about body wisdom, energy, intuition, and becoming an expert on your own feeling. Whether you're looking to find yourself again, create a new version, or see, just here for the results, you're in the right place. I'm here to demystify spiritual curiosities while adding a layer of humanness to the healthcare experience. No gatekeeping, no pedestals. This podcast is for the woman who is ready to take her power back. Let's do it. Hello everyone! Happy Wednesday! Guys, apologies for no episodes the last couple of weeks. If you follow me on Instagram, you'll know a few weeks ago we almost lost my soul pup, Argo. He had an emergency surgery after a couple days of really touch and go, and mentally I was unwell. You know, I'm still reeling after the loss of Tucker a few months ago. And it's just it's been a year. It's been a fucking year. And I'm tired and I'm sad. Uh, and I was just taking some time to feel my feelings and not um push through anything. So I took a couple weeks' break and I'm back. Thank you for sticking it out with me. Uh, big news. It's Ted Lasso release day. I I actually planned to release this episode a couple weeks ago. Um, and I just fate so happened that uh it is coming on the heels of a new season of one of my favorite shows because today I want to talk about feelings and sports and healing and gray areas and the collective. Um please don't press stop if you hate sports. I promise it's a goodie. I also think that if you dislike sports, you will like this episode more than somebody who actually does like sports. Okay, so just stick with me here. Okay, story time. I was at a gathering a few weeks ago, um, and on certain topics I felt like I was the odd man out there. So women were spewing hate towards the World Cup. When I was at this event, the World Cup was still on. And just in sports in general, honestly, it's for good reason, and I will get those statistics to you later um and show the darker side of professional sport, but I was the only person there that was pro-professional sports, but I said nothing. There was so much anger and hate, and the energy was so heightened that I knew no matter what I said in that in that situation, none of them were going to consider the other side. So I said nothing, which is highly unlike me. But that saying nothing really ate at me. And so here I am now saying something. This position is not new for me to be in. Being a diehard Buffalo Bills fan, which is football, the NFL, um, being a Bills fan in the spiritual space gets a lot of hate. The NFL is a corrupt organization. I am not denying that. The management, teams, players, yeah, there's a lot of really bad shit that goes on there. And I am in no way defending any of that. Have you ever been to a Bills game? Have you ever got caught up in the passion and pride and joy that happens there from the people witnessing the event? And maybe, maybe the Bills is a bad example because it's super specific to me. Um, okay, we can talk about the Blue Jays, because I'm assuming most listeners are Canadian, or even like Team Canada being in the World Cup, because that was so exciting. My first Instagram post, actually, that ever went viral was last year when the Jays made it to the World Series. So I made a post explaining the reason why everybody was so into that, even if they never watched baseball, um, and explained why they were feeling the way they were, because it was collective energy, it was collective healing. That's what everybody was picking up on. Humans by nature were not solitary beings. We know that forcing someone into solitary confinement like it changes their physiology in a very bad way, guys, in a very real bad way. Humans by nature are social beings, so we need other humans and groups for our survival on many levels, especially if we're looking at the dawn of time. We literally needed more humans for our chances of survival because inherently back then we are the weaker species. Like 10 humans could make a plan to take down a lion. But one-on-one, that human is a goner. But as time and humans advanced, we needed groups for survival in different ways. So studies from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention show that social connection protects our mental and physical health. Statistically speaking, people with strong social groups live longer. Like that is a proven fact. We know that. And one of the ways that society bands together collectively is sport. The oldest record of sport dates back over 15,000 years to the upper Paleolithic era. Like sports have been around forever, guys, and it's been used in many ways, and in my opinion, um, some pretty amazing ways that I want to tell you about. So, back in the time, uh the ancient Greeks used it for building peace. So they started the Olympic Games in um 776 BC. So during those Olympic Games, they held what they called an Olympic truth truce. Well, it could be truth, but it's an Olympic truce. So, what this Olympic truce was is it paused fighting and let athletes and fans travel safely to the events because like back then it was always like cities fighting with cities. So everybody paused fighting, and sport literally paused anger and violence and replaced it temporarily with pride and joy and all of these high-frequency emotions. And I know you're gonna say, well, they shouldn't have been fighting in the first place. Yes, we know that. We know that. One, we can't go back