Transactional Analysis

We are living in one of the most interesting times – with Alexa listening to all our conversations, robots taking up most of the repetitive tasks, and the Internet of Things becoming more prevalent. Indeed, technology has touched every aspect of our daily lives and has transformed the way we once lived or communicated. The business landscape has transformed too, and the environment has become more volatile constantly adapting to various factors like globalization, economic uncertainty, etc. The communication in VUCA world isn’t easy and comes with its own set of challenges. Look around yourself and what are the challenges you observe…

1. First, is the challenge of information overload. That is why we see brands struggling to get the attention of the target audience. We received approximately five times as much information as we did 10 years back.

2. Second, reducing attention spans – With the growing number of distractions available to us at a click of a button, our attention span is reducing. Hence, a communicator needs to try extra hard to get the message across.

Therefore, brands need to have their communication strategy clearly carved out and have focused messaging to be able to deliver an impact.

In this VUCA world, there is only one way to translate your dream into success; you communicate it. The importance of business communication to the success of any organization can’t be overstated. How do you communicate your brand image to your customers or communicate the level of strategies to your employees? This communication encompasses every single aspect of the business whether face-to-face, Zoom calls, or emails. For an effective communication strategy, there is no room for blue moon wonder and hence consistency is required to be effective. To understand the practical application of intra-personal communication, we were involved in a knowledge-sharing session organized by our HR. By the virtue of this blog, I have tried to encapsulate the highlights from this session.

The best part of going back to the office is meeting with team members and interacting with them. Yet, nothing beats ideation and teaming when the entire group is gathered to collaborate and know about the best practices followed by a senior leader in the organization. Thank you to the esteemed leadership of BCG who encourage us to be unconventional and ask questions. It was great to witness his journey of two decades in BCG and his reliance on strong communication as well as presentation skills. Something that had a tremendous impact and gauged my attention was Transactional Analysis (TA). I guess it is one of the most powerful frameworks, which can enable us to understand 8-year-old or Harvard professors or the smartest professionals.

Transactional Analysis (TA)

The transactional analysis enables one to tap into their fullest potential in all aspects of life. It is an excellent coaching approach for comprehending constructive communication in a relationship. A well-established approach that is widely used in various domains like psychotherapy, education, counseling, and the development of the organization. It is a form of contemporary psychology that targets to promote personal change along with growth leveraging the framework of conceptual tools. It was developed by Dr. Eric Berne in the 1960s and has grown a lot ever since. If we delve deeper into transactional analysis it offers us several models that can enable us to comprehend the relationship formed between the individual as an outcome of their interactions.

Ego States/ PAC model.

While we are in conversation with others, we would start giving transaction stimulus and then the person who receives the stimulus will share the transaction response. A concise method is used to comprehend the human personality which is constituted by three states of ego. Furthermore, there is the requirement of being aware of how one thinks, feels, and behaves while interacting with others. PAC essentially stands for Parent, Adult, and Child states, and no, these classifications aren’t made on the basis of age. Rather, these are ego states that a person of any age group may reflect with varying degrees while communicating with others.

Parent Ego: As the name suggests when a person reflects parental traits of being dogmatic, overprotective, upright, and indispensable. This ego state can be broken into two parts nurturing and critical. Former parent ego showcases behavior of nurturing not only with the children but also with others with s/he interacts. While latter ego state is the one where an individual behaves evaluative while interacting with others.

Adult Ego: This ego state expresses the logical thinking of the individual and the sense of reasoning ability. The person interacting and behaving with the adult ego considers information exhaustively and validates it utilizing one’s reasoning skills. A certain person that possesses an adult ego can be comprehensively judged through his overall discussion and the approach one thinks to the situation while arriving at a certain conclusion.

Child Ego: This state expresses how an individual behaves like a child and jumps to the conclusion just to satisfy immediate needs without thinking about others. The child’s ego state highlights an individual who is natural and impulsive. Furthermore, there can be two kinds of child ego state – adaptive and rebellious. While the adaptive child is sensuous and free to change as per the situation. On the other hand, rebellious is the one who behaves negatively in a given situation. This child state always acts under the impression of fear and anger.

We all have the tendency to swing between all three states based on the situation. I am sure that every one of us must have been in a situation where we said, “Why does this always keep happening to me”. This means we are running a pattern and if we want to break that pattern, we need to delve deeper into the transactional analysis.

For more …stay tuned…

Cheers

Bibliophile Parul