How does it get this good?….
“My wife and I are together, and expect to be forever. We’ve learned to deal with one another and learned to identify and control our bad habits. I’ve learned why I was an abusive man and how to not be an abuser.
“Sometimes I see my old habits in others and feel empathy and compassion – and wish they had the advantages of a hundred or so sessions with Dr. Deb.
Thanks so much for your help. Our time together was an investment worth more than anything I’ve ever done in my life. I believe that I owe my life to your help – certainly, I didn’t realize that I could be this happy again.”
–Florida
Well, of course I was pleased as punch to receive an email with this nice news. After all, YOUR happiness is what I get up for in the morning! Every day!
But I was also curious. I wanted to know, how all this came about. Why was I hearing from him now out of the blue? So I wrote him back. And here is what he said:
“Your assertiveness worksheet became a habit. Instead of playing intellectual one-upsmanship games with clever dialogue with a goal of “winning” some non-existent, delusional contest, I trained myself to be honest and ask myself, ‘Why am I thinking this?'”
And I have to tell you, I’ve heard so many good things about my Assertive Sheet that I decided to share some of it with you here on my blog. Here goes . . .
Part I of my Assertive Sheet is all about body language.
Before I launch into this topic, let me ask you this. Supposing someone says words that are exactly the opposite of their body language. Which do you believe?
Research suggests that people — and animals — respond to body language as the more accurate measure of what a person wants to convey than words. So, if someone says, “Go on; I’m listening,” but their eyes are glued to their smartphone, I can assure you they are not listening, or at least not fully.
(Incidentally, research also shows that people who say they can multitask are plain wrong. Their accuracy fails in each and every task and they need extra time to get back mentally to where they were in the other task. That’s a good point for the person above who thinks she or he is listening but isn’t.)
Assertive communication requires, first of all, good eye contact.
Are you shy? If you find it troublesome to look someone in the eye, here is my solution, stolen right from Nike: Just do it.
Sometimes, we have to get out of our comfort zone. We have to do what feels strange. Here is the good news about things that feel strange: After you do them a while, you get used to it and they won’t feel strange any more.
By the way, good eye contact does not mean staring at someone either. Notice how other people do it, notice the people who are successful with people.
I’m going to cover the next two items together:
Speak slowly and be brief.
In both cases, people who are upset or angry or agitated tend to speak very rapidly and often will go into a rant, i.e., they are most definitely not brief or slow.
Calm people, on the other hand, can slow down their words to a normal rate and say what they have to say and finish up.
You can use this as a helpful cue for yourself. If you notice yourself ranting or racing, just use the change itself — shorten it or slow it — as a way to regain your calm. Sometimes people don’t even realize just how upset they are, but when they notice their rate of speech or its length, then they get it.
So you now have your first 3 items that I teach my private clients on being assertive. Look out, in a future post, for a list of “don’t’s” and the most powerful ways to be assertive.