Six Myths About Assertiveness
And how they limit your leadership potential
To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. Albert Camus
I’ve talked to hundreds of people about assertiveness over the years. Usually the first thing I hear are people’s reasons for doing something, anything, else. Here are the six main categories of excuse, but there are plenty of variations. See if you recognize yours.
People might not like me — and that matters more than anything
People are not thinking about you at all. They’re thinking about what’s for lunch, how to help their loved ones, and a million other things that aren’t you. I know that’s hurtful but it can also be liberating.
Sometimes people will pretend not to like you in order to get their way. It’s called strategic umbrage. This is something professional negotiators — and scammers — do in order to gain a strategic advantage: pretend to be deeply offended by an offer or counter-offer, in order to wrong-foot their opponent.
Whether it’s a fraudster trying to bully you into paying a phony bill, or your 15 year old child acting outraged because you don’t believe their latest transparent lie, if you insist on feeling liked by them, you are giving away your power. You have nothing to gain, and a lot to lose.
What if someone really does dislike you? What if they are not just temporarily mad at you, or manipulating you, or taking a bad mood out on you? They really don’t like you! Explore that worst case scenario. Is it the end of the world? Haven’t you also just plain disliked someone? In fact, I bet you do right now. Does it matter to your life, or to theirs? Not much. Like and dislike are only important in high school. If then.
Increase your leadership potential by letting go of the need to feel liked (or to like others). A true leader has to be able to make unpopular decisions and stand by them. And that does not always get you liked by everybody.
I should never hurt people’s feelings.
Feelings do matter. Including yours. If you always make other people’s feelings the primary guideline for your own actions, how will you ever set your own priorities and strive for your own best outcomes? What happens when a guy you don’t find attractive enough is crushed by his unrequited love for you? What are you supposed to do, marry him and have his children because…you don’t want to hurt his feelings? Are you supposed to stay at an underpaid and underachieving job forever because your boss might feel betrayed if you leave? Will you let yourself be led into a dangerous situation by someone reckless who is “hurt” that you don’t trust them?
Also, predators, manipulators, seducers, and cheaters have a ready-made weapon to use against you. They can just act pitiful. How can you be so mean, so stuck-up, so cynical? How can you make them so sad? They’ll be leading you around by the nose if you let them.
Increase your leadership potential by balancing feelings against all the other information. It isn’t possible to protect everybody’s feelings all the time.
It’s weird and embarrassing.
Embarrassment is mostly in your own head. You don’t even know what other people are thinking. Most of the time — as I mentioned before — they aren’t thinking about you at all. But yes, if your assertiveness makes you conspicuous, they may think disdainful things. Even if that is happening, why does an invisible thing — another person’s thought, not even your own — why does that scare you? Scientists don’t even know what a thought is. We can’t measure it. We know more about light from the edge of the universe.
What other people think — and say — hurts only because you believe it! Try an experiment. Have someone criticize you for something you know isn’t true. It’s just funny, right? Lol at anyone thinking you’re too shy! Tables have to be danced on, and you’re the girl to do it.
Now have someone criticize something you don’t like about yourself (you know what it is). Do you suddenly want to punch them in the throat? For example, if someone calls me stupid, it rolls right off my back. That’s because I know I’m not stupid. If I’m embarrassed, it’s for them. But if someone calls me loud or abrasive…I want them out of my life, pronto.
Losing your embarrassment is easier said than done, of course. It takes practice. Do embarrassing things and you’ll stop being embarrassed. Start small and work your way up. Or go big, that’s another way. Do something so embarrassing that everything else will seem trivial afterwards. In my late teens I fancied myself a singer so I snaffled the microphone at some political fundraiser and let loose. I was disastrously bad and I have yet to encounter anything more embarrassing. It’s given me strength over the years.
This book on becoming rejection-proof isn’t precisely on the topic but it’s awfully close and I think it’s helpful for people who are terrified of embarrassment. Fear of rejection is about a lot of things — pain and disappointment and frustration and self-loathing — but embarrassment is in there too.
Increase your leadership potential by reframing your embarrassment as an achievement. No one ever became a leader without standing out from the crowd.
It’s rude and anti-social
Most people are afraid of violating social norms — of your family, your school, your job, your friends, your church, etc. Well, that can happen when you assert yourself. But not nearly as often as people assume. Any normal, healthy society allows for every member to defend themselves, set boundaries, and ask for what they want in a respectful way. Of course you may be in a dysfunctional system. If you stand outside the system and think about what is reasonable and logical, you will often see that your assertiveness isn’t the problem, and that there are many possible strategies available.
Here’s another thing that happens: people who have a lot of aggression can’t imagine how to be assertive. They can only imagine getting enraged, losing their temper, and over-reacting. And that really does violate social norms, and might even be dangerous. Those people aren’t scared of others, only of themselves. Once they learn how to control their temper and be respectful to others, they find assertiveness very easy.
Of course, people may call you rude and anti-social as a way of manipulating you into laying down and being a doormat. If someone acts insulted, don’t automatically assume that you misunderstood some social rule. First, ask yourself if the other person has something to gain from getting offended. It might be a case of strategic umbrage.
Increase your leadership potential by standing outside the system to observe it sometimes. A true leader doesn’t just follow the rules, s/he helps make them.
I’m not confident enough to be assertive
I used to think this. I thought I could not defend myself, ask for what I wanted, or say no, until I had built up my confidence to an appropriate level. So I waited. I did some therapy, read a LOT of self-help books, did some courses and trainings. I was often told by people that I just needed more confidence. My sister always used to say “Fine, I’ll just go on down to the confidence store and buy some, why didn’t I think of it before?”
Long before my confidence built up to a comfortable level, I realized something crucial. Confidence makes life easier in a lot of ways, it is true. And…you don’t need it in order to be assertive. What you need is courage. If you aren’t born with a lot of confidence, maybe you need a little more courage than average. Even if you do have confidence, you still need courage for the times you stretch yourself and step out of your comfort zone.
A final point about confidence: if you really want to build up your confidence, assertiveness is where you start, not where you finish. If you become your own best ally, defender, and advocate, your confidence will grow by leaps and bounds. There’s nothing more heartening than having a friend who’s always got your back. And even when there’s nobody else, with assertiveness that friend can be you.
Increase your leadership potential by striving for courage rather than confidence.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” Winston Churchill
Assertiveness causes conflict — and I should always avoid conflict
Should you? Always?
If you really want to avoid all conflict, you can never compete. That means no prizes for you.
If you don’t have conflicts, you never learn how to lose a conflict. And there are so many essential, core skills — especially leadership skills — that come out of that learning. Like resilience, for one. Learning that you CAN bounce back from a loss is one of the most enriching, educational, character-building, humbling experiences you can have. It is hard to develop trust in yourself — also known as confidence — without surviving a conflict and recovering.
Conflict is how you learn to compromise — something life requires of us all. It’s how you learn to negotiate.
Relationships cannot deepen and stabilize without occasionally encountering and resolving conflict. You need that resolution to build trust, forgiveness, and leniency.
Without conflict, how do you ever find out where your boundaries are? How do you learn to defend those boundaries? One reason that people like competitive sports — and competition generally — is that it shows them their own strengths and weaknesses in a clear light.
Increase your leadership potential by acknowledging conflict as an opportunity instead of an obstacle. Every story needs a conflict to move it forward.
A change is as good as a rest
Do any of these speak to you? If you can shift any of these bad boys even a little bit, you will see an immediate difference in your approach to your goals and relationships.
To read my previous articles about assertiveness, please click below:
