By Jorge Araújo
Former professional basketball coach
From a very early age, I was concerned with teaching and training people and teams so that, by working together, they could create a positive and effective working environment. This goal has always proved particularly difficult because there are anonymous areas of behavior in the relationships between these people.
In every team I coached, there was always an anonymous and unconscious behavioural plan that not only began intersubjectively, but also continued to influence these relationships even when they became conscious. This made it relevant for the training of high-performance individuals and teams to discover that, underneath their behaviour, there were always anonymous, intersubjective, inter-bodily and relational relationships and influences, which were based on the very way in which each of these people related to each other and their surroundings.
Throughout this journey towards becoming the coach I would eventually become, something common and very complex ‘happened’ to me. I experienced ‘being part of a team’ and, within my capabilities, contributing to each of these teams being as intelligent as possible. In other words, I wanted them to be intelligent as a whole, beyond myself, the designated coach. As I would later realize and learn, after all, ‘it is the players who play, not the coaches’. This means that, just as we must provide players with training that makes them individually smarter, teams also need to train their intelligence collectively. As a team, a group of people who interact with each other in the service of common goals, by doing so, by training daily as a team, they will become increasingly intelligent on a physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual level. With one particularity. They acquire this intelligence globally, and the coach cannot and should not conceive of their work in ‘parts’, as if they were ‘shelves’. A team is and will always be in the near future a whole, where everything influences and is influenced. An intelligent team, like an intelligent person, is a whole whose previous experiences have contributed globally to the acquisition of this intelligent way of being and acting. In other words, an intelligent team is only intelligent because it has trained ‘how to play’, knowing in its preparatory journey that ‘those who do not improve, get worse’.
