Straight forward introduction to TA that you can pick up and run with. The check for understanding exercise is good as people can ‘see’ TA in action. And the dominant states exercise was good.

Personally I added a little bit about the functional model as I find it helps people get their minds around the positive and negative parent and child states. But that was easy to add into this activity.

The complementary or crossed communications exercise was helpful, and again to make it a little more practical I gave them discs and sticks and got them to map out the transactions to help their thinking process with each example. Found this worked well.

I used this material in a coaching workshop for managers. The exercise was used in the context of giving effective feedback and what problems may occur when our communication style is crossed rather than parallel to the person we’re working with. It is structured such that the topic of transactional analysis is very easy to understand and everyone was able to identify with the states of being an Adult, Child or Parent. It begins with an exercise to consider what your reactions would be in five situations - which you later come back to and label the state in which you responded – many people were surprised that many of their immediate reactions were very much in a Child state! I followed this exercise with a coaching role-play, where the manager had to give feedback to an ‘employee’ about his/her performance which helped the participants to use a more appropriate state when giving feedback.