243. From Panic to Peace: Lessons from Ted Lasso’s “Signs”

Ted Lasso's Powerful Lessons on Anxiety and Inner Alignment: Signs Episode Breakdown

In this episode of Kathie's Coaching podcast, host Kathie Owen delves into the Ted Lasso episode 'Signs,' spotlighting the significant life lessons it imparts. Kathie draws connections between Ted's struggles with anxiety, leadership, and inner turmoil, and her own journey dealing with anxiety and finding inner alignment. 

Through meditation and focusing on her vision, Kathie explains how to navigate through anxiety, align the heart, mind, and gut, and overcome panic attacks. This episode offers practical steps and inspirational insights for those battling fear and searching for signs of true alignment.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to Ted Lasso's Lessons
00:53 Recap of Previous Episode and Personal Connection
01:36 Ted's Panic Attack and Its Significance
03:32 Processing Panic and Finding Calm
05:54 Ted's Believe Speech and Overcoming Fear
06:58 Personal Breakthroughs and Meditation
17:36 Practical Steps to Manage Anxiety
22:28 Nate's Journey and Final Thoughts
25:27 Conclusion and Call to Action

Blog Post for today: https://www.kathieowen.com/blog/ted-lasso-panic-to-peace-anxiety-lessons-heart-mind-gut-alignment

