1 ALWAYS USE ‘ISA’

ISA is a simple three-step process – recommended by Cathy Birch in her book Asserting Your Self: How to feel confident about getting more from life – that stands for Identify, State, Ask, and here’s how it works:

• Firstly, you identify the specific behaviour you’re not too happy about (because this will help you to keep personal remarks out of it).
• Secondly, you state the effect it’s had – or is having – on you (because this will enable you to steer clear of arguments about the truth, for you’ll be describing the situation only as you see it, from your perspective).
• Thirdly, you ask for the change you’d most like to happen (because clear signposting will make it infinitely easier for the other person to see what it is you want them to do differently).

And that’s basically it, rather like this:

• Identify: ‘When you were late for our meeting last Thursday, which started at 2.30 pm …’
• State: ‘ I felt let down because I was relying on you being there to introduce the new project to the rest of the team …’
• Ask: ‘In future, please can you let me know if you are going to be running late, so I can plan around it …’

By the way, ISA can also be very useful if you’re a manager who’s just about to give an appraisal or performance review to someone who’s not great at taking feedback, because it can help you to structure your conversation in a systematic and non-confrontational way.

2 TARGET THE MIDDLE

In Sweden, there’s a wonderful word – lagom – which basically means ‘not too much’ and ‘not too little’. And in many ways this sums up assertiveness.

Assertiveness is all about keeping everything you say, and everything you do, bang in the middle. And this is because assertiveness is all about the middle ego state (i.e. the adult ego state), which is all about being rational, objective, neutral and keeping emotions well and truly out of it!

Like lagom, therefore, it means not being too loud, and not being too quiet.

It means ‘keeping your head on straight’ (as they say in psychology) because aggressive people tend to jut their heads forward, whereas manipulative people tend to tilt their heads to one side.

And here’s a weird one. I’ve come across assertiveness experts who suggest we ‘keep our eyebrows straight!’ Yup, if you think about it, when we get angry our eyebrows tend to end up looking like the letter V, yet if we go passive they tend to look more like an arch or a rainbow …

3 FORGET POWER GAMES

There are times when it’s relatively easy to be assertive. For example, if you know your subject, you’re working with amazingly approachable people, or if there are no grey areas, such as when you have the law behind you, like an environmental health officer (who has the authority to close down a restaurant instantly if the owner fails to comply with specific standards).

Other times, however, it can be hard. For example, if you’re dealing with someone who’s intimidating, or unpredictable, if you feel like a fish out of water, if you need to give bad news, or perhaps if you’re so nice you don’t like to say no.

Whatever the context, if you’re keen to gain ‘mastery in the emotional domain’ (as Daniel Goleman writes about in his 1995 classic Emotional Intelligence) it’s a good idea to have your own strategy for staying centred in highly challenging circumstances.

So here’s one that might intrigue you: always think Gurkha!

Yes, I know it sounds a bit crazy, but mental visualisation (or what psychologists call visual motor behaviour rehearsal) can often help if you want to come across as appropriately powerful in a tense situation.

After all, why is it that ex-Gurkha soldiers are increasingly being recruited as security guards by top business people in the UK and elsewhere? Well, largely because these brave kukri-wielding fighters from the steep hills of Nepal appear to excel at handling conflict situations asssertively (rather than aggressively like a nightclub bouncer, passively, or manipulatively).

In other words, they’re able to stay strong and stand up for their rights under extreme pressure, yet also to remain restrained, too. For as Dilli Gurung – an ex-Gurkha and experienced security guard I know – recently told me, much of this assertiveness comes from a blend of honesty, discipline and pride: ‘We Gurkhas proudly remember and respect our prestige, and this prestige gives us a big moral to work strongly and effectively.’

So, please bear this in mind, within the context of the work you do: If you want to UP! your assertiveness, value who you are and value what you do.

Or, as Cathy Birch makes clear: ‘Assertiveness begins with a sense of self-worth. When we value ourselves we have no need for power games.’

To round up, however, here are few extra insights, which may also be of interest:

• Please don’t assume that passives are so meek and gentle that they are never angry. (Passives can often be very angry – inside – but simply do not show it.)
• Please don’t assume that aggressives are only ever loud, red in the face and point a lot, like the monster boss in The Devil Wears Prada. (Aggression can take many shapes and forms. Some people, for example, can be aggressive with silence, or with an icy cold stare. In fact – according to Roberta Cava in her book Dealing with Difficult People – everything from ‘gossip’ to ‘sarcasm’, and even eye-ball rolling, can be indirect forms of ‘aggression’ in the workplace!)