When you’re learning a new communication skill, it can be hard to know when to use it. The opportunities can speed past you or go completely unrecognized. This is natural when developing any new skill, and assertiveness is no exception. Thankfully, your awareness of your emotions can be your lighthouse in the fog. Before we dive into that, though, let’s get clear on what assertiveness is and why it’s important for our relationships.
What Assertiveness Entails
Assertive communication means clearly stating your opinions and feelings and self-advocating without being disrespectful, controlling, or violating the rights of others. Assertive communicators don’t expect others to mind read or know how they feel or what they want. They value themselves and are willing to self-advocate while still expressing respect for others. As a result of self-advocating, assertive communicators don’t suffer from resentment or pent-up frustration from unmet needs. Relationships between assertive communicators tend to be healthy as well, as others are less likely to guess or attempt to anticipate their needs because they have already been communicated. Assertive communication looks like this:
- Using “I” statements to communicate how you feel, what you’d like, and your unmet needs
- Self-advocating without blaming
- Attentively listening without interrupting
- Clearly stating feelings, needs, and wants respectfully and honestly
- Speaking in a calm tone of voice and with a relaxed body posture
- Noticing but not permitting others to manipulate or control you
- Taking responsibility for your impact on others
- Apologizing and taking ownership for hurt you caused
- Maintaining good eye contact
- Being willing to compromise and negotiate, and offering to do so when it doesn’t infringe on your own rights or needs
Assertive communicators express themselves clearly, allowing others to know where they stand without having to guess. They take responsibility for how they feel and their actions and don’t cave in when others try to control or manipulate them. While this approach can initially feel uncomfortable to adopt, in the long run, assertiveness prevents miscommunications and facilitates understanding and closeness in relationships. When assertiveness is the main communication approach, it fosters self-esteem and confidence, reduces the likelihood of resentment in relationships, and builds trust.
With clarity on what assertiveness is, let’s now turn to some common emotions that can signal we need to use assertiveness to improve a relationship.
6 Emotion Cues to Use Assertiveness
Emotions can provide vital messages about our values, needs, and interests. Yet, if we allow feelings to overpower us, they can stand in the way of what we want or need, and our relationships with other people and ourselves can suffer. Emotions and what we do with them play a crucial role in how satisfying, close, and connected our relationships are. Watching a young baby, you can see how readily they feel and express strong emotions. This ability is pivotal to thriving, as it communicates basic yet important needs to parents and caregivers. Over the course of childhood and into adulthood, we learn healthy and problematic ways to express, reduce, and avoid emotions. Yet, our emotions serve an important purpose and can be empowering messengers.
Without full awareness of your inner experience, you’re unable to harness your feelings for the clarity they can provide, nor use them to connect with others or express their message with assertiveness. When the same emotions arise repeatedly in a relationship, that message is worth heeding. Following are six common emotion cues that indicate assertiveness is needed in a relationship:
- Are you feeling repeatedly frustrated in the relationship?
- Do you often feel hurt, dismissed, or unseen by this person?
- Is resentment a recurrent feeling you have when you’re with this person or think about them?
- Do you feel contempt or bitterness toward this person?
- Does the relationship evoke feelings of anxiety, restlessness, or irritability that you can’t shake?
- Do you feel saddened, dismayed, or depressed as a result of the relationship?
When these emotions are evoked by a relationship repeatedly and go unaddressed, they can fester, making you vulnerable to expressing them in passive-aggressive or aggressive ways. Although it might be tempting, ignoring these cues strains our relationships further, resulting in unnecessary tension, conflict, and withdrawal.
Healthy relationships are built on trust, mutual respect, collaboration, and support, all of which necessitate assertive communication. No two people can agree on everything all the time. Conflict, disagreements, and hurts are inevitable in relationships. Learning to notice your emotion messages and express them with assertiveness will help you resolve them and can aid in preventing recurring issues. When a relationship is important to you, it’s worth noting and listening to what these recurrent emotions are trying to tell you. Often, they are trying to signal you have an unmet need to request something, share an opinion, collaborate, seek support or guidance, or address an unresolved hurt. The more we avoid asserting ourselves in a relationship, the less likely we are to get our needs met, and then we all suffer the fallout from inaction.
Another way to look at the downsides of avoiding these recurrent emotion signals is this: What’s the cost you and the relationship will pay later if you don’t assert yourself? If the relationship is important to you, give it the respect it deserves and assert your unmet needs. Doing so will help you build your confidence in practicing assertiveness as well as prevent an accumulation of unresolved issues that can pull relationships apart or set into motion unhealthy relationship dynamics in which everyone pays a price.