Chapter 27
 Assert Yourself, Now and Forever

Once you put into practice the skills you’ve learned in this book, the payoff will come over and over again. You may one day find, however, that merely being assertive for yourself or your immediate family is not in itself fulfilling.

Soon enough, you’ll realize that the true gift of assertiveness is being able to speak on behalf of a cause—for the downtrodden, the weary, the meek, or those who cannot speak for themselves. This wrap-up chapter will catapult you onto the path of speaking out to over-turn the injustices in everyday life. Heck, you might even become some group’s spokesperson!

Practice Your New Skills for a Lifetime Payoff

My sister Nancy recently moved to Manhattan. One night she was having dinner with a friend when a customer at the take-out counter started speaking in a loud voice that disturbed the entire restaurant: “THAT’S NOT WHAT I WANTED!” “WHAT ELSE DO YOU HAVE?” “NO, NO, NO. CAN’T YOU GET ANYTHING RIGHT?” This “patron” started to leave the restaurant, but was still shouting at the person behind the counter. Everyone in the restaurant was aghast. As he made his way to the door, my sister finally said, “Hey, you can’t talk to somebody like that. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” The man took a look at her across the crowded restaurant, and then left without saying anything more. My sister (without the benefit of this book!) asserted herself on behalf of the restaurant employee, to the relief of the patrons, and, when you think about it, for the good of society. Sure, the man could have been deranged, but in a crowded restaurant it’s not likely that Nancy was in any danger.

What Do You See?

How many times do you see teenagers who act in ways in which any fully functioning adult would disapprove? How about kids who deface property? If you don’t say anything, and the next adult doesn’t say anything, guess what? They’ll keep doing it!

Yes, I know there are arguments about butting in, and there are also safety concerns. But what if every time a teenager swore loudly publicly, numerous adults spoke up?

Suppose any time young children stepped out of line—did something that was clearly socially unacceptable—any number of adults were ready to step in and say, “Young man (or young lady), I don’t think that’s appropriate behavior”? Soon enough, in a year, perhaps a month, maybe only a week, much, if not all of the delinquency, truancy, and antisocial behavior that some youths exhibit would begin to dissipate. People would begin to toe the line.

Back of the Line, Jack

Once, I was waiting in line for a huge multi-family yard sale to begin.

I had been waiting for several minutes when another more recent line began to form across the street from us. The people in the new line had clearly arrived long after the people in the original line, and they pretended that they didn’t see us. They milled about, waiting for the gates to open, so that they could rush in and be amongst the first.

I looked at the situation and was silently, mildly upset. Like the others in my line, I did nothing, for a while. Suddenly, my strategy came to me. I spotted an event organizer who was in full view of the phenomenon but who apparently chose not to make waves. I told her “Some of these people have been waiting here 30 to 40 minutes. Could you please say something to the people in the new line?” She agreed to. I went back to my place in line.

She walked over to the people in the new line, and I don’t know what she said, but most of them went to the back of our line. Some still milled around, pretending they didn’t hear her or see us. I wasn’t going to be any more militant for the day.

As most of the renegade line broke up, a miraculous thing happened. The people in my line let out a round of applause and cheering. You see, everybody felt the same way, but no one wanted to assert himself. Hundreds of people in my line were willing to let this minor but clearly unfair situation exist. Yet any one of the individuals in my line could have done the same thing, and hence put the universe back in order, at least as far as this mini-drama goes.

Cross-Cultural Assertiveness

I didn’t write this book merely so that you could gain your best advantage in work and in life. I wrote it so that society could improve, in little ways, here and there, one day at a time, for the long run.

The Welfare of Those Who Can’t Speak

I was in Vietnam with my best friend Peter in February 1996. We were touring Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City. We made our way to the zoo. Once inside, after strolling about for ten minutes, we saw some teenage boys who were apparently taunting one of the animals. I came up to them and in English said “All right, that’s enough.”

