#psychology #transactional-analysis #games-people-play
idea
Life scripts are socially defined high-level rules that we are following. Examples of life scripts:
- Work life: university -> job -> seek power -> retire
- Build a family: date -> marry -> have children
They can be of lower level as well, such as the script we follow when organizing a wedding (phases, who to invite, etc.) or how we proceed when going to a coffee shop, what a lunch is, etc.
The problem with life scripts is that they create invisible shackles, pushing us to forget optionality, that we can change how we do things so that life is more enjoyable[1].
This is something that can be used to shape people's behaviour, such as is suggested in How to Win friends and influence people[3].
An alternative to life scripts is perspectives. Rather than thinking about life as a thing that should be linear and consistent, it's seeing life as possibilities, played through our own perspective. As poetry instead of prose[2].
links
[[inner-story]]
Transactional analysis has the concept of life position. Also closely related to games people play.
references
[1]: Not overthinking discussing a few life scripts
[2]: Your life is not a story: why narrative thinking holds you back
it is important to remember that narratives do not exist outside of people’s minds. The stories we tell ourselves are not out there in the world
Yet viewing our lives in such a narrow way hinders our ability to understand the complex behaviour of others and ourselves. For example, a child that accepts the narrative of being ‘naughty’ may incorrectly frame their behaviour as bad, rather than as an expression of their unmet needs. Stories can change us by locking us into ways of acting, thinking, and feeling.
Sartre, about a waiter:
All his behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us.
Definition of perspectives:
I’m referring to the way we engage with the world from a particular position or orientation that draws our attention to aspects of experience, like how our visual ‘perspective’ allows bright colours to show up more easily than dull ones
In some ways, perspectives are better represented by the non-linearity of poetry
[3]: Carnegie / how to win friends and influence people
In short, if you want to improve a person in a certain respect, act as though that particular trait were already one of his or her outstanding characteristics