Carl Rogers, Julio Velasco and authenticity
I started playing volleyball at the age of sixteen, in 1985. I immediately loved this sport, which is very comprehensive and in which Italy has excelled almost continuously since 1989. It was in that year that the Italian men’s national team unexpectedly won the European championship, kicking off a series of successes that led to that team being named “the generation of phenomena.” The coach was Julio Velasco. The same Julio Velasco who, after a career studded with successes, has just led the Italian women’s national team to the Olympus of world volleyball, winning the Olympics, Nations League, and world championship in succession.
Velasco recently spoke with journalist Jacopo Volpi at the Valli Theatre in Reggio Emilia. Listening to the interview1, which is essentially an interesting monologue lasting about an hour, we understand why the Argentine coach is often invited to companies to talk about leadership, winning mentality, and team building.
Velasco spoke very little about volleyball technique and tactics. He did not even mention his favourite topic, the famous “culture of excuses,” exemplified by the story that the cause of a spiker’s mistake cascades down to the setter and receiver, and then ends up blaming the electrician who installed the lights in the arena.
Velasco spoke about the importance of respecting people, the need to criticize without judging. He also emphasized the importance of “doing” and that “learning comes through mistakes”: mistakes are the feedback necessary to learn how to do things, just as falling is necessary for a baby to learn to walk. This premise is necessary to reduce mistakes in an atmosphere free from guilt and the resulting insecurities.
As a parent, I also appreciated a passage that I have tried to apply in the education of my children: the importance of teaching individual responsibility in managing personal situations, even the most difficult and unfair ones. I quote verbatim the words with which Velasco encouraged her daughter, who was struggling with a particularly difficult teacher:
“In life, you will find others who have it in for you. You have to learn to get promoted with someone who has it in for you. You have to manage on your own.”
About halfway through the interview, Velasco spoke about the importance of authenticity. He emphasized how players, especially young ones, place a lot of importance on the coach showing his true nature, being fair, and ensuring that his words are aligned with his actions. If a coach is perceived as authentic, a solid and winning team unity is formed. In his words:
“If the coach is not two-faced, then his players will respect him, even if sometimes they would like to tell him to get lost. If he is not fair, then he will have big problems.“
At that point, I couldn’t help but think of Carl Rogers, one of the pioneers of humanistic psychology, to whom I have already dedicated the articles The book “A way of being” by Carl Rogers and Thoughts on youth by Carl Rogers and Daisaku Ikeda. In his client-centered therapy, Rogers argued that the three conditions that promote the full flowering of an individual are empathy, authenticity, and unconditional acceptance. These three ingredients are necessary to promote the development of what Rogers called the self-actualizing tendency, that is, the innate drive of every living organism to develop its potential, to grow and improve. Over the years, Rogers began to understand and experiment with the applicability of this theory to other types of relationships, such as those between parents and children or teachers and students. Around the 1960s, he began to replace the term “client-centered therapy” with “person-centered approach,” and he realized how this approach, especially empathetic and authentic listening, could also be effective and successful in relationships between groups and communities.
At the highest levels, where teams have substantially equivalent technical and tactical skills, caring for relationships and the pedagogical aspect make the difference. Beyond purely sporting aspects, the coach’s main task is therefore to bring out the full potential of each person in a harmonious way within the team. Caring for each individual is as successful in sport as it is in the family, school, and business environments.
The person-centered approach has tremendous potential, which Rogers revealed to us in the second half of his life. He personally committed himself to demonstrating that dialogue centered on empathetic and authentic listening could reduce social and military tensions. Thanks to his work as a facilitator of dialogue, he made a concrete contribution to the resolution of conflicts in Northern Ireland and South Africa. For this reason, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987, the year of his death.
I miss the days when the nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize were true peacemakers!
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