Life Positions

I’d like to share with you a framework that helps if you want to gain confidence and self esteem. This model puts our thinking into perspective and gives an insight and understanding into how we undermine ourselves through our thinking process and it also shows us we have a choice we can make every day in every situation.

The concept of life positions comes from a school of psychology known as Transactional Analysis and was originally described by Eric Berne, although it was Thomas Harris who popularised life positions in 1973 when he had a book published with the title I’m OK, You’re OK, which is one of the life positions. Life Positions also goes under other names such as the OK Corral and Windows on the World, ++. Whatever it’s called it all comes back to the same theory and model. The model can be represented by a quadrant, which looks like four windows, hence it being called Windows on the World. The windows give a distorted view of the world as we look through three of them with a clear view from the ++ window.

The theory is that there are four life positions with three of them being determined in our early childhood and one we can choose when we are an adult. Whichever life position we adopt as a child goes with us into adulthood, especially when we are having a bad day or things are going wrong. We decide early on in life that one of the three life positions is our view of the world when we compare ourselves with other people, especially the big people around us, and we then behave in accordance with that decision. These three life positions are the result of our subconscious, emotional responses to situations, whereas the fourth position – I’m OK, You’re OK – is reached through a conscious and rational decision process about how we choose to behave. This ability for rational thinking and decision making is why the fourth life position is only attainable when we leave childhood and we can analyse situations and make decisions about which response we choose and hence which behaviour to adopt.