Improve Assertiveness and Relationship Skills | Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes
Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes teaches assertiveness through the IDEALS framework: I-statements, distress tolerance, empathy, awareness of wants, listening, objective language, and self-esteem. She walks through concrete examples in family and customer service, showing how to use deep breathing, paraphrasing, and calm empathy to de-escalate conflict and ask for what you need.
Chapters
Foreign. Hello everybody and welcome to today's presentation. We will be getting started in about a minute and a half. I just wanted to log on a little bit early and say hi, see if there was anything else that you guys wanted to talk about, any questions you had as they relate to assertiveness, communication skills and relationships. Remember, during the presentation, if you have questions, please feel free to put them in the chat discussion area below and I will answer them as quickly as possible. Today's presentation is going to be much shorter than yesterday's, so you know woohoo for that, which will allow us more time for discussion afterwards. So let's go ahead and get started. Today we're talking about assertiveness and how to speak up for yourself. And the acronym I created for this is ideals with two Ls. I know it's not spelled correctly, it kind of bugged me a little bit, but I couldn't figure out any other way to do it. Assertiveness skills are really important. When we are too passive, a lot of times we feel like we're not getting our needs met, that we feel like people don't understand us, that we, we feel kind of hopeless and helpless. When we are too aggressive, then we often push away other people. We may not do it physically, but we can do it with our words. If we're too aggressive, they may not want to engage with us because they always feel like it's going to be a fight. So your assertiveness helps you balance the two. If you want to think about it that way, it helps you learn how to state your feelings, state your opinions, state your wants and needs as your own without encroaching on other people, without saying my my way's right and your ways wrong. When you communicate assertively, you're saying, both of us have opinions, both of us have needs and wants. These happen to be mine. So let's talk about the basics. I statements. When we are being assertive, it's helpful to use I statements. Not you made me feel or you did this, but I feel. However I feel, I feel angry when this happened or I feel happy when you remember to text me and let me know that you're going to be late. You know, it's even better if you can frame phrase those I statements in a positive instead of I get angry when you don't text and you're late, stay stating is it a positive? Saying it makes me very happy and it helps me feel calmer when you remember to text me. Stephen Covey referred to that as creating A win, win. So you're creating an I statement. You're not blaming. You're taking ownership of your feelings and thoughts. You're saying, these are mine and this is why. But you're also telling the other person, guess what? How does this benefit you? If you do what I'm asking, how is it beneficial to you? And that's always a lot easier to digest when somebody says, when you do this, it makes me so happy. Well, golly, I want to do more of that instead of saying, when you do this, you make me angry. And. And again, you heard what I just said. When you do this, you make me angry. That's blaming. That's you, you, you. I didn't hear an I statement in there. So it's important to remember to use those I statements. Try to make it positive. Try to make it a win win. The second aspect of assertiveness skills is distress tolerance. And we talked about this some yesterday. I think it was yesterday in. In the fact that there are going to be times, maybe a lot of times when people don't agree with you. Somebody asks you what you thought of a movie, and maybe you thought it was awful. My family and I have these discussions regularly because I guess I'm a little quirky about the movies that I like. And they may ask me my impression of a movie, and I'll tell them, you know, I hated it or I loved it, but I'm asserting my opinion. And they will look at me and they'll go, I don't see how you can say that I loved it. And I may not understand exactly where they're coming from. I'm curious. You know, I'm like, tell me what it was that you saw that I missed. But I respect that they have different opinions of things, and that can be true with anything. Politics, schooling, you know, lots of different things. When my children were little, we homeschooled our children, and my mother was very against it, very, very against it pretty much the whole time. And whenever the topic would come up, she would assert her opinion that that was not the best thing for my children. And I had to use my best distress tolerance skills to not let that get under my skin. I had to breathe and say, okay, you know, I respect her opinion based on where she's coming from, based on the culture that she grew up in back in the, you know, 60s and 70s, and the messages that she learned, you know, I can respect her opinion is different than mine. It's not mine. However, I'm not going to let that. Cause Me an extreme amount of ongoing distress. When she would make a comment, would it make me irritable? Sometimes, yeah. You know, I would get irritable when she would criticize the homeschooling, however, I would take a breath. I would use my distress tolerance skills recognizing