A couple of the boys looked as if they were drunk, even though this was mid-day. Their crazed look was a little scary. Again, I said to them, “That’s enough.” I didn’t know whether they spoke English or not. They seemed to get the message. They moved on, joking and laughing, probably about those crazy Americans.

My friend said to me, “Jeff, this is their country and their zoo.” Instinctively I said to him, “Peter, you know, though, abusing animals is wrong everywhere. I had to say it.” He quickly understood.

Getting the Network in Place

Suppose those same kids went to another section of the zoo and did the same things, and somebody else came along and told them to stop. Suppose another day they did something else that clearly represented inappropriate behavior and somebody told them to stop. How long would it take before they got the idea that some of the behaviors they were exhibiting were not acceptable?

Suppose when they did something good an adult came along and said, “Nice job,” “Good going,” “Way to go,” or “I appreciate your efforts”? How long would it take before they went out of their way to start doing things that got that kind of response? I think you’re beginning to understand the whole enchilada. It’s a simple psychological principle: Behavior that’s rewarded is repeated.

If you are nervous about these tactics, start at home. If every parent took these tactics with their own children, we’d be off to a great start.

The Unlikely Event

There are situations where asserting yourself leads to trouble, but they are rare and fleeting. I recall playing volleyball on Monday evenings with the Washington D.C. Sports Club in the late 1970s. We played near the Lincoln Memorial almost overlooking the Potomac. It was a wonderful setting, and a wonderful time to be in Washington.

One evening, two men were playing volleyball on a court that was reserved for our group. One of them maintained a demeanor that was almost menacing. He was 6'3", built like a heavyweight prize fighter, and aggressive as all heck.

We told these two that it was time for our group to play. They didn’t want to relinquish the court. They suggested that they play against our team. At first we didn’t understand. They wanted to play two against six of us. As you can guess, we weren’t happy about that.

We could have taken them but that wasn’t the point. We play six against six. We would have let them join us had they been more accommodating. They decided, however, to stand their ground. They would not leave the court unless we agreed to play them six against two. They kept batting the ball back and forth to each other.

Time was passing, and the situation was getting ridiculous. I walked up to the big one and reached out to tap him on the shoulder as I said, “Say, don’t you think that . . .” As fast as lightning, as I was tapping his shoulder, he whirled around to the left and hit me point-blank in the solar plexus.

I had no idea that this guy had a hair-trigger temper. As soon as he hit me, others jumped into the court, and while keeping their distance from him, verbally bade him to tone it down. In a couple of minutes, a member of the U.S. Park Police came by—apparently someone had flagged him down. The officer issued a citation and told the two to leave.

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 Make It So
Please don’t let the long-shot odds of you being harmed diminish your potential for asserting yourself for the good of others around you and the good of society in general.

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Two weeks later I appeared in court, somewhat concerned about encountering this guy again. Still, I felt it was important to see this thing through. He never showed. I asked the court what the procedure was, they said he would be picked up by the police and held until bond was posted. I left that evening, and fortunately never saw him again.

The point of all this? Every now and then, when attempting to assert yourself, you will encounter someone who flies off the handle. In my case, it’s only been once in more than 40 years.

Yes, there are people who grab guns from their cars and shoot fellow motorists at California highways. Yes, there are people who spray bullets at passengers on New York subway cars. For the most part, these incidents do not occur in response to someone having asserted himself, verbally, moments before. The odds are that you’ll never encounter any situation like that.

Good behavior that’s rewarded is repeated. Antisocial behavior that is allowed in the absence of any other cues is also going to get repeated. For the good of society, go out and assert yourself all day long. Will you be wrong on occasion? Yes.

Will there be times when you shouldn’t have put your two cents in? Yes.

Will some people say “Butt out”? Yes.

All of this and more will happen, but the net effect is that things will improve in your neighborhood, in your town, and all around you if enough people assert themselves responsibly as situations unfold.

