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.
My eldest daughter Eden wanted a body piercing in her belly button when she as 15. She was already in 11th Grade and some of her friends had them. When she said that it would be beautiful, I could not disagree. It would be beautiful, but the thought of her damaging her body was very unattractive to me.
At first, I felt a bit hypocritical. I had my ears pierced when I was young. In my neighborhood, kids had their ears pierced when they were one to two years old. I was “old” (6 or 7) and did it at my neighbor’s house. At the time, it was not a choice but a social obligation. Back then, this defined me as a girl.
I got my second piercing when I was 21. This was my choice. It was a compromise, because having seven earrings in one ear was the norm at the time. Still, I did it due to peer pressure. It was accepted, it was common, it was cool and it was pretty.
How could I blame my daughter for wanting to do the same 25 years later?
Assertiveness is a helpful skill in life, yet most people do not have it. They do not have it because they could not learn it at home or from anyone else except professionals. You see, the people who teach assertiveness must be very confident and not afraid that you might use assertiveness with them, and these people are hard to find.
Am I assertive all the time? No, not really. Sometimes, I choose avoidance or aggression, and every time I use them, I feel uncomfortable. They either hurt me or others, which is not very good. Still, I aim to use assertiveness in my communication with others and most of the time, I do.
Assertiveness requires confidence to express your own thoughts and feeling without fear and without the need, desire or intention to hurt anyone else. It is important to distinguish between having the intention to hurt and actually hurting someone else.
Keeping things to yourself does not mean keeping them a secret. Assertiveness comes from confidence, while secrets come from fear. Sharing is expressing yourself confidently without reservation and without any pressure to convince others or justify your own thoughts and beliefs.
Here is a list of things you can keep to yourself or share selectively. If you are confident about them, you do not need validation, approval or to have the majority with you to hold them. If you want someone’s opinion, ask. If someone asks for your opinion, respect their choice not to accept it or to do whatever they want with it. If they disagree, do not like it or do not want to use it, it should not create any doubt in you. Some things are yours to keep and you can share them, but never with pressure. Pressure is not assertiveness.
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 »
My life changed when I was a teenager. I was in the middle of 10th Grade when the school counselor gave me a letter telling me that since I had too many failures in my report card, I would not be able to stay for 11th Grade.
There was nothing special about it. I counted the days to the end of the year, so I would not have to go to school anymore. I hated school with every cell of my body. I was looking forward to the end of it.
The change happened when there was a contradiction between what I wanted and how it felt. You see, I wanted to leave school at the end of 10th Grade anyway, but it just did not feel right.
This inner conflict was a very big quantum moment in my life. It made me wonder, “How was it possible to get what you want and still be unhappy about it?” It is a big question. Have you ever asked yourself this? I suggest you do!
I often hear that finding the reasons for things we do is the way to have a happy life. There are many public claims that understanding why we do things cures bad decisions and is the way to contentment.
However, it is important to distinguish between the search for a reason and finding a reason. Searching for a reason is a continuous state of limbo, based on the belief there is one true reason for something. Finding a reason is just an illusion that the reason we found is the one true reason.
There is a big challenge in searching for the one reason, mainly because most of our decision making (in fact, more than 90%) is done by our subconscious mind, which means we are not aware of it. We only know of 10% of it.
Our conscious mind can process a limited number of thoughts and memories, so it is unlikely to lead us to the “right” reason, or right decision. At the same time, our subconscious mind can process millions of thoughts and memories in a split second. We can never hope to be aware of everything that goes on “down there”.
So in humans, the concept of cause and effect is not that simple. There is no single cause that will lead to the same effect.
Teens have a bad reputation. Many people believe that they generally make bad choices, misbehave and lash out in ways that hurt them (and others) later. Among other things, they think that teens do not know how to make good career choices.
I have had the honor of working with many teens. This has given me a chance to prove to many of them, and to their families, that the bad reputation teens have is wrong. There are always teens who choose well, behave well and do well. And if they can do it, so can other teens!
Many of my clients share teen horror stories, like “You know teens. They never have any money”. I do not know what they are talking about. My own teens have always had money, and it was their own money.
Another common belief is “You know teens. They don’t want to work”. No, I do not know, because my own teens have always wanted to work. My kids also have friends who started working as soon as they could and are doing very well.
Children are affected strongly by their emotional state. When I work with children, I can see their performance decrease when they are emotionally preoccupied. Some kids are affected more and others less, but all of them drop in performance when they are down.
Kinesthetic children are typically affected more, because they are very sensitive to the people around them. These are the kids who can “sense” others around them and all they want is for “everyone to be happy and nice to each other”.
Children who are highly sensitive to pressure are at risk of developing “the disease to please” – dependence on external rewards and oversensitivity to pressure. It is the perception that other people’s feelings are so important that they trump your own.
In most cases, “the disease to please” comes from fear of rejection, which most people want to avoid. Many people have this disease and they got it during their childhood. We can say that this kind of disease is contagious and we catch it from our parents…
Book your private life coaching with Ronit Baras and learn how to be happy in life