that that initial feeling I had, you know, that initial anger was a fight or flight response. That was, you know, my brain going, okay, that's criticism. What does that mean? Does that mean you're getting rejected? What? You know, and I would have to stop, be mindful, notice how I'm feeling, use my distress tolerance skills to get into my wise mind, which most of the time just meant taking a deep breath and going, all right, I got this. And then proceeding to empathize. And that takes us to our next step. I had to try to get into her mind and see where she was coming from. Did I have to agree? No. Again, assertiveness does not mean you have to agree. It means you respect their opinion and you are ideally they are going to respect your opinion and you can agree to disagree. But empathy is where it come, what comes in next. When we use empathy, we try to understand where that person is coming from and why they may have made that statement. It may not change our mind, but at least we have a better understanding. The next part of assertiveness skills is just being aware of your wants, needs, desires, all that stuff. Mindfulness. What is it that you want in life? What is important to you? If someone starts to disagree with you, it's important for you to be aware of your wants and needs and make educated decisions about what you're going to do. If somebody disagrees with you, do you need their approval? If so, why? If you don't get their approval, does it mean they're rejecting of you as a person? Or does it mean they're rejecting of your idea or your behavior? Two very different concepts. You know, back to mother again, there were a lot of things I did that she didn't really agree with, but she didn't squelch me. She let me grow and be the independent person that I wanted to be. And, you know, that was, that was important. She was very clear about how she, what she thought about and, and how she felt about things. However, if I made a rationed argument for why I thought it was important in my mind, you know, that was, that was okay with her. She, you know, again, she didn't have to agree, but she'd be like, okay, you know, I, I see your, you've got your opinion made, but we need to be aware of our wants and needs. Sometimes our wants and needs are not that all that important. If somebody asks you, what color do you want a mailbox to be? Or where do you want to go to dinner? You know, I may look deep down inside and go, well, I'm hungry, but honestly, I really don't care where we go to dinner. I just want food. You know, I'm hungry right now. And that can be frustrating. If somebody is passive, they almost never state their opinions. They probably have opinions, but they almost never state their opinions. And that can be frustrating for others because it's hard for people to communicate and engage with someone when you don't know what their wants and needs are. Think back to love languages, acts of service, physical touch. You know, I always have a hard time rattling those off quality time. A lot of those are very abstract concepts. And if I'm interacting with somebody whose love languages are quality time and acts of service, then I'm left scratching my head. If they are not assertive, if they can't tell me what their wants and needs are and what quality time looks like to them and what acts of would be helpful to them. If they let me know, then, you know, I am all about doing it. I am all about communicating in that way. But if they're passive constantly and they tell me that, you know, I don't know what I need or, you know, there's nothing that can be done, yeah, it leaves me scrambling and kind of spitballing it. And I don't like spitballing. So this is why it's so important to be aware of your wants and needs so you can tell people, golly, this would make me happy, or this is ideally what I'd like to do. It doesn't mean I'm going to get my own way. We may have to compromise in there, but this is. This is my stance. This is where we're starting at. We want to listen to hear. And you may be kind of scratching your head going, well, isn't that listening? And the answer is no. If you've ever been in a conversation, and I think a lot of us have, where somebody starts talking and about, oh, I don't know, 30 seconds into the conversation, you're trying to formulate your opinion, your response, your rebuttal. Think about the last debate, the. The presidential debate, not the vice presidential debate. There was no listening to here. There. There was stomping all over each other. It's important to listen to what someone says completely until they actually finish talking and then it's okay to not respond right away. It's okay to take a breath and go, that's. You can use fillers. You can say something like, that's interesting, or I see your point. That gives you time after they finish speaking, to formulate your response and then speak. But you've got to hear them first. You've got to hear what they're saying and its entirety and not assume you know what they're going to say next. So important in assertiveness, and it's important to encourage the people you interact with when you're being assertive. It's important to encourage them to hear you out. When we talk about paraphrasing, when we talk about basic communication skills, one of the things we talk about is letting the talk or talk until they're finished talking and then paraphrasing what you just heard them say to check for accuracy, to make sure you actually heard what they said. So what I hear you saying is, you know, counseling 101. If you are a counselor, you probably