Transcript

0:00

All right, today we are talking about the episode Signs from Ted Lasso. These are lessons from Ted Lasso, and I invite you to check out the entire playlist because very soon they're gonna be many episodes because. When I first found out about the show Ted Lasso, it was after I gave my core speech on Inner Excellence. And when I did that, it was about sports psychology and all of that. So somebody told me to go watch the show, and ever since then I have been watching it over and over and over again, and there's so many lessons. So many cool life lessons from this show. And so without further ado, let's get into the episode. You're listening to Kathie's Coaching podcast. I'm your host, Kathie Owen. If you haven't watched part one on the episode Signs you can go check it out after this. It won't matter if you watch it in series or not, but I invite you to check it out as well as check out the entire playlist on lessons from Ted Lasso. But we talked about how. Signs can appear when we release control and drop heavy expectations. And today we're going deeper. This week, something happened in my own life that feels like a turning point, and it connects beautifully to Ted's journey in the episode Signs. So in this episode, so many of the characters are searching, Rebecca's questioning her destiny and Keeley's at a crossroads, and Nate is wrestling with inner demons and Ted is quietly trying to hold it all together while far away from his son. Near the end of the episode, Ted Pauses alone in his office after the team had lost, I wanna say like its eighth consecutive game, and he had his eyes on the Pyramid of success. What is that? That is John Wooden's classic framework for excellence and leadership. Just the sight of it. Stirs up everything that Ted's been carrying. The pressure to lead well, the guilt of being far from home and the quiet ache for his son and the miss of his soon to be ex-wife in that still moment before he even picks up the phone. Ted's anxiety surges and he actually has a panic attack. Later when he does talk with his son, we see something beautiful. His son had started to process his own anger and find calm on his own, and he told his dad, Hey, yeah, I learned this from you. I remember what you taught me. Count to 10, and then if I'm still angry, count to 10 again. And after the call, we see Ted calm himself after he already faced a wave of panic and it came back again after he got off the call. But he did calm himself. He took a deep breath, he put his hand on his heart and he began to study himself. And I'm gonna relate this so much to my journey with anxiety. But let's talk about why Ted's panic hit. We've all had that moment where a symbol of who we want to be, success, leadership, family. It suddenly feels like pressure. For Ted that pyramid represented the dad and the coach. He wants to be, the phone call reminded him of the distance and actually the guilt. And he's leading a team but losing trust of everyone around him because they keep losing and he's still coping with anxiety and homesickness. And his body finally said, this is too much. That's what panic is, our nervous system throwing the emergency break. And I know that feeling. All too well, I've had major panic attacks in the moment, and your nervous system is actually sending you a sign. And it may not be the sign that you think it is, you're actually safe, but your body is telling you, hold on, hold on. Something's not right here. And we're gonna process this today in a very magical way. So how Ted processed it, what's beautiful is what happens after he had this moment with himself. Ted doesn't run from it. He actually breathes and he steadies. He doesn't let the panic define him. He lets it move through. And I want to state this very wholeheartedly. Emotion is just energy in motion. And when you have a panic attack, if you breathe through it, if you steady, if you float, it will move through your body within 90 seconds. And that's exactly what he did. And we watch this on this episode and later, instead of shutting down, he returns to his team with one of the most powerful moments of the series. It's called the Believe speech, and he gives this speech to the team and it's so, so beautifully done while he is telling the speech, we see the other characters in their process of whatever they're going through at the time and. And also we see Ted giving the speech to the team, and this is huge because Ted moves from panic to presence. And I want to go back to finding courage. Instead of letting fear dominate, because that's what it takes. It's a scary, scary moment. But if you find courage, you rise above the lower vibrations of fear and panic, and you rise up to presence. What happens was Ted doesn't fix everything, but he finds ground again. He finds the higher vibration. So my own breakthrough, I had a very similar experience recently with anxiety. I've had anxiety probably all of my life, and I don't own it. So instead of saying I have anxiety, I really mean the anxiety shows its ugly head. And I love how the book Inner Excellence talks about anxiety and the trickster, the monkey mind, all of these different things. He really labels it. Because that's all it is. It's something we want to label, but something had actually triggered my nervous system and old panic feelings started rising. But this time I had a new tool that I really, really stick with Now. It's called meditation, and I made a deep commitment to hold to my inner vision. What is that? My inner vision is something that is bigger than the anxiety. It's much more powerful, and Neville Goddard teach teaches this, that when you live from the end, the feeling of that is where the answer lies. So it's really hard, I'm not gonna lie. It's hard to keep that inner vision when your entire world feels like it's crumbling, but when you really commit to it with courage. Oh my goodness. Miracles happen. I actually, I wanna say I manifested something really, really beautiful in my relationship and my 3D world was screaming all of these crazy things in my relationship with my partner, and it was going absolutely nuts. I, I honestly thought maybe in my ideal vision, it wouldn't play out the way I wanted it to. Like maybe we were not gonna be together