Randy Paterson
Appearances
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Oh, glad to be here, Mike.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Assertiveness is essentially the act of controlling your own behavior in the dance between you and another person in such a way that you're controlling yourself. You're not controlling the other person. That's more of an aggressive stance. They're not controlling you. That's more of a passive stance. But you are able to state what it is that you need.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
You're able to set boundaries and you're able to defend them.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Well, there's so many different reasons. One would be stress. The stress response is also known as the fight or flight response. Fight leads us into aggression. Flight leads us into a more passive way of responding, sort of an avoidant stance, the passive stance. And so the more anxious we are in these situations, the less able we are to be properly assertive. A second is other people.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
We've often been setting up other people to expect that we have no boundaries for our entire lives. And then when we set them, they think, oh my gosh, what's going on here? And they try to get us to change back. And a third major area is all of our beliefs about assertiveness.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
We think that it's impolite to be assertive or that it's aggressive to be assertive or that all assertiveness is is watered down aggression. A variety of different beliefs can keep us away from simply stating what we think, what we want, what we're willing to do, and what we're not.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Yeah, it's mostly a matter of rehearsal. And in fact, I would say that I'm not a natural. I don't think anybody is really born with this. Some people might have been born with more of a tendency toward it than me. But I've often said that when you're learning from someone, you don't want to learn from a natural because they'll just say things like, well, you know, just do it. It's easy.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
It's perfectly straightforward. Right. You want somebody who actually had to learn. But you're quite right. I mean, when we think about assertive people, they're often people we admire.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
And so one of the tricks is indeed to think of those individuals, like who is it that I admire, not because they're so hard edged and nasty, but because they're able in a kind, compassionate, clear way to set their boundaries without
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
know being grossly offensive all of the time uh and without it being deadly serious john i need you to understand my boundary around who steals the pencils from my it doesn't have to be like that you can be much more casual by saying what like like what would how that example what would you say differently John, I can show you where the pencils are in the storage cupboard if you'd like.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Might be a perfectly assertive thing to do. Another would be, I need the pencils, so do leave them here. Oh, I like that.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
I'm dealing with the behavior and the behavior rather than the person. One of the tricks with assertiveness is that you don't address the person's character at all. You don't say things like, I want you to be more respectful. I want you to be smarter. It's what do you want them to do? Leave the pencils here, please.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Yeah, although even in a situation like that, and this is where it can be a little bit tricky to figure out, okay, how am I going to address this and why it's often important to think it through before you're in that situation. But it might be something like, John, you were going to get that report done by the 22nd. Here we are, it's the 22nd.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
And what can you tell me about the progress of that report? Or, John, it seems that when you set estimates as to when work will be done, it tends not to happen. How can we change that? You'll notice that my responses tend to be quite brief. We can get into a discussion later, but it tends not to be a long speech.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
I think the idea behind a lot of people is if the other person comes back with something, I don't know what they're gonna come back with. So I better have a whole script in advance and deliver the whole thing before they have a chance to say anything.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Uh, really it's going to be a dialogue probably, and you're going to have to do a little bit of improvisation, you know, so you're going to have to come up with your point, know what your point is before you go into the encounter, make your point clearly, briefly, let the other person speak and then be able to follow up.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Absolutely. Nonverbal behavior is really important. One of the things that I encourage people to do is go to a dog park and look at the dogs. And you can tell which are the alpha dogs and which are the beta dogs, if you like. And we're not after alpha aggressiveness. So we're not after the sneering, masterly person. I'm sure we can think of examples from public life.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
But we're after something that's kind, clear, and as though we are treating the other person like an equal. But the passive behavior, you can really see it in somebody when they're giving it off. They're making themselves small. They may be rotating their shoulders inward slightly to, in effect, decrease their width.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
They may be decreasing their height by hunching down and turtling their neck a little bit. they may be looking up from under their eyebrows. An aggressive person, of course, may be leaning in, making themselves look large as though they're dealing with a marauding cougar or something and spluttering, or they may be pulled back
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
My perfect example of this is Severus Snape from the Hogwarts movies, the Harry Potter movies. This Mr. Potter, could you please manage to do your job? That's all that I'm really asking you to do. It's quite pulled back, fluent, and icy.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
so these non-verbal styles both in voice so it sounds like that would be verbal but in fact it's non-verbal it's not the words it's the way that the voice comes across but also your posture really communicates things do you think professor snape is assertive or aggressive No, no, that's icy aggression. So there's a sort of hot aggression and cold aggression.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
And Snape is a great example of cold aggression. He's probably the one that more people are familiar with than anything else. I'm trying to think of a good example of hot aggression, but it's sort of the red-faced, spluttering person who begins losing their facility with the language. And how do we refer to those aggressive people? We say that they've lost it. It. What it? What's the it?