remember your first semester of counseling techniques class where you learned paraphrasing and advanced paraphrasing. And you learn those phrases such as, so what I hear you saying is, or so the point you're trying to make is, and you repeat it back and then they can say, yes, exactly, spot on. Or what? Where in the world did you get that concept from? That's not what I said at all. And then you can have them explain again what they were trying to communicate. When we use those I statements, when we're being assertive, we want to use objective language. If I walk into my children's room and I say, I'm very angry because this room is a disaster, well, they may look around and go, looks fine to me. So if I want to communicate something, if I want someone to do something to change a behavior, it's important for me to tell them exactly what it is, what in ways that are objective and measurable and observable. So instead of saying, this room is a disaster, going in and saying, you know, I would really appreciate it if when you cleaned your room, you made sure to put all your dirty clothes in the hamper and take all your dishes down to the sink, you know, those are two of my little pet peeves. So my children know that those are things that they need to do, but that might not be something that bothers them. If it bothers me and it's something that's important, then I need to articulate specifically what it is that bothers me. And what they could do in order to improve it. Again, you could state that in a much more, in a much kinder, gentler, win win format. And instead of walking in and going, this room is, I am upset because this room is a disaster and your dishes are everywhere and your clothes are on the floor, you could walk in and say, you know, it would really make me happy if, when you're finished doing whatever you're doing, if you would put your clothes into your hamper and bring the, bring the dishes down there and maybe even back it up with a reason why. You know, in Tennessee we have lots of problems with mice if you leave food around for any period of time. So you know, I can use, I can use that if I need to support my thesis. But instead of being critical and going, you're not doing this right, telling them what I want them to do objectively, measurably. And self esteem is really important with assertiveness skills. When we are talking about what we need and what we want, we are making ourselves vulnerable. We're putting ourselves out there and going, these are my thoughts and somebody can disagree with those. And that's scary. If we are relying on others to tell us that we're okay, then you know what, we're going to be let down a lot of the time because everybody is not always going to agree with you. That's just the way life is. So with self esteem, it's important to be able to self validate and go, you know what? My thoughts are my thoughts and they're valid. My feelings are my feelings and they're valid and I am okay if this person disagrees with me. It's important to check your language, your mental language and again, differentiate disagreement of opinion versus personal rejection. Most of the time I'm comfortable saying, most of the time when somebody disagrees with you, they are not rejecting you as a human being, they are rejecting your point of view. And that is only one part of who you are. So why is it, and it's important to ask yourself why is it devastating to me? Why is it stressful to me if somebody disagrees with my point of view? And that requires a lot of internal searching and recognition of whether you need to do some self esteem work so you don't rely on other people to tell you that you're right to tell you that you're okay. It's important to be your own best supporter. So to summarize the I statements, assertiveness skills. The acronym is ideals with two Ls. I statements Distress Tolerance, empathy, awareness of your own wants and needs so you can communicate those listening to hear, using language that's objective and self esteem development that is a crash course, if you will, in assertiveness and, and the big things I want you to take away from it. Well, I guess there are a lot of big things. But using I statements that ideally state the positive instead of the negative, just like we do when we make treatment plans, instead of saying I want to get rid of the depression, we say I want to be happier. Instead of saying I want to get rid of this disaster that is your room, saying I would like, it would make me happy. I would like you to do these things. People respond much better. Believe it or not, in most cases people respond much better if you own your feelings, own your thoughts and tell them what you want them to do instead of leaving them there to guess. But in that you're going to have people disagree with you. So it's important to be able to develop those distress tolerance skills so when somebody disagrees with you, you don't automatically dysregulate. You can take a couple of deep breaths and say to yourself, all right, this person is disagreeing with me. And then you can choose to either pursue that and discuss your differing opinions or just accept that you're going to agree to disagree. So I see we have a bunch of people that are viewing right now. What questions do you have about assertiveness skills, communication skills, or how this relates to relationships, anxiety or depression? I think we can do a lot if you want. If you're a counselor and you're teaching assertiveness skills in group, or even if you're a parent, or maybe even if you're just an individual that's working