Understanding Drivers and how they work is fundamental to how I help my clients make progress and get great results.

Before we get into it though, I need to discuss the boundary between therapy and coaching. It’s generally thought of as therapy is about the past and coaching is about the future. Coaching is about generating awareness in the client such that they can take responsibility and have more choices in their approach. This is where there may be confusion in terms of boundaries when we talk about behavioural drivers. In Transactional Analysis (TA) we talk about Drivers and these are generally accepted as being five ‘rules’ by which people learn to survive and perform – early in childhood.

Every single person on the planet learns Driver behaviour in early childhood. Drivers are good things. They’re there to help us survive and perform. They become unconscious ‘programs’ that may run most of the time or only be triggered by certain stimuli, outside of any conscious awareness (an example might be senior executives being in the room when we have to present). Here’s where boundary clarity is important. Just because Drivers are learnt in childhood, it doesn’t mean that they are only accessible to the therapist who analyses the past. I’m not interested in a client’s childhood per se. I am extremely interested in the decisions they made then that are getting in the way now. It’s of huge benefit to bring this unconscious programming into our conscious awareness so that our clients learn autonomy. Using Driver behaviour can then become a conscious choice, but only when it’s useful.

I sometimes think of Drivers as the automatic programs that run on our computer systems. Until we become aware of them, we can’t choose whether or not to keep them running or kill them as processes because they cause the system to run slower.

I want to be very clear that the five accepted Drivers are not to be seen as bad things. They are, or at least have been, very useful to the individual. We must never forget ​​this.  Let’s take an example of the Driver to Please (Others). As a child, I learned that I get on better in my family system and at school if I Please Others. This becomes an unconscious behaviour that really works for me. Now, however, I’ve become the manager of my team and to be successful, I have to delegate well. If I’m running the program that “I’m only OK if I Please Others”, then I will never be successful in my new role. I need to be aware of my unconscious processes and choose the Allower or Permission instead. In this case, the allower is ‘Please Me’. This Driver can get in the way of setting good boundaries so we can say no to others. Performance management can be difficult too as can be any form of conflict or standing up to authority.

Here are the other Drivers. “I’m OK if I can Be Perfect”. Again, this can cause challenges in delegating and trusting others to deliver. It can lead to overwhelm as effort goes well beyond Pareto. Micro-management can also be an issue. Those with a strong Be Perfect Driver feel uncomfortable with the Allower which in this case is ‘Good Enough’. The ‘Be Perfects’ often have to decide what is more important to them, perfection or quality. We get better quality when we learn to be comfortable with Good Enough.

I’d say that everyone I coach has this next Driver and that is to Try Hard. We ‘Try Hards’ love to take on challenges and dislike it when things are quiet and easy for any length of time. This drives us to be successful, and you’d be right in thinking this can be a great adaptation. However, what happens is that our unconscious wants to see everything as a struggle and we therefore naturally frame challenges as binary – this OR that. I can’t count how many times clients have presented issues as either/or when there’s no reason for this polarity other than their unconscious wanting to perceive a struggle. The Allower in this case is ‘Do It’ which is getting us to move past the struggle that may not even exist in reality.

These are the key Performing adaptations most relevant to any executive building their self-awareness. The others are Be Strong, with an Allower of ‘Show vulnerability/Ask for help’ and finally Hurry Up with the Allower ‘Take Your Time’. They can and do play a part in people’s success and failure but don’t arise as often as the others I’ve covered. Of course, Drivers can combine and this can lead to the sense of overwhelm that we often see in our clients.

I’ll finish on this note. If someone has a lot of strong driver behaviour it doesn’t mean that they’re in any way broken! Remember, everyone is okay. What strong Driver adaptation in a person means is that as children, they were clever enough to develop behaviours that allowed them to survive and perform In their family system. The ‘problems’ only occur when these behaviours, learned in earlier years, play out unconsciously now.

This blog post is part of a collaboration between two Executive Coaches Sarah Turner and Gregor Findlay, co-hosts of The Coaching Question Podcast. This blog features as part of a special series on the topic of Transaction Analysis in Coaching. Check out the podcast here.

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