Back to Basics Executive Coaching Series – How Do We Miscommunicate?

My name is Sari van Poelje and I’m an expert in business innovation. I’m the director of two businesses. One is called the Intact Academy where I train coaches and consultants from absolute beginners to supervisor level. The other business is Team Agility where I help businesses innovate their business more quickly than their products. I train coaches and consultants to be able to do this work, and for that, I use transactional analysis. 

One of the things we’ve been talking about in this series of videos is how people interact and communicate effectively. 

What happens if people don’t communicate effectively? What happens if people are more invested in wanting to keep their own reality and story than in actually being really in touch and changing? 

Within transactional analysis we distinguish  five ways people keep their own reality going without getting into real contact and really changing. 

  1. Redefinition: when you distort reality to fit your own life story.
  2. Symbiosis: where you create a fake dependency by pretending that each of you has less than three ego states, and one and one is less than two. 
  3. Racket and racket feelings. Authentic feelings are real reactions to the here and now. Racket feelings are feelings that you learned or were allowed to have, instead of the authentic feeling.
  4. Discounting: consciously or unconsciously ignoring information that could lead to problem solving, for example denying the existence of a problem or options
  5. Psychological games: One of Eric Berne’s first books from the 1970s, was called Games People Play. It became so popular that someone wrote a song about it. A game is a series of ulterior transactions which lead to a predictable payoff. You can think of psychological games as the conversations you have at home about who puts out the trash. You know, those conversations, when someone goes, it’s your turn and you go, no, I cooked. This goes on and on, until someone says “if you really loved me…” and by the end of the conversation the trash is still in the house.

These five ways of keeping your old reality going are stopping you communicating effectively. In the next videos we’ll look at each in turn.

Published On: December 13th, 2019By
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