anymore, maybe. But I held on with unconditional love because I absolutely love my partner like so, so, so much. And so I held onto that unconditional love from my meditation and I pictured it beautifully. And what happened was absolutely magical. We had a moment just less than 24 hours after this chaos came through. And it wasn't anything like I ever dreamed of this actually happened, and it was better than what I thought. And I'm like, okay, so this works. So when you hold on with unconditional love, let the 3D play out. Let your anxiety play its little game. Give it some validation even. Because I even sat there with my ego and I said, you know, I hear you. You think you're keeping me safe, but you're not. So we're just gonna let this. Go through and I'm just gonna feel this energy in motion and let it go. So even though the outside world, the 3D world looked chaotic and opposite of what I wanted, I pictured unconditional love, I pictured safety, and I pictured the reality that I am building. So in this meditation, I saw myself in a maze bumping into walls, confused, and then I felt myself lift up and looked down from above like a bird's eye view, and I realized that. That fear and anxiety was just me inside this maze, and that was my warning sign. Hey, get out of the maze. And the way to do that for me was to go into meditation and find the bigger vision. And that gave me a higher perspective. I could see the path, I could breathe, and this moment was powerful. My body calmed down, my actual body, and the anxiety calmed for a good 24 hours. My heart, mind, and gut felt like they clicked into alignment. I wasn't fighting reality anymore. I was standing clear in my own vision and it felt like the end of panic and it felt like fear wouldn't come again. But that's not gonna happen because I believe that the fear and the anxiety is just a sign that I'm in the maze and I need to rise above that. And I know how to meet it now. I wanna go back to Ted's believe talk, where he came out to the team after the, that consecutive loss. Everybody was so disappointed. The belief sign fell down. Everything was like, and if you follow sports, you know when that belief Sein fell down, you know, they're so superstitious, they're all like, oh my God, this is not gonna work. And it's funny because that happens to me with that panic and that anxiety when it comes up. I am paying way too much attention to the 3D world. That is just my sign and it's time to rise above and look at it differently, get a different perspective, and calm the nervous system down because you can make much more clear decisions from that. So after Ted's panic attack, he returns and gives the team that unforgettable talk about belief. But this time he reframes belief. It's not blind optimism, it's connection between heart. Mind and gut, and this is really important. The heart, the mind, and the gut. So the heart, what you deeply care about. Your emotional compass, your unconditional love for yourself and others. And then there's your mind. There's reason, planning, strategy, and a lot of times your mind can get in the way. It can get in the way with logic and sometimes it's just better to picture something so clear and vivid in your mind that you feel it in your body. You just feel it and it's, it's so powerful because the subconscious mind will believe that. Um, yeah, believe I said. And then there's your gut, your intuition, that deeper knowing that goes beyond logic. When those three are at war, we feel lost in panicky. So when your heart, your mind, and your gut are at war, you can feel anxiety and panic. But when they align, we feel powerful and grounded. And Ted helped his players stop living split between fear, doubt, and overthinking. He brought them back to wholeness. That's what I felt in my breakthrough, my heart, my mind, and my gut finally talking to each other again. But it took meditation and it took a while in meditation. It also took what I talked about in the last episode. It took a social media detox, an email detox. A chat GPT detox because whenever I felt myself getting on these sites or looking at anything, I started to feel that anxiety rise in my body. And when I feel that it's time to step away and meditate. And then what happened was it led me to start thinking, I'm going to start doing a YouTube series on these episodes. I don't know or even expect anything big to happen from this, but I do expect a miracle, whether it touched your heart or whether it talked to you in some way. That's what I expect, because I'm not expecting like big, big, big things, but I am expecting a big, big, big miracle because whenever, even now. I can feel in the daytime, um, maybe somebody told me I needed to be doing this for my business or doing this for my, um, work and it doesn't feel right. My anxiety is a sign that I am in that maze. And it's time for me to step back. If that means 24 hours, that means 24 hours. If that means going to meditation for 30 minutes, that means going to meditation for 30 minutes, even if my 3D world is screaming, for example. So I went outside and I was just sitting there thinking and just meditating, and I was just sitting on the patio, just sitting there doing nothing. And when I came back inside, my partner was like. What kind of bad news do you have? I, I know you have bad news. That's what you always do when you go out there. Oh no, it wasn't bad news, but that was the 3D world. Um, just mirroring back to me what I used to think. I used to do that, but I don't do that anymore. And sometimes it takes a while for all of things to catch. Up to what we're doing. But one thing that really built my faith in this process was the fact that what happened in my relationship was so magical and so beautiful, and nothing I ever dreamed of that it was like, okay, that was a big sign from the universe. So I'm gonna give you some practical steps for you and me if you're listening and think, I want this too. Here are some small, doable ways to practice what Ted and I did. Number one, pause and name the storm. When panic or anger shows up, literally say, this is fear, this is pain. It's okay. Naming it is powerful. And I wanna add this too. It also validates your ego who is screaming at the top of its lungs. Hey look, this is scary. You