in time. Two, it's still happening to this day. It's inevitable. People are gonna fight. I went to Waldorf school, and something across the board as a fifth grader in Waldorf School is you do something called the Greek Olympics. Um, so Waldorf schools from all over the area come together and they distribute your class throughout different Greek cities. So you could be on a team with people you don't know. You may have like one or two of your classmates in it. Um, and we compete in javelin, discus, long jump, Greek wrestling, and running. And it was so, so exciting to be a fifth grader and represent your school at these games. You practiced all year, um, and you're judged not only on winning, but like on certain aspects of the skill and beauty, like how effortless you can make the craft look. And throughout the year, we also, because you all wear tunics, we like sew our own tunic belts, honoring heritage, like it could be your own heritage or a Greek heritage or something you got really into. Um, because grade five, you're learning about um Greek history and Greek mythology. Uh, and then before you would throw the discus, we got to say a prayer or an ode to a deity of our choosing, and that was all self-driven, like what we felt connected to. Like, look at all those life lessons I just learned through sport that we're not necessarily even to do with the sport itself. Another really cool thing, the Greeks and the Romans used to do something called funeral games, which was like a structured grief process. Um, it provided like catharsis for participants. They would channel their sorrow, their grief, their anger, all their emotions, all those low frequency emotions that they felt into a physical action through an organized game. But it also brought the community together to honor the dead. It like really makes me think about how I view processing emotion in clinic. We have to take all this energy, big feelings, low frequencies out of the upper chakras, because oftentimes like they're living in our head, in our heart, and we pull them down and out through the solar plexus. And a really great way to do that is movement, something physical to move and ground the energy. So throughout history of sport, the overlying theme is collective regulation. When I talk about collective, that's like all individuals band together. It could be like a community, a city, a country. We have a global collective. So when my post went viral, it's because that's what everybody was feeling. They were feeling this collective regulation by way of the sporting event. Guys, our life has been one shit show after another since 2020. It's like we're almost afraid to feel hope because what the hell else is gonna happen? But last year, the Blue Jays, one team for an entire country, it unified us, and it felt like a safe place that we could collectively be hopeful and joyful. And that feeling spread to all of us non-baseball fans because we wanted to be a part of something bigger than us, and that is our human nature. But the sport of baseball, it didn't create the human emotion, it just gave us a vessel to amplify energy, and that can go either way. It can amplify what's already there, just like money can do that, alcohol can do that, power can do that, these things exist within and of themselves. They do not create an emotion, they amplify the emotion that is already there. They are vessels. So if someone is connected and emotionally healthy, sports can become joy, community, celebration, hope. If someone is dysregulated and unhealthy, sports become anger, disrespect. They can become violence. Sport doesn't make someone violent. Sport becomes the vessel, the justification to act on their dysregulation. Again, we see this with money and power. I think we have pretty clear examples in our minds of both ends of the spectrum for people with money and power. But we don't say money shouldn't exist or power or a place of authority shouldn't exist, because in the right hands, both those things could change the world for the better. And I believe that the same is true of sport. So the conversation that sparked the debate at this event was the alarming domestic violence statistic coming out in England. So reported domestic abuse rises by 38% when England loses a World Cup game, and by 26% when they win or draw. The day after the match, incidents remain 11% higher than normal. That's alarming. Like, even more so that it still rises, domestic abuse still rises even when they're winning. Those statistics are horrific, and I am in no way brushing them under the rug, and I am not saying like overall sport out raise those costs. I do not, that's not what I'm saying. I believe that if we got rid of sport, I would suspect that those statistics might drop in the short term and eventually rise again. Because we're talking about a group of men who are dysregulated, they're unhealthy, they're disassociating through coping mechanisms, largely alcohol, and they're using sport as a vessel for their behavior. Their blame. Oh, oh, because I'm so mad because they lost. They're blaming the sport, much like we see the abuse of women and children in certain cultures, but it's justified through the vessel of religious texts. The point I'm trying to make here is it's not so black and white. Simply getting rid of something is not the answer to anything. Democracy isn't working right now. What do we do? Just get rid of