A Variety of Alternatives

Suppose you’re absolutely not going to speak out in a public place. Nevertheless, there are a variety of ways that you can assert yourself when you feel the situation merits it. Let’s revisit some of the previous scenarios and see what else can be done.

Fortify Those Who Need It

In the case of the man berating the restaurant worker, maybe it’s not your cup of tea to say anything to such an individual. What else could you do? How about going up to the person who was berated and offering some nurturing language such as the following:

• “He had no right to speak to you that way and I want you to know that everyone here was glad to see him go.”
  
• “I don’t know what started that, but it’s clear that his manner and demeanor were uncalled for. By the way, we like the food and the service here—that’s why we come so often.”
  
• “I thought you handled that as well as you could under the circumstances. Who knows what that guy’s problems are? You’re doing a good job and there’s no need to give that fellow a second thought.”

Find Someone in Authority

Let’s revisit the zoo situation. What else could you do? The most obvious action to take would be to go find a zoo official. Never mind all that stuff you heard when you were growing up about not being a “tattle-tale” on others.

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 Make It So
There are times when reporting inappropriate behavior of others to authorities is not only acceptable, but the right thing to do.

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Too many books written in the last two decades blather on and on about how it’s inappropriate to judge others and that the only true path to peace is to be nonjudgmental! This is, of course, unmitigated hogwash. Yes, self-help gurus and authors are prudent when they urge you to be less judgmental of others and more tolerant. It would certainly make for a better world.

Clearly, however, there is behavior of others that is socially detrimental. My mother told me when I was young that a good way to determine if the behavior of others is socially acceptable is to imagine that the behavior was repeated by everyone else. If everyone gave restaurant personnel a good tongue-lashing and then stormed out, it wouldn’t be long before no one would enjoy themselves sitting in a restaurant and the entire industry would come to a halt. If everyone taunted and abused animals in zoos, it wouldn’t be long before the very nature of the zoo-going experience would change, and the well-being and lives of the animals themselves would be in jeopardy.

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 Make It So
Do make judgment calls, at least as far as others’ behavior is concerned. Go find a zoo official or security guard or whomever and report what you’ve observed.

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Threaten to Boycott

Let’s revisit the situation in which a mass of people have decided to form their own line to bypass others who have been waiting for a long time. Other than going up to an organizing official as I did, what else could you do? As an after-the-fact gesture, you could speak to the organizing hosts and suggest that you and others will not attend in the future unless some form of effective line control is installed. What isn’t effective? Giving the people in the other line dirty looks—especially if they’re not looking at you! Also, calling out to them from your line. That’s likely to cause resentment and bitter feelings as opposed to resolving the situation amicably.

Letters to the Editor

Whether it’s your local newspaper, an industry or trade magazine, or some other public printed forum, you always have the opportunity to send letters to the editor. Don’t dismiss the potential power of this assertiveness vehicle.

In many magazines, the letters to the editor section represents public forums wherein lively debates ensue. When I peruse such publications, I frequently read the letters to the editor section first. Often I encounter well-crafted, thoughtful letters from obviously well-educated individuals. This stimulates my thinking, and on occasion even prompts me to change my opinion on some matter. Hence, the assertiveness of the author of the letter to the editor certainly prevailed in influencing me.

More Ways to Assert

Other options for asserting yourself, other than directly confronting specific individuals, are discussed in the following sections.

Voting

Undoubtedly you’ve heard stories about how one vote swung an entire election. One day, some place, perhaps at the local level, your vote will be the one. Until that time, it still makes sense for you to assert yourself via voting for several reasons:

1. All elections these days on the national, state, and local level are carefully examined by political pundits, reporters, campaign advisors, political action committees, special-interest groups, and the citizenry themselves. If you vote for a candidate who has particular views, even if that candidate loses, if he or she was able to garner a large following, information is imparted to others as to how a particular community, state, or entire country is moving. Hence, your vote can help to ultimately sway public opinion.
   
2. The mere act of voting often prompts you to take stands on other issues in other ways. Taking time out from work, or getting out of the house early some rainy Tuesday morning to cast your vote is a self-reinforcing gesture.
   
