Successfully Being Assertive
November 21, 2023
Assertiveness is a confident and emotionally mature way of addressing your wants, needs, and responsibilities, and standing up for the things you believe in. It’s the sweet spot between passiveness and aggression. It’s the space that helps you advocate for yourself (and others) and express your opinions professionally and effectively. It doesn’t mean that you always say or do what you want; it means that you kindly, respectfully, and responsibly speak up for what you believe in.
Being assertive is not:
Passively waiting for or relying upon others to do what you can be doing for yourself.
Aggressively insisting that something should be as you want it to be.
Being assertive is:
Communicating directly, kindly, honestly, and responsibly.
Advocating for yourself, your causes, and your beliefs.
To be assertive and not be passive or aggressive, it’s important to understand the differences between the three pursuits. Let’s take the situation of wanting a promotion—a common workplace instance requiring a degree of assertiveness. Here’s how a passive, aggressive, and assertive person would handle the situation.
Passive: You assume others will notice your skill and consider you for a promotion.
Aggressive: You behave unprofessionally and are pushy when trying to get a promotion. You put others down to prop yourself up.
Assertive: You respectively advocate for yourself to get promoted.
Those of us who lack assertiveness may also lack self-confidence. We may be avoiding opportunities to authentically represent ourselves by placing more value on the possibility that others will perceive us as hostile, conflictual, or disagreeable. However, with deliberate efforts, we can work to override this discomfort and develop our assertiveness muscle.
Assertiveness, as related to confidence, is about using your voice, setting yourself up to be heard by others, and doing things you might have previously felt too anxious to do. It’s not necessarily easy, but with the following steps, you can feel positive about doing hard and uncomfortable things with the intention of becoming more assertive; it will also help you grow as a person and a leader.
Steps to building assertiveness:
Self-awareness: Know what you want and what you need to be doing.
Planning: Develop a strategy for how you will responsibly effectuate your plan.
Action: Give yourself permission to follow through with these steps, despite any uncomfortable and unnerving feelings.
These steps are sequential and build upon each other, starting with identifying what you are working toward, followed by outlining how you will work to responsibly achieve it. The final step, putting your plan into action, is where you develop your assertive muscle.
Because there are no guarantees, your strategic efforts may not lead to your desired outcomes. But that doesn't mean you won't have been successful. Think about your willingness to do something new and different – about your willingness to override your nervousness and fears – and how doing so will help you prove to yourself that you can do hard things – that you can be assertive. In my book, that's an excellent example of successfully being assertive.