Assertiveness is a quality of being self-assured and confident without being aggressive. Most of us will falsely recognize assertiveness as aggression. Even though we will feel that they are lying in the same poles. They are opposite sides of a coin that is life. Assertive means giving respect to your own rights, values and beliefs while respecting others. As like every behavior assertiveness is also a learnable behavior. It sometimes means to act in a confidential manner which will give others the feeling that what we do is right and does not do any harm to others. By being assertive we can easily and effectively communicate our feelings and thoughts with others. It not only help in our personal life, but also influence the professional life.
An assertive person will have the ability to express the emotions, feelings and thoughts. This will be done by considering the rights of others. In the normal society we cannot see more assertive persons. Most of the people will come under two groups, that is passive aggressive and direct aggressive. People who are aggressive will attain their goals through any means without considering others. But the people with passive aggressiveness will always try to please others. You can’t satisfy anyone more than two times continuously and consistently. This behavior will make your life to feel like hell. We are the one who makes our life like hell or heaven.
Like I said earlier, it is something we can be learned. As has been assertive you not only improve your confidence, but also your self esteem. Self esteem in a simple sense called as self evaluation. How much we value for ourselves?. If it comes below than those surrounds you, shows low self-esteem. It is a notable thing that only persons with high self-esteem, succeed and enjoyed their lives at fullest. If we think about self-esteem it is a simple thing. It is only our thinking about our life. It is something like you are writing an exam and you are evaluating it by self. You can either give full mark or low. The scores can also be faithful, that means you will get according to what you have written.
If you consider the case of self esteem, we can make a false evaluation, but the thing is that our mind will not allow you to make false evaluations. It will retry to bring you back to the original state. Here is what a good counselor can act upon. A good, experienced counselor will try to make these false self evaluations as your original one, that is if you got 30 out of 100 in your self-evaluation, the counselor will help you to fix a false evaluation rate that is 80 out of 100 in your mind by using various techniques.
Assertiveness is also being considered as a tool to improve your self esteem. If we are giving importance to our self-esteem then only others will give the same importance to you. Significance is always important in everyone’s life.
While being trained to become an assertive person there will also be a chance to become aggressive rather than assertive. This is because the individual will overdo the newly learned behavior and the chances of being aggressive will increase. This is only a sort of precaution we should take, that means it can also occur during the course of time. But this is not a permanent condition. We can change this through continued learning of the techniques. One other thing is also there to take care that is we should be capable of distinguishing between the situation we need to take assertive steps and those which does not need it.
Assertiveness training is usually given in women centers and colleges to strengthen the women empowerment. It is not only done for women, but also for men. Usually this type of training is given by corporate companies to train their employees to handle different situations with priority. The training is usually done in stages. During the first stage, information is gathered from the participants in the areas which they seem to be more difficult to handle. Through this the trainer will try to understand the behavior of a particular candidate and areas to give focus for the improvement. In the next stage role plays are done. This will give more clear and direct form of communication with others. The trainer will give feedback in each role play, this will help the individual to perform well next time.
It will encourage you to use” I “statements which itself give importance to you. More than giving importance it will help you to share your feelings. This will give a new way of expressing themselves.
I discussed all about how it helps in giving a self-confident and self-assured talk. It will also help in many other areas like improving self-observation skills, awareness of personal preferences and assuming personal responsibility. So hereby I want to say that assertiveness is not only a part of behavior, but also we should adapt it as a way of living.
