BE ASSERTIVE, NOT AGGRESSIVE

WRITER: CHARLIE BENTLEY

Assertiveness is a powerful skill that can be learned and developed to improve your career prospects, business dealings, personal relationships, and even your mental health. Learning to be more assertive involves using effective communications skills to assert your needs, rights, opinions, and beliefs. Here are three reasons you need to be more assertive in your relationships:

Passiveness Rarely Leads to Success

Passive people tend to put other people’s needs before their own, often because they don’t value their needs very highly. Low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and false beliefs can cause people to devalue their rights, needs, feelings and emotions. This leads to increasingly passive behavior. Success, whether in business, parenting, or personal relationships, is almost impossible to achieve when you adopt a passive attitude. To truly succeed in any area of life, you have to believe your rights are as important as anyone else’s.

Passiveness is Bad for Relationships

Passive people rarely express what they want; they prefer to wait for someone else to offer the right solution. The problem with this approach is that it requires other people to predict or guess what you want. Often, this makes it likely you will be dissatisfied and disappointed when they fail to recognize your needs. It can also be incredibly frustrating for the family and friends of passive people to have to guess what is expected of them. Relationships and life, in general, run more smoothly when you ask for what you need.

Passiveness Leads to Mental Health Problems

Passiveness can cause internal conflicts that lead to negative behaviors, such as aggressive, passive-aggressive, and manipulative behaviors, particularly in close relationships. The human brain is designed to look after our best interests, which means it naturally rebels when you ignore your needs. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other mental health problems can also occur if you continually suppress your needs. Speaking up for yourself and telling those close to you what you need makes a huge difference, helping to manage depression, anxiety and other mood disorders.

Passive behavior causes problems in all areas of your life— your career, business, parenting, and personal relationships. Becoming more assertive. Stand up for your rights and boost your self-esteem and confidence. Learning to respect and value your rights, needs, feelings, and emotions is the first step to being more assertive.

“Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.”