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
The it is control. They've lost control over the situation. They've lost control over themselves. Even though the point of aggression is to gain control, it actually loses it. The assertive posture is much more relaxed, much more casual. You'd look at coworkers, and if you had the volume turned down on a video, you'd think, oh, these are two friends talking about something.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
You're absolutely right. It would be easier if we could set these things out at the beginning. But for a lot of us, we've been in the same family, the same marriage, we've had the same kid, we've had the same parents, we've had the same boss, we've had the same coworkers for years. How do you change it now? Well, one of the emotions that we associate with the passive style is fear, of course.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
It's fear of counter-attract, fear of other people's aggression. But the hidden emotion is indeed exactly what you say. It's resentment. Because these people, they keep dumping work on my desk on Friday afternoons. I can't believe that they're so inconsiderate. This is such a toxic workplace. and so on and so on, that that resentment gets in the way of doing anything assertive.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Yeah, I mean, the resentment comes from, you know, wishing that people were different, wishing that people would respect our boundaries, despite the fact that we've never told them what our boundaries are. And we need to recognize that, yeah, expressing this anger is not going to have any utilitarian purpose whatsoever. It's not going to help in any way.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
any sense and that really why is it that uh the people around me are using me it's probably in large part because i allow myself to be used and so as understandable as the anger is spraying it outward toward them probably is not going to lead us forward We need to sort of swallow it, maybe beat up a pillow somewhere else, deal with it in some other way.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
But in this relationship, changing what we're doing, I need to adopt a more assertive style, which is much more calm and much less emotive, I think.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Yeah, well, one of the things that we advocate is that when you're noticing that there's something pulling you away from being assertive, you identify what that fear is. It's very hard to let go of a thought, and thoughts are predominantly what drive fears. It's hard to let go of a thought until you know what it is, because who knows? You haven't looked inside the box. Like, is it a valid thought?
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
so really use your fear and use that almost like the um the thread on a fraying sweater and pull on it and pull on it and pull on it and see if you can get at the thought what exactly is it that i'm afraid is going to happen and sometimes when you do that you realize Oh gosh, that's pretty unlikely.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
That's never going to happen because you can use your critical faculties on it now that you can actually see what you're thinking.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Yep, and if you were in my consulting room, I'd say you are exactly right. It's going to take so much time, so much effort. You're going to have to think through exactly what to say. I'm going to advocate that you rehearse it in front of a mirror.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
I'm going to have you imagine that this person reacts in seven different ways, and you figure out how you're going to respond to each of the seven different ways. For a movie, give me a break. It's so much easier just to give in this time. But are you going to be happy giving in in this way every time for the rest of your life?
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Yes and yes. Learning assertiveness is very much like learning any other skill. It takes you out of your comfort zone. And the first little while that you do it, and frankly with assertiveness, often for quite a while, it feels unnatural. And it doesn't feel like it's just flowing smoothly out of you. You need to actually plot it out a little bit.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
And I think that's how we learn anything, that feeling of, being outside my comfort zone, that's the feeling of my life growing.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
Yeah. Well, that's an ideal situation. In fact, if both people are using an assertive stance, typically what it means is that they're both remaining calm. They're both figuring out what it is that they actually want. They're both defining the limits on their own behavior. And So actually, conflict resolution becomes much, much easier.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
It's much harder if one person is being assertive and the other one is being aggressive. So generally speaking, these things tend to go better. But it may be that in setting your own boundaries, you realize that there is some kind of fundamental disagreement with the other person. And at that point, you have to figure out what you're willing to do. I've been using this silly movie example.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
It is a very low wattage example, I realize. But it might mean, Well, I'm going to go see this movie and you can go to whichever one you want. In other words, I'm going to control my own behavior and not yours.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
yes they are intertwined and in many people's minds what they really need is to develop the confidence and then the assertiveness will come and what i suggest is that confidence is always a um an outcome not a cause confidence is the result of setting proper boundaries it is the result of practicing new skills Imagine a person deciding they wanted to go swimming.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
They've never been in a swimming pool before, but I'll get into that pool the moment I feel confident. Well, you're never going to get into that pool. You will feel confident after you've been in the pool, unconfident for a while. So confidence and assertiveness are very, very much linked. But if we wait for the confidence, the assertiveness will never come.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
To control yourself, your own behavior, and in effect to be giving up on controlling other people's behavior. We often want to change the steps that other people are making in this dance. And what we need to do is refocus on our own feet and change our own steps instead. It's an ecological system. You change one thing, others will change as a result.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
You need to change what you have control over, and that's you.
Something You Should Know
How to Get the Best Sleep of Your Life & How to be Gracefully Assertive - SYSK Choice
When you're noticing that there's something pulling you away from being assertive, you identify what exactly is it that I'm afraid is going to happen. And sometimes when you do that, you realize, oh gosh, that's never going to happen. All this today on Something You Should Know.