it? No. We try to fix the system. And how do we do that? By banding together as a society, using our voices, executing our right to vote, putting our money where our mouths are, like backing the morally sound businesses and institutions that will support our best interests moving forward. I can tell you right now, a way that you can do that at the professional level of sports is by supporting female leagues. You want to change a professional level, take the money away from the men and put it towards the women. And that starts by filling seats in arenas and stadiums, watching them on TV, buying their merch, donating to their causes, their teams. Like money talks, my friends, and you have to put your money where your mouth is. That is really how it starts. Humans evolved in tribes. We're wired for synchronistic experiences. If you think about chanting, dancing, festivals, religion, um, military marches, concerts, sports, they're all doing the same thing. They're synchronizing a state of being, or they're synchronizing nervous systems, if you will. So research shows that synchronized movement and shared emotional experience increases feeling of trust, belonging, cooperation, and even pain tolerance. Collective rituals from singing together to cheering in a stadium can actually increase oxytocin and strengthen social bonds. So this explains why. Like somebody you've never met, like when Canada scored a goal, I've never met the goal scorer. But but you cry. Objectively, that is ridiculous. You don't know this person, you have no emotional investment in that. But biologically, it's exactly what we're designed to do. I don't know if anybody watched the final World Cup game, but at the end, a Spanish player, Nico Williams, he ran over to his mother in the stands and gave her his gold medal. So his mother, Maria, she was pregnant with Nico's older brother. And she crossed part of the Sahara Desert on foot to reach Spain in search of a better life for her children. Guys, I wept with pride watching that. He is not my son. I don't even know him, but I know the love of a mother. And I felt that moment so deeply in my heart, as I know hundreds of other women did, and it united us as women, as mothers, as humans. That message of hope that transcends the sport of soccer. But that might not have been accessible to people without the game of soccer. I read the statistic that 34% of adults who played youth sport show high grit compared to just 23% of non-athletes. This stat made me laugh because I've been saying this for years, like actually using the word grit. I get asked, or I used to get asked all the time, like, how are you able to have three jobs while going to school full-time and simultaneously building a business and a brand? And I always say, competitive cheerleading gave me grit. So what bothered me at the event in that conversation was not that they criticized sport in particular, but it's that they were only willing to see one side, which is exactly the problem in the first place. People want things to be good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, scientific or spiritual, instead of both things can be true. We have to stop viewing everything in black and white. The world just doesn't work like that. Anything powerful enough to unite us is also powerful enough to expose what's unresolved within us. So the real work is having the courage to stay awake inside of a crowd. So we celebrate what deserves need needing to be celebrated, but we question what needs questioning. And you can never just like hand your consciousness over to the group. And I think that's the problem when these things get larger scale and larger scale. It really makes me think of Ted Lasso. And if you haven't watched Ted Lasso, honestly, you have to do it. Soccer is like the smallest thing that it's actually about. So Ted is an American football coach hired to coach an English soccer team in hopes that he will fail and ruin the team and it will be a big embarrassment. And despite everybody disliking him, everybody rooting against him, he gives it his all because he cares about his team, his city, his staff on a human level. He brings humanity into the world of sport. And because he exudes an energy of like positivity, hope, and love, it has a trickle effect to everyone around him because he doesn't blend in with the crowd. He goes against it, but in a very non-antagonistic way. My favorite quote in Ted Lasso, and I will say this forever and ever, and oftentimes I stop my own thought process to repeat this is stay curious, not judgmental. And I think that should be the top thought on everybody's brain right now, in every interaction. Like just think of the change that could be created in this world if we stayed curious and not judgmental. Communities are powerful, movements are powerful, sports are powerful, but anything that can bring millions of people together can also become dangerous when we stop thinking for ourselves. So our job here is to participate consciously. I would love to know your thoughts on today's episode. I feel like support of sport, um, it can really be on a sliding scale, and I would love to open up the conversation. You can DM me at Alana Crawford underscore on Instagram. That is all for today, folks. We are back in action weekly. Thanks for bearing with me. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I will see you next Wednesday. Bye bye.