What actually is my “I”? And what am I allowed to be? What do I allow myself? What do others allow me to be?
Am I allowed to make clear statements in life? Can I be caring and protective? Or do I always have to be rational and sensible? But what if I want to be creative and free, playful and innovative? Or do I want to adapt and simply do things well? Or simply oppose things critically?
These are all roles that we can use in life depending on the situation. Both privately and professionally, as a top manager and as an employee.
Our customers often realize that they have been shaped in such a way that they can only “fit” into a few of these roles. For example, that they are always submissive and well-behaved. Instead of saying what they feel like doing.
It is always amazing how much life, wealth, freedom and satisfaction is created when our clients take the following steps in coaching:
1️⃣ Create awareness of the possible roles, even for “small”, “suppressed” roles (e.g. for the role ‘I can also be rebellious sometimes’)
2️⃣ Deep appreciation and understanding of the roles through inner dialog.
3️⃣ Create new ways of thinking, feeling and acting by allowing our customers to adopt different roles depending on the situation.
4️⃣ Anchoring the roles in life by activating suitable energies. Strengthening and practicing the new degrees of freedom.
Incidentally, our coaching approach has parallels with Stefanie Stahl’s method. She uses what we consider to be a rather simplistic concept of the shadow child and the sun child.
In coaching, however, we prefer the deeper, richer terminology of transactional analysis, which speaks of 6 ego parts (called “roles” above). More about what these are in the next post.
Would you like to get to know your ego states? Finding ways to more freedom, peace and energy? Taking the ‘wheel’ back into your own hands?
I would be happy to conduct an initial analysis of your ego states and patterns with you and reflect on the results together with you. Get in touch if you would like to know more about this “Short-term coaching on ego states”!
This article is part of the following mini-series on transactional analysis:
- How many am I? – A motivating introduction to transactional analysis
- How many am I? – The methodological and conceptual foundations of our coaching
- How many am I? Or: The caring and controlling project mother
- How many am I? Or: The little dictator
- How many am I? Or: The cold ice princess
- How many am I? Or: ‘The adapted little one’ with the explosions
- How many am I? Or: The rebel and the always bad world
- How many am I? Or: The imprisoned, deeply unhappy artist and free spirit
