Are you living out a script, or improvising in the moment?

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

I posted the following on Nick Wright's website (interesting articles) in response to his invitation to read his article 'What's your story?': http://www.nick-wright.com/1/post/2011/12/whats-your-story.html

Hi Nick, thanks for pointing me in the direction of your article, I have been away hence the tardy reply.

I think I said previously I am a qualified organisational Transactional Analyst and I teach TA to trainers, coaches, consultants, managers etc. The TA concept of script is one which I find fascinates and provides deep insights for teams and individuals alike. I too agree with Scott Shaw's final statement of "we become the stories we tell ourselves.

The interesting thing is we form our script at a very young age, based as you say on stories, fairy tales, myths, even television programmes around at the time. The script is more or less in place by the time we are 7 years old - a scary thought for most! - and the rest of the time we are refining it and creating our reality which lines up with the decisions we have made - and those decisions form our script. So we filter away any information that does not fit our script, and only allow information in that says we were right to make that decision! "The world is a scary place" (lots of evidence to be found if you focus on the negative .....) "I m shy (so don't talk to people who then leave you alone .....) etc.

Fanita English, a very respected TA writer talks about "positive" scripts - we have a psychological hunger for structure and the need to create new responses could be too much - so she talks less about script and more about the idea of "improvisation" - being in the here and now, but with a loose framework from which to respond.

The aim of TA is autonomy: being spontaneous, responding to the here and now reality and not being in our script, dancing to an out of date tune which was laid down years ago when our circumstances were different. Some say being script-free is the ultimate goal of TA, but personally I like and prefer Fanita English's view - and continue to aim to dance in the moment!

Great thread, interesting discussion and contributions - thank you.
Lynda