3. Perhaps most importantly, when you vote, and your particular candidate happens to win, you’re more likely to feel as if you have a stake in government.
   
4. If your candidate doesn’t win, perhaps you’ll be more vigilant in examining the winning candidate’s activities and record so as to hold the officer accountable.

Make Donations

If you support a political candidate, a group that’s doing good work, or a cause in which you fully believe, assert yourself with your checkbook. If enough like-minded individuals do the same, even donations of $25 or $50 will have an impact.

Becoming Active

There is a wonderful book by Jeff Hollender titled, How to Make the World a Better Place (W. W. Norton, 1995). It shows you how you can make a difference in helping to achieve change on a local, national, or even global level. The book offers scores of simple strategies you can implement immediately, including:

• Making your community a safer place to live
  
• Helping the homeless
  
• Protecting the environment
  
• Reducing violence on television
  
• Controlling government spending
  
• Reducing discrimination

It also lists hundreds of civic, social, public, and philanthropic societies and includes names, addresses, and contact numbers so that you can follow through on your commitment.

Volunteer

Voting and making donations are useful and appropriate but relatively passive compared to becoming active and volunteering. How to Make the World a Better Place can also be a great resource if you’re interested in volunteering your time or talents for a cause that you deem worthy.

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 Make It So
Action is invigorating. Go serve soup in a soup kitchen, or volunteer to answer the phone during pledge week at your public broadcasting station. You can’t fix the whole world, but you can help a small part of it. You can assert yourself and make a real difference in an area that you deem worthwhile.

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You can find such causes in your own community. Call your Chamber of Commerce, local United Way, town hall, editor of your newspaper’s community page, or public affairs director of any local radio or television station to obtain names of groups seeking volunteers. Often, you’ll have more than enough names and phone numbers of contact people within groups who are working in your community to make it a better place.

I know it’s not easy to volunteer your time in this fast-paced society. Nevertheless, if you want to assert yourself in a highly-effective, hands-on, visible way, volunteering could be your cup of tea.

Encourage Others to Be Assertive

If you teach a course on public speaking, writing, making presentations, or interviewing for a job, you have the opportunity to help others to be effectively assertive.

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 Make It So
Are you a parent? If so, you have the opportunity to raise assertive children.

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Perhaps you teach foreign-born students who are learning English as a second language. Maybe you’re a counselor in a shelter for battered spouses. Or you’re a Boy Scout or Girl Scout troop master. In all these cases, you have the opportunity to help other people to be more effective in their lives. Are you a columnist, or perhaps a book author yourself? If so, you have the opportunity to influence your readers.

Following is just a partial list of social, civic, and charitable groups you can join:

Practice Your New Skills for a Lifetime Payoff

Once you become comfortable asserting yourself in specific situations, look to expand your range. If you’re good at speaking before a small group, look for the opportunity to speak to a larger group. If you’re good at holding your own with co-workers, perhaps it’s time to start being heard by some of the higher-ups in your organization.

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 Make It So
Each time you expand your repertoire—the range of situations in which you’re able to effectively assert yourself—you’re really laying the groundwork for creating a brand new you. When you put your skills into practice over and over again you’re paving the way for a lifetime payoff.

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In a different world, assertiveness skills wouldn’t be so important. I wish the world were concocted differently. I wish that by doing a good job you would get the recognition and rewards that you deserve. I wish that people would see the real you without you having to help them. I wish the better-qualified, more worthy candidate always won in elections.

But since none of these is likely to happen with regularity, it behooves you and me to continually take advantage of opportunities to assert ourselves all the time.

Assert Until It’s Second Nature

As with any new skill, at first things may seem a little shaky. If you work with computers, think about the first time you ever used word processing software on a computer. By contrast, think about your proficiency in using whatever word processing software you’re using today. I’ll bet you and your computer are almost one, and getting words down on a page is almost second nature to you. So it is with any skill, especially assertiveness.

