Archive for Assertiveness

Emotional Intelligence affects how well you express yourself. I have already covered in prior articles how emotional intelligence allows you to have good self-awareness, which is required for good self-management. And social awareness or empathy is needed for good relationship management. These are the building blocks of emotional intelligence that allow you to be skilled [...]

When you choose to be assertive, you can do it with commands, demands, or requests. For a command to be effective, you need to have authority. You need to be an authority figure such as a parent or a boss or a representative of one. Military officers learn how to issue commands regularly. But experience [...]

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 [...]

Would you like a little guide as to when you are being assertive? One way is to monitor your own feelings and desired emotional payoffs. Assertive: When you are being assertive, you usually feel confident and good about yourself. Often you are aware of your own feelings and also aware of what is important to [...]

How to be more assertive? Make a conscious choice of both verbal and non-verbal behaviors. Assertive: Express what you honestly want, think, and feel in direct ways. Usually start your sentence with “I”, not “you”. Non-verbal behaviors include listening closely. Stay calm, relaxed, assured, and firm. Also if possible, be caring, warm, and expressive. Look [...]

To improve our appropriate assertiveness skills, we need to be aware of 3 types of behaviors on a continuum: Avoiding, assertive, and aggressive. We usually need to behave in the middle range with assertive behaviors. However, in some situations it may be wise to avoid things. And on very rare occasions we might want to [...]

In order to be maximally successful, you need superb assertiveness skills. What are your goals when you are being assertive? You need strategic and tactical goals. Strategic goals include getting something you really want and value. You need to know what that is before you start a crucial conversation. As negotiators insist, you must know [...]

In my Web-conferencing Virtual-Workshop, Leadership Communication™, we sometimes use cases as a way to practice applying the skills we have already learned. In the following case we practiced using two sets of skills: strategic thinking – knowing what you really want, and communicating in a way others can hear by starting with factual observations. In [...]

In my neighbor’s yard is a dog that used to jump over their fence and roam. Then they put an electric fence around the inside of their wood fence. I watched the dog learn about this electric fence. Whenever he went over the electric invisible line, he got shocked and jumped back with a whimper. [...]

I had an administrative assistant who once resorted to passive-aggressive behavior toward me. She was in another room when I gave her some directions about a task to do when she returned to my room. She called back that she had already done that task in a better way than mine. I had my back [...]