This is a good point to stop and notice how far you have come. Remind yourself by flicking back through some of your earlier notes and, most importantly, give yourself a quick pat on the back for coming this far and really sticking with it.
By this point, if you have practised everything in this book, you will have started to notice some shifts – your new assertiveness tool-kit will be helping you to achieve more.
The last part of this book is about how to make this newly assertive you someone who remains effective and confident in the future, whatever might lie ahead.
This chapter contains a 14-day flexible personal plan that will help you implement your assertiveness skills in your own specific context.
The 14-day plan
Before you start
As with starting anything new, the first thing to do is to decide what you want the end result to look, sound and feel like.
Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine yourself standing in a room after a full day of interactions. All of the interactions have gone perfectly and you are smiling, confident and content. Now think about what it was about the interactions that is making you smile. Take one interaction at a time and work through the day in detail. When you have got to the end of the day in your mind’s eye, slowly open your eyes.
Now recall what you can about the short visualisation and record everything you can about those ideal successful interactions:
Follow up this visualisation by breaking the above down into no more than three key goals for the next 14 days. Remember that goals that are too big can often feel overwhelming and therefore end up not being tackled at all. (For example, if one of the exchanges on my list above is that I spoke to everyone with real authority and got everything I wanted, then I may want to shape this into a simpler and smaller goal and settle on just one or two influential people so that the whole thing feels more doable.)
Day one
At the start of the day
Look again at the first goal you have identified for yourself within this 14-day plan. Remind yourself of all of the reasons why you would like to reach this goal:
Identify all of the exchanges you are likely to have today that relate in one way or another to this goal:
What small thing/s (and identify no more than two here) can you realistically commit to doing today within these exchanges?
During the day
Note down any observations about yourself and/or others that are helping or hindering you in actively doing the two things you have identified above:
At the end of the day
How did all of the above go? Try to remain positive in your evaluation even if you did not achieve what you wanted to. By the very fact that you are sticking to these worksheets you are moving forward – remember this!
Day two
At the start of the day
Write down your current beliefs about the three goals you have identified – for example, you might believe that they will be quite difficult to shift within this 14-day window, or you might feel they are highly achievable. Do also include any thoughts or assumptions you have about any people or outcomes that may be linked to these goals:
During the day and at the end of the day
Check in to see if these beliefs have evidence to back up what you believe, or might it be possible that there is an opportunity to view things in a slightly different way? (For example, you may believe that Chris is not very keen on you being involved in his chief project but today he may have asked your opinion on something. What does this suggest then?)
In light of anything from today, might you want to alter the way you head towards any of your three goals?
Day three
At the start of the day
Identify your strategy for the day. What conversations or actions do you have to take in order to move closer to your goal? This strategy might be that you are going to negotiate a workload with a colleague, initiate a conversation with your partner about a sensitive issue or it might be that you are simply going to reduce the amount of explanation you give in your day-to-day dealings. Outline below your commitment plan for the day:
At the end of the day
Write some notes on the effects on others that you observed from adjusting your own behaviour and interactions:
Day four
At the start of the day
Ensure that you are clear about what you feel your rights are within your own situations and what are the rights of the other people involved? (For example, you might feel that everyone has a right to express their views and everyone has a right to be listened to.) Identify these rights below:
How can you ensure that these rights are acknowledged and enabled?
What can you actively do today to ensure that this happens, and in what situations?
Day five
At the start of the day
Simply acknowledge for yourself that today you are going to put your attention on everything that is positive and successful, however small, and make a note of these things below:
At the end of the day
Identify any key words, images or sensations that you associate with the success list above. Take yourself back through the memories of them from earlier on today. Note down any ‘anchoring’ words or images that will help you keep these positive experiences close to hand. (NB Anchoring is an expression that means to hold something in place, or fix in the body’s muscle memory. Sometimes people might associate touching their cheek with a special kiss they received, for example, or they may have been holding a particular item when they received some good news.)
Day six
At the start of the day
Spend some time going through any of those worries about your goals, or anything else that is concerning you about your own assertiveness journey so far. Write these down:
At the end of the day
Imagine that those worst-case scenarios from above have happened or are about to. What strategies can you put in place for yourself to deal with these consequences?
Now that you can see that you are quite capable of dealing with the worst-case scenario, and remember that it is highly unlikely that it will happen, how does that make you feel?
Day seven
At the start of the day
Simply make a mental note that today you will be taking some head space in order to recognise when people praise or compliment you. You will also be putting your attention on how to accept criticism in a constructive and confident manner so you can use it to continue to move yourself forwards towards your assertiveness goals.
During the day and at the end of the day
Make a note of any of this praise and criticism that has occurred throughout the day. How can you incorporate this into reaching your goals more effectively? (NB This may simply be that you allow yourself to hear and accept praise and criticism positively.)
Day eight
Today your only task is to re-read your goals and make a mental note of what the last week has brought up for you. If you wish to write some things down then a space has been allocated for you below:
Day nine
At the end of the day
Take some time to reflect and see if what you have remembered about the last week actually matches your notes. If there are some variations, however tiny, then this is a good time to notice how our human emotions and internal experiences of events can colour our memories.
Writing notes can help us stay accurate to what actually did happen, which can be a key tool in keeping us on track and linked into what is, rather than what we perceive it to be. The more in touch we are with exchanges and events as they occur, the more confident and assertive we can be in our responses to them, whether in the moment or afterwards. Note down any thoughts or observations you have concerning any of this:
Day ten
At the start of the day
Write down any negative thoughts or self-talk that may be getting in your way on a daily basis:
During the day
Challenge the list above, and any others that may come up, and treat them as questions that you do not have to answer rather than statements. For example, if one of the pieces of self-talk you identified above is, ‘You’re really not very good at this assertiveness malarkey!’ then rephrase it for yourself into ‘How do you think you are getting on with this assertiveness malarkey?’ You will notice that the impact is quite different.
