Be your parent you desire !

This is not about parenting children so read ahead this post is meant for grownups like you!

Talking to thousands of stories over the years I have witnessed first-hand that our childhood rules our life.

Most of my conversations proved these points extremely clearly:

1. Our strengths are our weakness
2. When we overplay our strengths, that creates derailment in the external environment which most of the time we are oblivious to. It's like overspeeding a car causes accidents.

The conditionings we receive in our primitive years are like codes that run the programs of our entire life. To explain this I am leveraging the Transactional Analysis framework.

This post also emphasises the narrative crafted by Marshall Goldsmith

"What got you here will not get you there !" and I am connecting the same through Transactional Analysis to create some perspectives.

Let me explain that with some examples

1. Meera is a senior leader in an organisation and is now positioned for leadership roles with the clear feedback that she needs to work on being more approachable and build more people skills Her strengths that got her here are: Focus, Results, and Performance The reason she is in this position is that she has proved herself through extreme focus. Meera has been able to maintain the focus because she has invested all her time and energy in creating results so much so that she doesn't believe in too much socializing and relationship conversations. She thinks it's a waste of time.
2. Arvind is another example of a leader who is successful due to his results and is now positioned to deal with the sales team because he has been the subject matter expert and knows the products in and out. However, was struggling to maintain the rhythm between himself and the sales team because of the expectation of the speed of responses the sales team expected from him. His strengths are again focus, results and performance.
3. Sidharth is an example where he is a people leader and extremely successful in creating results however is extremely autonomous and hence needs to focus on building more listening, empathy and compassion.

An analogy to explain these three examples is to Imagine you write from the right hand all your life and you are now given the feedback to use both hands equally to create a holistic experience.

The TA framework by Eric Berne is essentially coined for analysing communication however I am connecting this to the patterns of communication that create judgement in the environment leading to false perceptions. That's the reason we are pushed to pretend to survive.

Transactional Analysis suggests that we all have three ego states in us. Parent, Adult and Child. This ego state is not the "self-claiming ego" we generally refer to in our normal life, these states can be looked at as more stances we tend to take in a conversation subconsciously and unknowingly they become habits of communication and tend to create false perceptions in our environment for us. For example, if someone has a loud and affirming voice will form the perception of being "dominating" while that may or may not be true.

In our environment, we generally create perceptions based on looks, communication style and general conduct which at times are quite far from the character of the real person. Hogan (assessment) explains this as the difference between Identity vs Reputation. An individual may think it's great to take time to think and ponder and then respond to any conversation and that may be the strength of this individual however the external environment may label this individual with non-confidence, introversion or lack of courage.

So think of it like a Parent-like ego state, an adult-like ego state and a Child-like ego state.

A parent-like ego state is further bifurcated into controlling parent and nurturing Parent to explain the communication we adopt as part of conditioning. This may create confusion between Identity vs. Reputation. The parent-like ego state is driven by the polarity of emotions. A controlling parent's ego state gives more importance to structure, results, performance and outcome while a nurturing parent pays more attention to the nurturance of overall well-being, and believes in forgiving and second chances. The bias is polar in nature.

An adult-like ego state is being more objective, neutral and practical. Call a spade a spade and do not hesitate to conduct a difficult conversation objectively. They are flexible and adaptive to the environment without getting hijacked by the polarity of their emotions. This doesn't mean they are emotionless :-)

A child-like ego state is bifurcated into an adapted child and a free child. The adapted child is developed as a response to a controlling parent and the free child is developed as a response to a nurturing parent.

What makes humans complicated is that we have all of these in us in different capacities and hence the idea is to understand the dominance of these styles to catch the monkey that creates the confusion. Monkey is referred to as the derailment of behaviours.

Connecting it back to Meera and Arvind who have been groomed from childhood to be focused on results. The script they are living in is "socialisation is a waste of time" "don't get lost in friends" "don't be distracted make your life" or anything that has pushed them to develop habits of focus that creates results. So from TA perspective, they have been under controlling parent/s which has created this strength in them and at this stage of their career they are facing the flip side of those strengths.

Siddharth on the other side has been given all the autonomy and freedom to experiment and to make mistakes so much so that he has no barriers in his mind he thrives on experimentation, finds it hard to stay within boundaries and hence lacks obedience which is the need of hierarchy.

So the ask from coaches in these cases was to:

Help Meera and Arvind develop more leadership qualities which are the softer aspects of dealing with people, creating influence and inspiration.

To help Siddharth develop more empathy and compassion for the levels upwards.

Bringing awareness about TA to these conversations was helpful to create awareness around the blind spots and create reflection around, what's a small twist that can bring bigger changes in perception.

Most of the coaching journeys are about these three key milestones

• Realising the blind spots
• Thinking of a small twist that can create bigger changes and stay consistent
• Acknowledging and celebrating the observations from the environment

Meera and Arvind realised how they were living like a controlling parent and Sidharth was being the free child at work.

The enablement here is to realise that these patterns can be unlearned by forming new patterns. Changing old patterns is an uphill and difficult journey.

These realisations created insight into how they need to blend the Adult-like ego state in it to manage their perceptions, as simple as maintaining eye contact and smiling more for Meera, sending more stimulation to the sales team about his thinking status and keeping them informed more regularly and for Siddarth to be more mindful about his childlike energy and listen more and moderate his energy to avoid the overwhelming reaction from the environment.

Becoming aware of these blind spots to take charge of "what's not working" and making changes that can support the journey which is like "becoming your parent you desire"

TA and Identity vs Reputation have been extremely instrumental frameworks to connect the dots of our personalities.

The key focus of this post is to support you in reflecting on your own self to see

• What's the feedback you keep receiving?
• How is that coming in your way?
• What's your strength which may be causing this for you?
• What's a small tweak you can make to play it in your favour?
• How about becoming your own nurturing or controlling parent to create the balance? It's the polarity that creates confusion, a balance helps us manage the perceptions around us.

Do share your questions and responses in the comments or personal window.

Happy to create some perspectives for you! Have a great week ahead!