The Benefits of Being Assertive

Let’s look at the likely outcomes of three types of behavior, avoiding, assertiveness, and aggressiveness.

Avoiding:
Lose/win: You tend to lose, others tend to win at your expense. Low results because you act small and get treated as small. Your avoiding posture usually results from fears and ironically it often causes the fears to come true. This is called a self-fulfilling prophecy. Avoiding often breeds low self-esteem and depression.

Assertiveness:
Win/win: You win and so do others. To some extent, the self-fulfilling prophecy works with assertiveness too. When you expect good results and assert yourself to get them, they often materialize. When you assert appropriately, you stand the best chance of getting what you really want and being happy about it.

Aggressiveness:
Win/lose: You get what you want and others have to give in to you. However, this often changes into lose/lose because others will drag their feet on your priorities or even sabotage them. They see ways to subvert you and when they succeed, you have a lose/lose, both parties have a less than optimal result.

Aggressiveness has this huge drawback of breeding passive or passive-aggressive behavior in response. It also breeds bad health such as heart attacks in people who are habitually aggressive. Research proves this, and it is described by Duke psychologist Redford Williams, in his book, Anger Kills.

Risks:
People often complain that there is a risk to being assertive, and they spell out a fear of a bad outcome such as their boss will take offense. What these people seldom recognize is that there is a risk with each of the three behaviors. Staying silent or avoiding has the risk of others not taking you seriously. Being aggressive has the risk of engendering subversive reactions. So weigh your risks with each of the three behaviors before deciding on one.

What you need is to have a conscious choice of one of the three behaviors, not a knee jerk reaction in favor of one. Want to improve your ability to weigh outcomes and make good decisions on when to assert yourself? Explore our individual or group Executive Coaching. Our Web-conferencing Virtual-Workshop, Leadership Communication™ has a full Module on Assertiveness. For more information call me, Bill Murray, at 919-419-9460 or visit our web site, http://www.EagleAlliance.com