0440 - Get Assertive! (Self-Paced)

Course Description

Are you tired of being intimidated and treated badly by others? Learn specific techniques to become more assertive in all parts of your life. Discover how people manipulate you and how you submit to being a victim. Understand the difference between passive, aggressive, and assertive behaviors, and see how inner dialogues keep people acting in passive ways. Explore ways to change your inner dialogue, such as using affirmations and visualization, creating new labels for yourself and others, and keeping a journal. Do you think you speak non-assertively? If so, master the skills that will empower you to talk in an assertive manner, including specific verbal techniques and phrases for a variety of situations. Anger and criticism from others are difficult to deal with, so you will get many tips on how to handle these. Because your body can reflect an inner uncertainty, you will learn how to use facial expressions, eye contact, gestures, and your voice to reinforce the assertive statements you're making. You teach people how to treat you through your behaviors as well as your words, and this course will help you understand which behaviors to use with others so they perceive you as being assertive. When you begin to exhibit your new confidence in relationships, people will counter in various ways. You will learn how to stand firm in the face of this resistance. Get the assertiveness training you need in order to be more confident and powerful with family members, friends, bosses, co-workers, professionals, service people, and even total strangers. It's your turn to speak up!

• Understand the difference between passive, aggressive and assertive attitudes, gestures and phrases
• Learn to recognize ways you lose power and discover simple adjustments to the way you say things.
• Learn to deal assertively with people who criticize or try to manipulate you
• Discover the importance of eye contact, facial expressions, voice, body posture, gait, and clothes to project a more assertive personality
• Learn ways to be assertive in all types of situations whether it is family, social, or everyday life situations.
• Learn how to give and receive compliments and discover times when it is best not to be assertive

• Gain insight in learning about how not being assertive can have surprising consequences in all areas of your life
• Deal effectively with people who are angry or criticizing you
• Create an assertive body language
• Learn to treat people in an assertive but loving manner
• Gain respect and a positive self image

• This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

• PC: Windows 8 or later.
• Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Lesson 1 - The Importance of Being Assertive. This first lesson will mark a turning point in your life. You will begin by measuring your assertiveness quotient, you will learn about the many surprising consequences of not being assertive, and you will learn to recognize the different behaviors of passive, aggressive, and assertive people.

Lesson 2 - Inner Changes to Become Assertive. Before you can begin to act assertively, you need to be able to identify your self-canceling thoughts and change your inner script. In this lesson, you will learn why you have negative thoughts about yourself and what those could be. You will learn several techniques for replacing them with a positive inner script, including visualization, affirmations, storytelling, writing a journal, and creating a collage.

Lesson 3 - How You Lose Power Verbally. One of the ways non-assertive people lose power is through the use of certain types of language to either gain approval or avoid opposition, criticism or disagreement. In this lesson, you will learn how to recognize when you're doing this, and you will discover some simple and painless adjustments to the way you say things that can help you avoid this problem.

Lesson 4 - How to Be Verbally Assertive. Now that you have learned what takes your verbal power away, it's time to learn how to be verbally assertive. In this lesson, you will learn how to make the four types of "I" statements to tell others about yourself, respond to others' requests, ask for cooperation and support, and confront another person. You will also learn about techniques you can use to deal assertively with people who are angry with you or criticizing you.

Lesson 5 - Creating an Assertive Body Image. Just as an actor perfects the nonverbal aspects of a role, you need to pay attention to the nonverbal nuances in your new assertiveness role. What you will learn in this lesson is how to use eye contact, facial expressions, voice, body posture, gait and clothes to create an assertive image.

Lesson 6 - Adapting Your Message to Others' Personalities and Resistance. In order for you to be most effective, you need to be able to adjust your assertive message to the personality of the person with whom you're communicating and to deal with resistance. In this lesson, you will study four behavior types and five sensory types to help you understand which assertive approach works best. You will also find out how to identify resistance in others by observing verbal and nonverbal clues and various methods you can use to handle the resistance you may encounter.

Lesson 7 - Assertiveness With Your Family. Most people find it extremely challenging to be assertive with close family members. In this lesson, you will learn about a variety of statements family members use to manipulate you, and you will discover the most effective ways to respond to each of them. You will learn how to act assertively with your parents, siblings, and children to build more positive relationships.

Lesson 8 - Assertiveness With Your Mate. In this lesson, you will discover the four different emotional types of people and how they come together as mates. You will explore the relationships these types have with each other, what problems tend to arise, and how the partners can treat each other differently in order to resolve any problems they may have. You will also learn guidelines for working out issues with your partner in an assertive but loving manner.

Lesson 9 - Assertiveness With Friends and in Social Situations. Do you find it difficult to say no to a friend who asks a favor that you don't really want to do? Do you have difficulty having conversations in social situations? If so, you will really learn a lot from this lesson, including how to use the assertiveness techniques to deal with your friends. Next, you will learn techniques you can use to open up to other people and carry on interesting conversations.

Lesson 10 - Assertiveness in the Workplace. You may approach the thought of being assertive at work with trepidation. However, when supervisors and employees treat each other with respect and act assertively with each other, both happiness on the job and productivity increase. In this lesson, you will learn how to be assertive during job interviews as well as with your boss and subordinates, what to look for to see if your workplace encourages or discourages assertiveness, and how to advance assertiveness where you work.

Lesson 11 - Being an Assertive Consumer and Dealing With Everyday Situations. Often, you encounter situations in which you deal with people as a consumer. In this lesson, you will learn how to be assertive with waiters, salespeople, government clerks, doctors, hospital employees, lawyers, and IRS agents. This lesson also discusses how to be assertive in everyday situations, such as when a restaurant or movie theater is unbearably cold.

Lesson 12 - Final Steps in Becoming Assertive. So far in this course, you have gained a wealth of knowledge about how to be assertive. These skills and techniques can be used with family and friends, as a consumer, in the workplace, and in everyday situations. In this closing lesson, you will learn some situations in which it's better to not be assertive, how to give and receive compliments, and how to be assertive in all parts of your life.