If you keep stretching yourself, eventually you find that one bright morning you wake up, and not even thinking about it, you’re a wholly assertive person. You can speak up when you want to and need to and even make the other party feel good about the interaction. In those few cases where you need to vigorously assert yourself regardless of how the other party will feel, you can do that as well.

There Is Genius in Boldness

In an increasingly crowded, over-communicated, frenzied world, it’s not likely that your opportunity to stand out simply by being who you are and doing the job you’re doing is going to increase. If anything, the odds are that without assertiveness skills, you may be lost in the shuffle, whether it’s within your organization, community, or elsewhere.

I wish that things were different, but they aren’t. I wish that shy and retiring types, the meek and mild, and the non-assertive people in general among us could comfortably traverse within society and attain the same benefits and rewards as their more assertive counterparts.

But until that day, which unfortunately, may not happen in your lifetime, the assertive shall prevail.

Boldly Go Where You’ve Never Gone Before

For the heck of it, if I were to ask you to jot down ten ways you can assert yourself where you once feared to, what might you come up with?

Here are some suggestions for you. This is a wild and crazy list and you may not entertain all of them. If, however, you can gravitate to even a handful of these suggestions, you’ll stretch your assertiveness muscle.

• Run for public office.
  
• Stand up to your boss the next time you’re chewed out.
  
• Directly confront movie patrons who are talking loudly.
  
• Go up to someone who you find remarkably attractive and engage in a pleasant, sustained conversation.
  
• Request that your bank give you a huge loan (presuming that you have a specific profitable business venture in mind).
  
• End a long-term friendship that lost all meaning, spark, and enthusiasm for you years ago.
  
• Defend your gender in the midst of substantial numbers of the opposite sex who’ve made unflattering remarks.
  
• March into your boss’ office and ask for a raise and mean it, even if it’s months away from the designated time in which raises usually occur.
  
• Serve on the honor court of your school, whereby you preside over cases where students have been accused of wrongdoing.
  
• Act as moderator for a publicly aired forum or debate.
  
• Volunteer to have a significant speaking part in your company’s eight-minute promotional video.
  
• Visit an elected official and directly present your views on a controversial issue.
  
• Take an unpopular stand (but one that you believe is correct) in a letter to the editor in your local newspaper.
  
• Request that the manager at your supermarket remove the magazines and periodicals with lurid covers from the checkout area and out of the view of children.
  
• Tell the barber or stylist to stop cutting your hair as soon as you see that he or she is not giving you what you want.
  
• Thank those who have been helpful to you, such as a bus driver, police officer, mail carrier, or delivery person.

If you’re thinking to yourself, gee, these aren’t so wild, good! The task now is to put three or four of them into action in the next day or so. Then revisit the list and implement some others.

The Future Belongs to the Bold

Suppose you wanted me to summarize the whole book into one paragraph that covers when and where to you assert yourself.

• When does it make sense?
  
• When is it worth the effort?

I say when in doubt, let it out! In other words, the next time you’re in a meeting or listening to someone and you’re thinking to yourself, “Should I speak up here? Maybe it will be more trouble than it’s worth,” I suggest to you that that’s probably a good time to assert yourself.

Trust the Inner You

Yes, occasionally you will go overboard and say too much. There will also be times when in retrospect it would have been better if you had said nothing. This will happen. This is life. You’ll learn from those encounters and get better at training yourself to know when it’s time to speak up. Still, heed your internal voice. If you think you ought to say something, the chances are extremely good that yes, this is an instance in which it makes sense for you to speak up. Don’t let the handful of times where you err block you from the multitude of other times in which asserting yourself is appropriate.

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 Handle with Care
Those few times in which you go awry are hardly ever fatal. In fact, they’re often salvageable or correctable. If it’s helpful for you, refer to the tearout card in the front of this book for a summary of the four ground rules for assertiveness, as discussed in Chapter 1.

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I close with a memorable quote:

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief

candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

—George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman