Before we begin: Be curious, not judgmental

One of the best pieces of advice in communications is that our job isn’t to have all the answers. It’s to ask the right questions.

That's one reason the famous darts scene in Ted Lasso has resonated with so many people. Ted's reminder to "be curious, not judgmental" isn't just good life advice. It's a mindset that shapes great communicators. The best school PR pros don't begin with assumptions.

Ted’s advice is simple: Goldfish supposedly have short memories, so they never dwell on a bad moment long enough to let it ruin the next one.

You don’t have the luxury of an actual short memory. You remember every version of every website that launched with a broken link, every social post that landed wrong and every family email that stirred up more concern than you expected.

What you can borrow from the goldfish is the mindset, not the memory span. Every communicator carries a mental highlight reel of moments they’d rather forget. The mistakes themselves aren’t the problem. The problem starts when one bad moment sets the tone for every decision that follows it.

Learn what the mistake has to teach you, adjust and move on to the next challenge with your confidence intact. The correction matters more than the moment.

Ted has a habit of taking a hostile press question, acknowledging the concern buried inside it and steering the conversation toward what actually matters.

You face a version of this constantly. Reporters, board members and concerned parents rarely ask the question you’d choose. But you get to choose how you answer it.

Good media relations start with acknowledging the emotion behind a hard question before you respond to the substance of it. That single move changes the entire tone of the exchange. It tells the person asking that you heard them, even before you’ve said anything about the actual issue.

A single question, however sharp, shouldn’t be allowed to define the whole story. Your job is to answer honestly while giving people the larger context they need to understand what they’re looking at.

Some of Ted’s best decisions happen away from the field, around a table with people willing to challenge his thinking out loud.

School PR can be an isolating job. In plenty of districts, you’re the only person with a communications title. That means the person best positioned to catch a blind spot in your messaging is often you—and you’re too close to the work to see it clearly.

Even in larger departments, the hardest situations benefit from a perspective that didn’t help write the first draft. A trusted peer who will look at a draft and ask, “Have you thought about how this reads to a parent who’s already frustrated?” can catch a problem while it’s still small and easy to fix.

If curiosity is the foundation of good communication, it should extend to ourselves, too. Sometimes the most important question isn’t one we ask our audience. It’s one we ask a trusted colleague: “What am I not seeing?”

This kind of circle doesn’t need to be formal. It can be a text thread with two other communications directors in nearby districts, a state association contact you call before a tough announcement or a colleague in another department who will give you an honest read. What matters isn’t how you build it. It’s that you build it before you’re forced to improvise one.

Ted wins Rebecca over with quiet, repeated effort: a box of biscuits delivered without asking for anything in return.

The biscuits were never really about the baked goods. They were about showing up consistently, with no agenda attached.

Most of the contact you have with department heads and school leadership carries some kind of ask built into it: a request for approval, an update on a problem or a heads-up about something coming. That’s necessary work, but it also means leadership rarely experiences you as anything other than someone who needs something from them.

A no-ask interaction is rare, and that rarity is exactly what makes it valuable. A quick check-in with a principal, a genuine thank-you to an administrative assistant or a moment of support for a coach with no larger purpose attached—these small gestures build the kind of trust that makes harder conversations land better later.

Relationships with the people you work alongside aren’t built in the middle of a crisis. They’re built in the ordinary weeks in between.

Nate’s arc is one of the more complicated stories in the series, and it doesn’t start with him as a villain. It starts with a talented person who goes unnoticed long enough for that invisibility to curdle into resentment.

Every school communications department has a version of this risk: someone doing real, valuable work who never gets named publicly for it. Left alone long enough, that kind of quiet contribution can turn into quiet frustration. Frustration is a predictable outcome of being overlooked, not a personality flaw waiting to surface.

You spend plenty of time celebrating students, staff and community wins. That same instinct is worth turning toward the people you work with directly. Naming someone’s contribution, pulling them into the conversation or simply acknowledging the work they put in costs you almost nothing and prevents a real problem down the line. Just remember that recognition isn’t about how you would want to be recognized. It’s about how they feel most valued.

People who feel seen tend to become advocates. People who feel invisible tend to become something else.

Roy Kent rarely softens an opinion, and while his vocabulary isn’t a model for anyone drafting a newsletter, his directness is worth paying attention to.

The strongest communicators speak plainly. They address hard topics without burying them in institutional language, and they earn credibility through that plainness rather than losing it.

Roy’s bluntness works because it comes paired with obvious care. Directness without care reads as harsh. Directness paired with care reads as trustworthy. That combination, more than the bluntness alone, is the actual lesson.

Families don’t expect perfection from their schools. They expect honesty, and a plainly stated truth is usually the most effective message you can send.

Final whistle

Ted Lasso was always about more than soccer. It was about people: how they build trust, how they recover from mistakes and how they show up for each other over time. Notice how often that same lesson resurfaces in different forms throughout the show. A new player, a new crisis, a new episode—but the same instruction underneath. Life tends to work that way, too. The lesson repeats until it’s learned.

The same is true of school communications. Whether you’re rebuilding trust after a hard decision, preparing a superintendent for a tough interview, launching a new website or celebrating a student’s success, the work always comes back to relationships.

Relationships are what a community is built from.

And as Ted might put it, believing in people is rarely a bad place to start.