You can learn assertiveness skills at any stage of life and you can always improve them and gain more respect for yourself and others. In this post, I have gathered all of my assertiveness tips in one big list. I hope this summary will be useful for you and for your children and students.
If we create a society full of assertive people, we will not have conflicts and we will live with each other with respect, so pass this along to everyone you know.
In order for us to be assertive, we need to create clear boundaries between us and other people. In the previous post about assertiveness, I explained that assertiveness is the ability to express our needs and desires without hurting others and that this skill is important, yet nobody learns it at school. In this post, I will describe the things we do (and should not do) that sacrifice our own best interest and let other people into our personal space.
In order to be assertive, we must understand that everyone is entitled to his or her own thoughts, beliefs and actions. At the same time, we do not have to accept them as applicable to us. We should always stick to the things that are important to us and take care of ourselves first.
What a shame! Assertiveness is not something we learn at school, so if you cannot learn it from your parents, because they never learned it from their own parents, then you can be easily manipulated and pushed over.
Everybody hates being pushed over. I see it as a natural part of life. We all do everything we can to improve our position, and if others are in our way, we push them aside. Sometimes, well, most times, we hurt people along the way without any bad intentions. Assertiveness can help us do better in life without hurting anyone.
Many of my clients mainly need assertiveness. When we do not have it and we cannot express our needs and assert our rights, we resort to either avoidance or aggression. It is the old “fight and flight” response. We see a lion or a snake and we either run away or attack. So when I see aggression or avoidance, I know that assertiveness is needed.
Read Assertiveness: It is better to be Wise than to be Right »
In Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists, I covered easy ways to diagnose symptoms of stress in children, without having to go to psychiatrists that are very likely give your child medication that might prevent them from developing coping mechanisms and might damage them for life.
Once you have confirmed the stress, you will want to know how to deal with stress and start helping your child. So here is a list of easy solutions you can use at home to help your child cope. No Psychiatrists. No Medication. These methods take the same time to work as medication does, are just as effective and have no side effects, so they are much better in the long run.
Read Kids under Stress: How to Deal with Stress the Easy Way »
Stress is the epidemic of the modern world. All health concerns are associated with stress and as time goes on, stress goes up and stress symptoms show earlier and earlier in life. I was shocked to discover that psychiatrists now prescribe drugs to children as young as 3 years old!
Yes, instead of teaching children to deal with the feelings they have, which is what emotional intelligence is all about, we give them drugs that prevent their body from coping and developing the mechanisms to cope with stress.
Use of drugs to manage stress prevents the body from producing chemicals to calm the body. Over time, the stress increases and we have to increase the use of drugs to cope with natural and healthy life processes. Sadness, disappointment and anger are all healthy feelings, essential for our survival. The use of drugs to suppress them sends a message to the body that they are not healthy feelings for us and makes us helpless and powerless.
As a parent, I have a strong desire to keep my kids away from therapists (yes, even doctors, as much as I can). Why? Because for some reason, kids who are in therapy for a long time form the belief that something is wrong with them. As a life coach and special education professional, I can tell you that working with disabilities and learning difficulties is much easier than working with a child that thinks something is wrong with him or her.
Read Kids under Stress: Diagnose Stress Symptoms without Psychiatrists »
“Using the placebo effect on kids is an effective technique to help them go through tough periods in their lives.”
This may seem like a bold statement, but when I learned about the placebo effect during my special education studies, I realized that the placebo effect activates the natural “pharmacy” we have in our bodies. When we believe something to be true, we make it true. It works the same when we take a physical tablet and when when we take an emotional tablet.
The more I explain what life coaching and emotional intelligence are, the more I realize how important the placebo effect is for my work. Most of my work is to plant positive ideas and beliefs in the minds of my clients. Once they hold on to those beliefs or ideas, I have done my job in setting them up for a better future.
The placebo effect works in the same way. You can plant an idea in your kids’ mind that they can do something, be healthy or be smart by giving them a sugar pill and telling them it will help them do or be what they want.
Actually, the placebo effect works for kids even when you apply it to their parents by convincing them that their kids are amazing and talented, because your pill will help them…
In the previous chapter of the character traits series, I explained about the beliefs we try to instill in our kids. We need to focus on encouraging the characters we want our children to have, not try to prevent the characters we don’t want them to have. If good character traits are like plants, the fear that your child will develop a bad character is like watering the plant with weed killer. The character will never grow. For good character to grow and flourish, we need to water it and give it nutritious and healthy fertilizer.
In the last chapter, we listed traits from A to F, that we want our kids to have. We talked about some of the major weed killers that prevent these good character traits from growing. This chapter will cover the traits from G to Z.
Generous – “Don’t be a sucker”, “People will take advantage of you”, “Why would you waste your time on that?”, “What will you get from helping them?”, “If you do things for people for free, they’ll expect you to do it for free forever”.
Gentle – Aggressive behavior and the use of force, threats and harsh discipline will prevent kids from developing gentleness as a trait. Saying things like, “Stop being a girl (for a boy)”, “I am make the rules. You do what I tell you or else…”.
Grateful – “You are ungrateful”, “It is not worth doing anything for you”, “I do things for you and you do not appreciate it”, “You need to beg me to do that”, “I am ashamed of you”, “I will help you only if you do what I tell you to do”.
Read How to Destroy Good Character Traits for Children: G-Z »
Stress is known to be the number 1 killer in the world today. More even than accidents and war (which are also attributed to being stressed). Even the disease in the world are related to stress.
In my work with my coaching clients, I explain that our feelings and thoughts are a choice. My slogan is “happiness is a choice”. With this choice, there are three main pills: the happiness pill, the chill pill and the stress pill.
The happy pill
Smiling bouncy balls falling out of a bucketOver the years, I have collected many strategies to make people happy. I have tried to share them in this blog. When I write about them, I want each of them to be a happiness pill. Ever psot contains a “pill of happiness”.
The thing is, people seem to understand happiness better when they can compare it to stress. I have written some posts about stress in the past and found this to be true. That is how the idea for this series was born. So in this chapter I will describe thoughts, beliefs and ideas in the form of a “stress pill”.
So far, we’ve covered how attachment styles affect babies and individuals, but what about attachment styles in relationships and marriages?
Have you ever heard the theory that we pick partners who are similar to our parents? I have wondered about this over the years. My life partner, Gal is similar to my dad in some ways and totally different in many other ways. He is also similar to my mom in some ways and totally different to her in many other ways. I find it hard to either confirm or deny the theory.
While it is hard to decide if this theory works based on personal attributes, attachment theory claims that in some strange way we relate and attach to our partners and in a way that matches the attachment style that was created between us and our caregivers in those first years of our lives.
Read Attachment Theory: Attachment Styles in Relationships and Marriages »
Babies’ relationships with their parents in the first years of life has a significant impact on their future relationship. As babies, the attachment they have to their parents will become a blue print of their attitude towards themselves and others. During that period, they create a “navigating map” and use it until they become teenagers. In teen years, which are considered to be between 11 to 25, teens renew this map and the relationship between them and their parents becomes even more important for their future relationship.
For parents, this is the perfect opportunity to fix any problems in the relationship. For example, amending insecure attachment or making an already slightly secure attachment more secure. This is our second and the last one.
Like in early childhood, a secure attachment in teenagers is characterized by the ability to seek comfort from a meaningful figure when they are going through difficulties. It is also measured by how fast and how easily they are comforted and able to get them back on track, enjoying life and being available to absorb new experiences.
Read Attachment Theory: Secure and Insecure Attachment in Teenagers »
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