 Hello and welcome to MIPTV, with ever the well-read and polymathic Mr Bob Cook. Bob's going to share one of his favourite books. I suspect that some people will have heard of. It's by Muriel James and it's called Born to Win. So what's this book about, Bob? It's written by two elders of the transactionalist movement. Born to Win by Muriel James and Dorothy Youngwood. And as I was saying to you off air, it was one of the first real TA books that I wrote. And I saw it not wrote, read, which I had wrote, but anyway, which I read. And what I liked particularly is it's very easy to read. It's a paperback, for example, and it's very easy to read. And what particularly makes it stands out is the mix of Gestalt techniques that are explained in this book. So two reasons I like it. One is very accessible. Secondly, which is my favourite reason for liking it, is mixes Gestalt techniques with transactionalist concepts. So for example, many people would think that the two chair technique comes from Gestalt psychotherapy, which it does in some ways that we could link it back to Marina, who was the originator of drama therapy. But in this book, Dorothy Youngwood, who's the Gestaltist per se, even though she knows TA, talks about how to use the two chair technique and talks about Gestalt experiments to use to help the person or the reader develop their own inner child to get in touch with the early history and to really talk about establishing that compassionate narrative in search of the child ego state. It sounds like there's some integration going on here, Bob. Yeah, way back because it was written in the middle of the 1970s. So it's an early book. So before the real search or movement towards integration in psychotherapy, I think the Gestalt experiments in the book were all aimed or focused on getting to the inner child or the child ego state and TA terms. Yeah. It's called Born to Win. What's the significance of the title? It comes from the idea of scripts. Going back to scripts again, and we've done many videos, and many of them we talked about the concept of scripts. So it burns marvelous book. What you say after say hello, which is his first book on scripts and the idea of a script that we design a life plan early in history, which comes to template for our life in many ways. But over and talked about winners scripts and losers scripts. Steiner, who was a disciple of Bern, talked about hermatic scripts, mindless scripts, loveless scripts. Hey, Bern himself talked about he looked at the idea of the Greek ideas of almost script and different types of scripts, but he did come up with the idea of winners scripts, losers scripts. And I think the title is that we are born from the beginning as a blank screen if you like or an early sponge. And with the right fertile ground, we can develop the script for success. Right. So it's interesting, there's some little bit of behaviorism in there. For the blank slate, the tabala raza, as the behaviorists are fond to call it. Then, yeah, it's interesting, isn't it, how all these ideas kind of seem to come from the same roots. The tree just is very broad, isn't it? In the humanistic tradition, of course, we certainly believe that we're okay. You know that whole, I'm okay, you're okay. And you believe that it was the environment around or the significant others that turned people into Fox or the kids into Fox. Yeah, yeah. And through therapy, you can put a new script on the port, you know, on the world, and you can actually become Prince or Princess rather than keeping to the script which was imposed on you, which turned you into Fox. Yes. So we can actually put a new life plan on, you know, a new script on the road. We can start winning if we've given up that script. But I think Mule James believed we were all born with the potential for success. And our birthright is actualization to live our life as winners and not to live our life as Fox. Yeah, it's just an idea, isn't it? Because there's a little link to humanism and people like Maslow and Rodgers and... ...the needs and the conditions. I mean, from your world, I mean, I know you know a lot about Carl Rodgers. He had ideas around scripting and life ban. Well, they were called conditions of worth and projected values. But one of the interesting things was around the same time and it's around the same time Burn was around and all these people was the human potential movement, which I think one of the people was Aldous Huxley who braved the world and does a perception. And this kind of idea that humans had potential, which kind of links into the book, isn't it, Born to Win? Yeah, that's why we've got that title. I'm a great believer in this. I mean, as a therapist, really from the beginning, I'm always looking for the potential for growth, the potential for winning, the potential for success, the potential for taking ownership of your own destiny. And I'm always, always looking for that potential and helping the clients often get in touch with the part of themselves they've forgotten. To shine a light into the other areas that maybe the hidden areas that maybe they're not aware of to open that up, open the other rooms of the house up. Yeah, so they can become the winners they were born to be. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like a fascinating book. It's a book I've heard of, Born to Win. It comes up quite a lot when I look through, I'm searching for psychotherapy books. And in terms of students, why would you think it would be important for a student maybe to visit this particular text? One of the reasons why I wanted to bring this into this video really is that when I look back at my career and how many of the introduction to TA courses I've done or the 101 courses I've done, which is the basic introduction. And I ask people, these are people who are interested in transaction analysis, interested in psychotherapy at first time and come on on this two-day workshop at Manchester Institute. And I ask them, what have you read already in TA? Well, why have you come? And you know, this particular book's title comes up over and over and over again. And people said, you know, some of the first books I ever read was Born to Win. Or, I'm okay, you're okay, but Born to Win is such a popular book that people seem to really take their heart. And I believe it's because it's very accessible and has many exercises after each chapter where people can start looking at how to develop themselves. It's almost like a kind of a self-help book. Yes, it definitely was. And the other question was the same thing. It also, in the first three or four chapters, talks about the basic concepts of TA in a very accessible way. So students who want to learn TA in a very accessible way, right at the beginning of their first year, if you like, I would recommend this book because of its easeability, if you like, to read. Yeah, so a very easy book for new students of the discipline. People who are just reading round maybe in the first semester of the training. So, yeah, so an accessible book, a one that's really readily available, isn't it? So the book we reviewed today is Born to Win by Muriel James. We're going to put our link in the bottom in title bar so people can click on it and you can inspect it. As always, Bob doesn't do this for money. He's not being sponsored by the book company. He just does it to share his love of literature. And at the end of the video, we'll just put a little title window in with a picture of it so you can identify it. So as always, Bob Cook, thank you very much. Thank you, Roy.