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.
So far, I have covered things that affect our ability to be assertive. This post adds some tips on how to know your rights, keep them and be assertive about them. I hope they will help you on your quest to develop your emotional intelligence and communicate with assertiveness.
When you are assertive, you express yourself with confidence without hurting others. You are firm, not a bully. You are clear, not manipulative. You are honest, not aggressive. Healthy communication is based on honesty, clarity and confidence.
First, you have to know your rights in every communication. It takes two to tango and when one has more rights than the other does, this will not be an assertive relationship. I suggest teaching kids these rights too and giving them opportunities to practice them.
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 »
In the last two posts about the expectations paradox, I explained how expectations from others and ourselves can cause us lots of pain and why respect and acceptance are the keys to overcoming them. It is much better to be prepared for the future than to try to control a specific outcome. Today, I will describe how to develop respect and acceptance with mindfulness.
Mindfulness is a state of reflection with no judgment. This state is similar to mediation. We observe and do not let the ego interfere with our observation and tempt us to label and judge what we experience. In a mindfulness state, we do not give a rating to the event, thought or feeling. We only name it. In a higher state of mindfulness, even naming it is not necessary. We just notice.
I remember the first time I mediated. Gal and I were in California at a meditation course. Every week, we learned a different kind of meditation. We did walking, eating, light, mantra and visualizing meditations and we were very confused. Millions of thoughts ran through our minds and we had no control over them. When we got home, we went to sleep and felt overwhelmed.
My mother-in-law was an experienced teacher and a manager at an adult education institute. Many years ago, when she was still alive, she told me about a management course she was taking that shook her perception of her work. She was very surprised to discover that there were many types of managers.
After her course, we had many discussions about how management, leadership and parenting are very similar in their essence. At that time, I was running my first business, where I was a manager, a leader and a parent. I managed all the aspects of the business and led the educational program, while being a young mother.
I thought about these three roles we play for years and managed to combine them into something that worked really well for my family and me. Hopefully, the ideas below will work well for your family and you too.
Parenting is a management position. For the family “business” or “operation” to run properly, we need to manage time, manage our emotions and those of our family members, manage money, manage habits, manage education, manage health, manage work and manage time off. In fact, all aspects of family life, we even need to manage things we have no control over (yes, it is very frustrating that we cannot control everything).
In the last post about the paradox of expectations, I explained how unmet expectations can bring lots of misery to life when we do not understand them properly. Today, I will explore additional aspects of expectations and what happens to us when our expectations are not met.
Many people think that expectations are part of their identity. They expect so much of themselves that they believe this gives them the “right” to expect the same from others. I am sure that if you examine the definition of arrogance (“having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance or abilities”), you will see someone who expects a lot from themselves and from others as arrogant. Thinking highly of yourself is great, but expecting others to fulfill your expectations is not!
Most people care a lot about what others think about them. They are in the approval trap and have the disease to please. It is very hard to be assertive and to take care of your own interests when you are busy pleasing others. It may be easier when you are young, but it becomes more complicated during the teenage years, when you realize that that some of the expectations of those around you contradict others.
More people find the pain we experience from unmet expectations unbearable. They think that life is hard when things do not happen the way they expect them to. But this is only because they believe life is supposed to work as they expect.
Questions are very important on our way to mindfulness. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates thought that questions could lead us to many discoveries. One of the most important discoveries is that questions can reveal to us what we think and lead us to a better life.
The formula is simple. When we ask good questions, we get good answers that can help us grow and evolve to a better version of ourselves.
As a life coach, I use questions a lot. I know that some questions I ask (myself or others) will lead to pain and others will empower. Questions can trigger responses like “let’s move on”, “let’s do something”, “let’s think positively”, “let’s plan”, “let’s change perspective” and “let’s appreciate”, like pressing a button.
Every thought we have also triggers a feeling, so by “pressing the button” for that thought, we can create that feeling. For example, the “good memory” button will make us happy and “bad memory” button will bring us pain and suffering.
We may not have more bad memories than good memories, but if we press the “bad memory” button more often, we will have more suffering.
Read Mindfulness Questions to Change Your Life for the Better »
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