Question: Suppose that you are a soccer coach. Some soccer team invites you for a year to help it become a better team. As a coach, what can you offer it in the field of group psychology?

Answer: My condition is I demand fifty million dollars! This immediately creates tension: Why so much? What intentions does he have? And I don’t say to anyone that at the last minute I will return the money to them. This is so that they will all be on their toes. They immediately see that I am exactly like them: I am interested in money, power, and honor. This is so that their attitude towards me will be as it is towards everyone.

Question: Now we will imagine how your daily life looks. In the evening the team has a game, what is your attitude towards that?

Answer: It is necessary to arrange a workshop one hour before training, the warm-up, and the game, before every team activity. Here we are talking about how to build such a team so that each one will react to the moves of the others without thinking about it. And so, from day to day, we connect and unite more and more, with this we build a connection above rejection.

This is because from the start there is rejection between us: competition, disagreement, jealousy, an orientation towards control and honor. Someone scores two goals and I don’t even score one, he gets a million and I don’t, and so on. But now we are talking differently. First of all we talk about making the same amount, no more and no less, we are building a homogeneous team. We don’t bury the personal desires of each one; rather, we build a connection above them.

This is a long training process that includes a multitude of activities. Ultimately, the feeling of the connection between them into a single whole itself becomes important for them. So the game becomes only a means for them. We reach the desired result: We play not for the sake of the game itself but for the sake of general harmony and the feeling of connection and unity. There are no differences between them; we exist like some kind of cloud, as one body with one heart. And the audience is also included in the action as if they are in a vortex, they connect with the team and feel the game as if it were alive. Regular soccer, in which there is nothing besides competition, finds a new life!

Question: How must I relate to a situation where a member of the group should have given me the ball and didn’t do that and ran towards the goal by himself?

Answer: At that moment you must control yourself, overcome your anger. You must play with him in complete harmony as if he were 100% right. At that moment you say to yourself that as far as it seems, he hasn’t understood his action correctly. It could be that he didn’t see the whole situation.

You behave with him the way you would towards a child. Let’s say that your child wants to help his mother wash the dishes, and eventually breaks a plate. But you forgive him because he wanted to do something good.

Question: This seems like a very high state requiring a change in education.

Answer: Right. Here it is important to understand the degree of responsibility. Now the soccer players could easily move from one team to another. But in bringing them up towards a spiritual reward, none of them will want or be able to abandon his friends.

It could be that they will come to us complaining that on the one hand, they became alive but on the other hand, in their profession they are no longer ready to work with other people. The rules of the game of this world often don’t leave us with much choice. But it is in our power to change them.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 1/26/14

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