At the end of the day
Notice the effect of challenging the inner critic today and write down how it affected you and your behaviour:
Day eleven
At the start of the day
Think about everything in this book that has stood out for you and you have thought, ‘Oh I would love to try that with x situation or person.’ Now select the top three that you would like to try but so far have felt a little wary about:
Now your commitment for today (or over the next three days if the relevant person/situation doesn’t present itself today) is to see if you can try at least one of the above.
During the day and at the end of the day
Note down how this has all gone. Did you manage to act on any of the above? If so, what was the impact? If not, what was it that got in the way and is it something that you could actively influence in a different direction in the future?
Day twelve
At the start of the day
Today is simply an opportunity for you to be with your own thoughts and feelings and allow them the space to exist, positive, negative or otherwise, without any judgement. If you catch judgement seeping in then let it go (visualise letting go of a balloon and allowing it to blow away out of sight). There is something incredibly powerful about just allowing ourselves to be with our thoughts and feelings without trying to push them away or chastise ourselves for having them. As far as confidence, self-esteem and assertiveness are concerned, once we stop battling with ourselves we feel more able and comfortable in acting upon what is right for us.
Note down anything you like related to this throughout the course of the day:
Day thirteen
At the start of the day
Today is the day to check in with where you are at so far with your assertiveness goals. Identify what has shifted for you to date:
Recognise what it is that you actively chose to do in order to create these shifts:
Is there anything still outstanding that you would like to act upon in terms of further assertiveness development over the next couple of days?
What strategies will you implement to achieve those last goals you have identified?
Day fourteen
Congratulations, you will by now be really starting to see things from a far more assertive place. You are proactively changing the way you deal with difficult situations and are moving things forward for yourself. Write down all of the professional and personal differences you have noticed over the last 14 days:
Stay with this plan
Do be honest with yourself while working through this going-forward plan. The plan itself is highly flexible, so if you wanted to change the order of something or circle back and repeat a step then do just that.
If you think revisiting the 14-day plan at regular intervals, using different goals, is for you then absolutely do it. The only recommendation I would make is for you to keep notes in a specially allocated notebook so that you can diarise and assess your own progress through and into the land of assertiveness.
What happens to you when you are working on changing your habits around assertiveness?
There is an excellent model that describes exactly what happens here from a cognitive perspective. If things feel tricky or a bit ‘clunky’ when you are initially trying to shift where you are on the assertiveness spectrum, this model explains why. Be aware that it is totally normal, good in fact, for these sticking feelings to arise when learning and coming to grips with a new skill-set. The US Gordon Training International-derived model, below, explains what happens to you, the individual, when you are moving yourself forward into newly assertive habits.
Unconscious incompetence
This is the place where the individual is unaware of the existence or relevance of their skills. It might be where there is a denial of relevance or usefulness of the particular skill or it may be that the person is unaware that they are limited in choice within a certain area. In order to shift anything, the person must become aware (or conscious) that they want or need to develop new or existing skills.
Conscious incompetence
This is where the individual has become aware of the existence or relevance of a particular skill-set and therefore their limitations within a particular area. There is the realisation that by developing the particular skill the area can be consciously improved on and the individual will usually have a grasp as to what or how much work is needed. This is where commitment to moving forward and practising happens.
Conscious competence
The individual has now grasped the skills needed and can perform them through choice, but at this stage there is some thought and effort required in the execution. The skill has not yet become an automatic thing and it needs practice in order for the brain and body to fully ‘get it.’
Unconscious competence
The skill has now entered the unconscious part of the brain and is happening as second nature without any thought – it now feels instinctive.
As with most things, it is inevitable that this model will keep moving round. As one skill-set becomes unconsciously competent so another is moving from unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent. We may also start to raise our self-awareness to periodically consciously question our own ‘unconscious competencies’, and so the pattern continues again in order for the individual to further fine-tune their skills.
Simple, down-to-earth affirmations
Affirmations can get bad press. They can be perceived as fluffy, hippy-dippy, a bit daft and many other things. However, so long as they are simple and tangible they are incredibly powerful in terms of changing those not-so-useful thought patterns and negative self-limiting beliefs.
Here is a list of some of my favourite affirmations. It is important to choose something that resonates with your own unique set of circumstances, so feel free to adapt what is here or come up with your own:
- I am great just the way I am
- I am kind and thoughtful
- I am doing the best I can and that’s more than enough
- I am at where I am at and that’s okay
- It doesn’t matter if things turn out differently from how I’d like them to
- I have enough life skills and experience to deal with whatever comes my way
- I am a human being and imperfection is to be celebrated
- Sometimes you’ve just got to let it go
- All that matters is the now and the future, the past has gone so there’s no point in worrying about it
- I am lovely and I am going to let myself acknowledge that
- Go me, I rock!
- I love me, I’d be my mate!
- Establish with clarity what you would like to achieve in your day-to-day life; be responsible for setting your own targets and keeping yourself on track with honesty and integrity
- Be sure to work with an awareness of the bigger and smaller pictures as much as possible, be aware of what is going on for others and be equally aware of what is going on for you
- Stay positive and proactive even when things may not turn out how you might have hoped
- Dedicate time for you – use this time to be kind to yourself and reflect on where you are for at least a few minutes at the beginning and the end of each day
- Allow yourself to be at wherever you are at; in other words, in both your professional and personal life, things go as they go and are easier to act upon when negative judgement is kept at bay
- Re-frame any negative self-talk you become aware of as a question, not a statement of fact
- Keep moving forwards with pride