Are you assertive?

August 5, 2009admin 42 Comments »

There is a party late in the night. You have to reach office early next morning for a very important meeting. You don’t want to go but your friends are repeatedly inviting you. How would you respond?

a) Say “what is wrong with you people. How can you even think of asking me out tonight? Don’t you know I    have an important meeting tomorrow? How insensitive of you.”

b) Say “Okay I’ll meet you later tonight”

c) Say “Okay I’ll come” but keep blaming and complaining all the time that you had to go.

d) Say “I would love to come tonight but since I have an important meeting early tomorrow morning I would have to skip the fun”

What emotions do you think you and those around would experience with each one of the above kind of responses, over a period of time?  Usually, these responses result in the following emotions…

a) A feeling of anxiety and stress. You would tend to feel bent and out of shape. They would tend to feel angry and resentful at the outburst. They would comply with your demand but feel negative and hostile towards you.

b) A feeling of helplessness and lethargy. They tend to feel dominating and imperialistic as they know they can always get their way with you.

c) A feeling of being victimized and wronged. They would feel confused in the beginning because they would believe it’s your choice but then tend to get angry with all the blaming and complaining.

d) A feeling of satisfaction and well being. They would tend to feel good about you as there is direct communication.

So which communication pattern are you following? Are you…

a) Aggressive? You may be winning your battles in the short run but I must warn you… you would lose the war in the long run.

b) Passive? You are just going along with everything in life and not making any kind of waves. You would tend to stay with this feeling of being used and low all your life.

c) Passive-aggressive? You are unable to get your way though you constantly want to teach others a lesson. Its building up a lot of anger within you.

d) Assertive? You sure know what you want and how to effectively get it. Congratulations!

So how would one define assertiveness?

Assertiveness means taking responsibility of your own life, feeling and actions. It would require you to change your perception and your communication pattern with others. Most people need to learn the art of being assertive. This enhances their quality of life and chances of success.

What would be your reasons to want to learn to be assertive?

  • To be able to handle conflict
  • To be more assertive with your boss
  • To gain self confidence
  • To become less aggressive
  • To express yourself better
  • To be able to win more arguments when you know you are right
  • To be able to deal with situations better
  • To communicate effectively with your partner
  • To cope with difficult situations without getting emotional
  • To stop feeling guilty for standing for yourself
  • To turn confrontation into an adult to adult discussion
  • To be able to take more risks in life
  • To improve the quality of your life
  • To….

In assertive behaviour you stand up or speak up for yourself without diminishing someone else’s rights. You state facts of the situation without getting emotional and adding past baggage about the person or situation. For example, if your child throws a tantrum, you feel it is better to ignore the tantrum because it would pass but your spouse feels the child should be scolded for the same. How would you respond in this situation? The passive way would of course be to agree with the spouse and scold the child and the aggressive way would be to shout and have an argument as to how you know more about disciplining, how your spouse only knows how to criticize and pull everyone down by shouting and so on. The passive aggressive would tell the child that I’m scolding you because my spouse wants me to scold you. The assertive response in this situation would be to say something like “I think it is better if we ignore this tantrum at the moment rather than scolding him because he gets more rebellious when we scold him and usually he cools down faster when we ignore him.”

It is also important to understand that you don’t have to assert yourself all the time. It’s good to just let go at times. You need to make a list of your priorities and choose the battles you want to fight. Very often you may find that there would be issues which in retrospect were not worth your being very assertive about. It might have been a better option for you to have let go of that particular situation. For example, your car mechanic told you he would fix and deliver your car by noon but he does not do so. Is it worth your going to the garage and being assertive with the mechanic or just letting go of the delay?

The first step towards assertiveness training involves you to be doing some serious soul searching and identifying yourself. You need to be penning down…

  1. Which behaviour style do you usually operate in? Aggressive, passive, passive-aggressive or assertive.
  2. Your reasons to want to learn to be assertive. A few examples have been suggested above but you have to identify your core reasons for yourself.
  3. Your priorities in life. Keep the list as precise as possible. This will help you identify what is truly important to you in life and in turn help you decide when it is worth asserting and when it is good to just let go.

To sum up, I would want you to bear in mind that if your goal in life is to be successful in what you do, being either passive or passive-aggressive can definitely not achieve it because your brain experiences an increase in frustration. In aggressive behaviour your brain experiences an increase in anxiety and stress while with assertive behaviour it shows an increase in pleasure. Assertive behaviour helps both parties in a conversation feel happy and helps all around you as well. Learning to be assertive is interesting and an enriching experience of life.

Saloni Sawnani

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Assertiveness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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