Recently, I attended a very good and interesting course on ‘Communication’ … yes, the kind of stuff we all fail to deal with every day at some level or in some situation. Part of the course material was a short introduction to Transaction Analysis (TA) which I found to be a very useful tool for the processing and evaluation of the everyday communication, be it professionally, as a parent, a partner or whatever.

Basically, TA is about considering ego-states and analyzing communication patterns on that premise. The basic model is shown on the illustration below.

So, what is the deal here ? The deal is that when we communicate transactions should be complementary (parallel) rather than crossed… that is,  problems and poor comminication outcomes are more likely to occur in the latter case.

So… as one says ‘it takes two to communicate’ … well yes, and TA is about analyzing from which ego-states the two persons are ‘acting’ from. For business and professional purposes the ideal is to have a parallel transaction on the adult (=objective) level.

Now as  a Runner… can this be useful ? Well… when you blend in the ideas of personality parts from Psychosynthesis I believe you can ! I’ll have to think more about this and will elaborate in a future article. But for sure I think it will be meaningful to analyze one’s inner communication and self-talk inspired by the above model and concepts, especially when it comes to either quiting something or holding on forcefully.

‘Who’ are your inner actors and how do they communicate ? What does it mean to your motivation and to your results ?