need to do something about this. You better do it right now, and you better start following these tips. And that is just pain. But when you say. This is fear, this is pain. It's okay. That's powerful. So step number two, come back to your vision. This is something important I want to add here. You've got to get clear on your vision. Go journal it. What do you exactly want? And you have to get clear on that because when you come back to your vision, you ask yourself, what's the loving, safe picture? I'm moving to? See it clearly breathe into it. And for me, sometimes, especially when the anxiety is really strong, it takes a little while to really start getting into that. But your body will let you know and give yourself plenty of time to breathe into it and see it clearly, because your subconscious mind doesn't know the difference. Between your imagination and reality. And when you really feel it, you really feel it with all your five senses in your imagination, that means you have created the safe picture that you're moving towards. And then number three, lift your perspective. Imagine yourself above the maze, especially when you start thinking about the 3D, you're looking at it from a. From a bird's eye view, look at yourself running in the maze. With all those fearful things, your brain cannot come up with the solutions. I'm going to repeat that'cause it's super important. Your brain cannot come up with the solutions. You have to listen to your intuition, you have to listen to your heart. And then from there what will happen is they all three align your brain, your heart, and your intuition. And then of course, I'm leading right into this. Number four is your heart, mind, and gut check. Your heart. What do I feel? I mean, really feel when I see that vision of the future or whatever you're dreaming of. What, what do you want? And then your mind, what's the truth and the plan. Again, you're not gonna find that with your rational mind. You have to align all three, and then your gut, what feels instinctively right next. Bringing them into the conversation can settle your nervous system. So I want you to celebrate tiny wins, all of those signs, especially like the ones I talked about yesterday. So I probably triggered thoughts in your mind of signs that you have on your path. And notice the small confirmations and write them down. Keep a little notebook handy and always be ready to notice the small confirmations. A message, a coincidence, a person showing up. They rebuild trust that life is supporting you. Just remember that because my sign yesterday was a. A big one because it was actually something I'd never even dreamed would happen. And it was so awesome and it was such a contradictory to the day before when the 3D world was screaming loudly. But it can be something simple, it can be something easy. And it will be something easy. And I also wanna note this right here,'cause it's really important. When your nervous system is screaming, it's usually a sign that you're in the maze. And it's not the right direction. And I can tell you that without a doubt, because here lately, my nervous system had been acting up and it was just going in the wrong direction. It was living in pain. It was living in the past. It was living in memories. It was living in. All kinds of things. So what I did was, instead of letting that imagination rule my, my mind and my nervous system, I went to where I wanted to go. And that changed everything. I also wanna touch on Nate again. And Nate is the coach who betrayed ted and he left the club and he went to go work for Rupert, who is the ultimate villain in the entire series, but. Nate is not a bad guy. He just doesn't know. He's just not, he's unaware. It's kind of like you when you're in a panic attack. It's kind of like me when I'm in a panic attack, I am unaware, and so I am following signs that. Are not the right way. So Nate is battling his own inner pictures. He starts to see Rupert's darkness, and he's wrestling with who he really wants to be because. In the next episode, Nate actually gets set up on a date with this supermodel that's absolutely like famous and very into herself and you know, looks good on paper, but that's not where his heart is. And he knows it and she treats him really bad and it's like, oh my goodness. I can't believe people even think like that. But it's funny because. That's true. That's what anxiety will do. It will trick you into thinking that's where you wanna be, but that's not. And so sometimes our first signs are uncomfortable. They reveal truth about relationships or environments that we thought were safe. And that's part of growth too. And seeing clearly so we can step into better alignment. Alright, so if you've been stuck in fear of panic like me, or you're searching for signs that you're okay, I want you to know this. The body panics when it thinks you're lost. Give it a bigger loving picture. Align your heart, mind, and gut. Is possible. It really, really is. And when you do peace returns and signs really do show up, but often after we let go of needing control, that right there is probably the most important thing because the ego wants to control everything, but when you let go of needing to control, like I did, like I let go of needing to control my partner of how he had to respond. All I did was picture him with unconditional love and I trusted that he would be a part of my process. And guess what? It turned out so much better than I expected. So Ted's journey reminds us you can have a panic attack and still stand up and lead with love. You can breathe, believe, and help others find their ground even while you're finding yours. If this episode resonated with you, check out part one of Signs and subscribe so you don't miss what's next in this series.'cause oh my goodness, it's so good and I bet I could come back to this episode and all of the episodes with more and more profound insights and I'd love to hear your story. Have you ever had a breakthrough after fear? Share it below and you could be someone's sign today. All right. That's my episode for today. I trust that you found it helpful. If you know someone who could benefit from this, please share with them. And until next time, I will see you next time. Peace out and Namste.