on improving your assertiveness skills. There is so much fodder on TV and you don't even have to go to debates if you watch the news. When they have people on, on news programs that are talking, they talk over each other and it just, it drives me batty. But it is important to be able to identify aggressiveness versus assertiveness and start practicing assertiveness remembering, you know, like I talked about in, in the, in the presentation, distress tolerance skills and self esteem development are so important for assertiveness skills because not everybody's going to agree with you all the time. It's just the way it is and recognizing that a lot of times when they disagree with you and you know that's, that's their point of view and their point of view is valid. So you need to Ask yourself, why is it important to me to have this person's approval of my opinions? And is this person's rejection or disagreement with my opinions or my statement, is that a rejection of my opinion or a rejection of me? And my sense is at least 80% of the time it's a rejection of your opinions. They, you went to a movie and you liked the movie and they didn't. You are getting ready to go to pick a college and there's this one college that you absolutely love and somebody else has a different opinion and they think that that college is just not worth anything. Okay, well you're, you are entitled to your opinion, but it's important to again separate rejection of an idea from rejection of a person and be able to validate yourself. Recognizing where your thoughts, feelings, wants and needs come from and that they are valid and you deserve to have them. And avoiding guilty feelings kind of goes along with building up that self esteem. When we feel guilty, guilt is self anger. Guilt is angered ourself for doing something we shouldn't have done, like stating our opinion. Oh my gosh. Recognizing that it's okay to state your opinion. Think about your, your best friend, think about your children or your nieces and nephews or, or whomever other people that you interact with. Do you want them to stifle their feelings, their wants and their needs, or do you want them to communicate openly with you so you can, you know, better connect with them so you can help them meet their, their wants and needs? I think most of us really would prefer to have someone openly communicate with assertively, not aggressively, what they want and what they need. We need to look at where that guilt comes from. And a lot of times it comes from prior learning. You know, we, if you were raised in a household where you weren't, it wasn't okay to have your own thoughts and feelings where you were shamed for having a differing opinion. It's going to be important to process that and feel, figure out whether it is okay to have your own opinion. And I hope you come to the idea that it is okay to have your own opinion, wants and needs. But I can't make that decision for you. In addicted families, for example, the mantra is don't talk, don't trust, and don't forget feel, which are the antithesis, antitheses, whatever of assertiveness. In an addicted family, everyone is supposed to be passive to the person with the addiction in order to keep harmony because the person with the addiction dysregulates so easily that everybody else is Supposed to walk on eggshells and do whatever that person says. So it's important to, again, look back at your developmental history. Where was it that you got the idea that it wasn't okay to assert your opinion that it was somehow wrong or belligerent? Now, culturally, I will say in some cultures, assertiveness needs to be considered with care. In. In some cultures, for example, younger people are admonished from being assertive with their elders. And I don't want to take away the cultural sensitivity of that. If that is a cultural practice and you are embracing of that, then you know, by all means recognizing that that is one of your wants and needs to conform to that cultural practice. So it is important. It's not super easy to just be assertive, you know, I'm not telling you it is. There are times, Even today, I'm 50 years old, and sometimes I'm not as assertive as I probably could be. And I recognize that and is one of those areas that I strive to work on every day. Being assertive as opposed to passive or aggressive, Because I can be both. It just kind of depends. And I admit that, and I recognize that, and I work on those things and recognize that when you're. A lot of people, when they're passive for too long, they either become depressed or angry. And when they. If they're passive for too long and they become angry, eventually, oftentimes they just jump right over assertive into aggressive. So learning how to communicate your thoughts, wants, and needs and hear other people's thoughts, wants, and needs and respect those is really important. When you are dealing with aggressive people and. And that's a great question, Edwin. It is important to not escalate with them, because if they're being aggressive and you respond with aggressiveness, then they're going to up their game. When you're responding, when you're interacting with somebody who's aggressive, one of the best things that you can do is maintain your composure, take a deep breath, and you may need to jump down to empathy. I will say that in this acronym, these are not in any particular order. If you're maybe a customer service manager and you are dealing with a customer who is just irate, taking a breath, you know, they. They come in, they start screaming at you off the bat or being aggressive