Asserting Yourself: A Brief How-to

Have A Goal

What is the outcome or result you’re hoping to achieve? Do you want to get your point across at a staff meeting? Get a refund for a faulty coffee maker?  Be clear about what you want to get out of the situation and what will constitute success. In the beginning, simply voicing your opinion or making a given boundary clear to a single individual (hand off my butt, drunk guy on the dance floor) might be a sufficiently challenging target at which to aim, regardless of whether it yields the desired result. You can increase the magnitude of your goals as you become more comfortable speaking up.

Which leads us to:

Start Small

Send a cold entrée back to the kitchen. Turn down a Friday night invitation without giving a long-winded apology. Shut down a telemarketer’s sales pitch within the first 10 seconds of picking up the phone. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper. Heck, begin with calling to make a dentist’s appointment or order a pizza if that’s the stage you’re starting from. Building assertiveness is an incremental process. Figure out where your comfort zone lies and keep pushing just an inch or two beyond it with every new opportunity to make your voice heard. No need for shock therapy*.

Be Firm, But Polite

If you want to be respected,  you not only have to act as if respect is your due, but you have to treat others with it as well. Asserting yourself doesn’t mean tramping all over someone else’s humanity. You can make your voice heard without silencing (or drowning out) others. To do so is a rookie mistake. Also, realize that you can only control your own behavior; the reaction  of others to your assertiveness is largely out of your hands. It’s a hard lesson to keep in mind in the heat of the moment, but even if you can only apply it to your post-hoc analysis of a given interaction, that’s much better than nothing.

Be Persistent

Once you stand up, refuse to let yourself sit back down. Keep mentally checking in with your own intuition about when you need to take a stand and keep identifying opportunities (both for practice and for specific results) to assert yourself.

* I’d kill to make a Jeffery Sachs joke here, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I’d be the only one laughing.