How to be Assertive and Likeable

Introduction 1. Welcome Transcript Welcome to this course on assertiveness. Basically, how do you handle difficult people in an assertive way? And assertiveness is to do with standing up for your rights and getting what you want out of conversations and out of situations. And assertiveness is a big, complicated, difficult subject. But it's okay because we're going to cover everything you need to know. It's more than just a skill. It's kind of a habit. It's almost how you live your life. And what I've done is I've broken it down into lots of little steps so that you can gradually learn each part and then you can practice it. And I'm imagining you might do one video a day, and then you might go away and apply it and think about it. Mail it over. Try it out on some people who aren't expecting it. So you might do a video. You might even do a video a week. And you might want to take a year gradually just practising this material. The great thing is, it's up to you. So you can go at any speed you like and go back to a video. You can take longer or shorter over any part of this course. But by the end of the course, we will have covered everything you need to know about assertiveness, and you will have had a chance to really think about it and try it and practice it. And I think this could be the only assertiveness course that actually works. It's all very well to study this subject in one big lump, and you come away going, Yeah, I understand that now, but how do you put it into practice? And I think bite sized learning is the way to do it. So I really hope you enjoy this course and it makes a big difference to how your life pans out from now on. So let's get started. 2. What is Assertiveness? Transcript What is assertiveness? Well, assertiveness is really to do with believing that you are okay, believing that Well, assertiveness is really to do with believing that you are okay, believing that you have a right to be treated properly by other people and then standing up for your rights. Assertiveness cropped up in every situation in life. Every interaction you have with another person could be at work, could be at home, might be in a shop asking for a refund, could be even big things with families. It might be saying to your in-laws that you don't want them to visit you at Christmas. It could be something huge. And certainly in your personal relationships with your partner, it might be telling them that they have habits that annoy you. Assertiveness is there in every relationship that you have. So involves a certain amount of courage and a certain amount of honesty when you deal with other people. And that can be difficult. And it also involves handling people who are either aggressive or very submissive in the right way. So it's very easy to be pushed out of line when you're dealing with other people. So if somebody is very aggressive towards you, it's tempting to be too submissive and not stand up for your rights. And paradoxically, you can get it the other way as well. So if you're dealing with somebody who's very submissive, you might be tempted to forget to respect their rights and you might end up being a bit aggressive. And some people go through their whole life either being submissive or being aggressive, and it becomes a tactic that they use to get what they want in life. And these tactics can work, but generally they're not good tactics. So being aggressive can allow you to get what you want in some situations. But of course, longer term, it's going to lead to problems. And being submissive can allow you to avoid trouble and go along underneath the radar. But it also means that you don't get what you want in life in the longer term. So assertiveness is a kind of mental way between being aggressive and being submissive, but it's more than just being in the middle because it's to do with standing up for your own rights, but also respecting the rights of the other person. So it's kind of a win win approach where aggression is win lose and being submissive is lose win. So that's what we're going to look at. We're going to look at how can you get that win win outcome when you're dealing with all these other people who might be a bit aggressive, they might be a bit submissive, or they might just be tricky.