in some way, and it's important to take a breath and think to yourself, wow, what must it be like in their head for them to feel this angry, this threatened, this fearful? Because remember, anger is part of fight or flee, which happens when we Feel threatened, what, what must it be like? And maybe it's not a lot of times. It's probably not even that episode. Whatever they're upset about, then they have been taught they have learned over time and that the only way to get what they want is to be aggressive. And so they just come in, you know, full barrel and with whatever they need. So recognizing first empathy and going, okay, this person is very upset. I can see that empathy paraphrasing goes a long way. Don't most of the time it's not advised to tell them to calm down. We know how well that works on us. Most of the time when someone comes in and they are aggressive, when they are upset, remember behavior has meaning. So ask yourself, you know, what's going on with this person and then say something like, I can see that you're feeling very angry right now, or you're frustrated, or you're afraid that you're not going to get your needs met here. And what I want to do is meet your needs. However, I need to first understand what your needs are. So providing empathy goes a long, long way. Staying calm goes a long, long way. And it's not easy. When somebody's coming at you and being aggressive, your fight or flight reaction, your natural reaction is to meet that threat and you know, try to overpower it. Sometimes you need, which is where distress tolerance skills come, Come in, somebody comes in, they're angry, take a breath, empathize with where they're coming from. And by staying calm, a lot of times they're going to de escalate. Not always. You know, some people get angry because you're not fighting back. But most of the time if people are being aggressive, it's because they feel powerless in some way. So if we can help them feel understood and empowered, they will de escalate a lot on their own. And then you can move into helping, asking them, you know, I would like to understand what your wants and needs are in this situation. I'm wanting to understand what is it that I can do to best help you. And then listen to hear. They will tell you whatever it is and it may be a long drawn out story and just letting them talk as long as you can and then saying, okay, summarize what you heard, you know, paraphrase. If you're on, on point, then you can start brainstorming what it is objectively using that objective language, what it is objectively that you can do in order to help that person feel less, less powerless in that situation. And I would encourage you to Think about different ways of dealing with aggressive behavior. When you're dealing with your own children, for example, if they become verbally aggressive, sometimes they need a timeout if you're dealing with other people. And this isn't always the, an appropriate response depending on your situation, but sometimes you need to just state, you know, I can see that you're really upset right now and I want to help you. However, I need to be able to understand what's going on. So let's take five minutes and you know, recombobulate ourselves and, and then, you know, you can tell me what's. When you've had a chance to catch your breath, maybe you can tell me a little bit more what's going on. There are a lot of different scenarios with that when you look at something. And since you brought up the presidential debate, you know, we'll go there. There was a lot of interrupting. It was, it was, in my opinion, appalling. But unfortunately the moderator didn't have any teeth. There were no consequences that the moderator could use to say, well, if you keep doing this, then you know, I'm going to turn off your microphone or I'm going to end the debate or whatever. He didn't have that to say to the person. And it was up to the speakers to recognize the consequences of their behaviors and how it might impact their v voting base to see that behavior. So unfortunately, you know, would I have loved to have seen somebody say, all right, you know, until you guys can quit stomping all over each other, we're just going to take a commercial break. Would I have loved to see that? Oh, heck yes. But that was, that's not how things are running. And so it's important to recognize that there has to be a reason. And you remember in the presidential debates, you know, I said earlier that when you're dealing with somebody aggressive, responding calmly, well, that didn't happen. So they were both upping each other. Whether it was through aggressive or passive aggressive comments, non verbals movements, they were both continuing to poke at each other instead, instead of trying to rain it down. Now, you saw something completely different or somewhat different in the vice presidential debates last night. So I would encourage you, if you're interested in just comparing the difference, look at, watch both debates, maybe not in their entirety because that's a lot of watching, but watch the debates, maybe the first 30 minutes of each one of them and look at what was different and figure out as you know, a person, which one was clearer, which one do you, out of the two debates. Which one did you walk away with? A better grasp of what the candidates were talking about as opposed to, you know, just trying to figure out, quote, who won. Are there any other questions? Comments? All righty, everybody. Thank you for being with me today. I enjoyed having some interaction with you, and I will see you tomorrow.
