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  A Woman in Your Own Right

  Anne Dickson Ph.D has degrees in psychology, mental health and environmental science. She has worked as a freelance psychologist, writer and trainer for many years and is recognised as a leading authority on women’s development, assertiveness training and interactive communication. Her best-selling, widely translated A Woman in Your Own Right is still used as a core textbook for assertiveness trainers around the world.

  A Woman in Your

  Own Right

  Assertiveness and You

  ANNE DICKSON

  Illustrations by Kate Charlesworth

  First published in 1982 by

  Quartet Books Limited

  A member of the Namara Group

  27 Goodge Street, London W1T 2LD

  This revised edition published in 2012

  Copyright © Anne Dickson 1982 and 2012

  The right of Anne Dickson to be identified

  as the author of this work has been asserted

  by her in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in

  any form or by any means without prior

  written permission from the publisher

  A catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978 0 7043 7304 4

  Typeset by Antony Gray

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  T J International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Further Reading

  1 When and Where to be Assertive

  2 What is an Assertive Woman?

  3 Equality and Power

  4 Putting Theory into Practice

  5 Assertive Techniques

  6 Rights and Responsibilities

  7 Body Language

  8 Saying ‘No’

  9 Self Disclosure

  10 The Compassion Trap

  11 Expressing Your Feelings

  12 The Two Faces of Anger

  13 How to Handle Criticism: on the receiving end

  14 How to Handle Criticism: as the critic

  15 The Art of Assertive Confrontation

  16 Giving and Receiving Compliments

  17 Women in the Workplace

  18 Women and Authority

  19 Your Body – Friend or Foe?

  20 Self-esteem

  21 Assertiveness and Sexuality

  22 A Middle-Aged Woman in Your Own Right

  23 The Power at the Centre

  To those individuals – wherever they are – who have the vision and compassion to see and treat other human beings as their equals. It has always taken courage to resist the norms of aggression and misuse of power: today it requires much more.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to acknowledge the contribution of the women I have trained over the years, both in the UK and elsewhere, many of whom have kept the free spirit of assertiveness alive in their work. They have helped to instil an authentic confidence in women and enabled them to literally find their own voices.

  I would like to thank a few women in particular. Stella Salem’s loyalty and contribution to the general administration of Redwood in the earlier years needs to be honoured: she has long tried to persuade me to update this book. Patricia Hodgins has also given me much encouragement and support in this venture. My thanks also go to Casey Taylor for our helpful discussion and Arlene Faris for taking the time to read and comment on the first draft of this new version.

  Prologue

  When my English publishers first approached me with a proposal to create a thirtieth anniversary edition of this book, my response was one of ambivalence: not because I personally believe that assertiveness training has become less relevant now than it was three decades ago. On the contrary, in the face of contemporary cultural values, adherence to the fundamental principles of equality and honesty seem more important than ever in a world where inequalities are glaring, dishonesty often overlooked and individual rights prioritised over compassion or a sense of responsibility for others. My initial doubts were much more to do with whether anybody would be interested in what are now largely considered out-dated and irrelevant principles.

  Nevertheless we agreed to go ahead: my brief was to update the original book by removing what were obviously outdated references: to typewriters, for example, or addressing the problem of asking someone not to smoke in a restaurant. It wasn’t long before I realised that I couldn’t simply tweak a few details: far too much has changed in terms of the social context in which assertive principles have to be understood.

  The commitment to equality, for example – at the very heart of assertive behaviour – has been dealt a devastating blow by the shift in social and political values throughout the last thirty years. Neo-liberal economic policies have meant a radical change in life as we know it as economic values have evolved into social values. Sports, education, medicine, politics, broadcasting, the performing arts and the media have been colonised by market values while entailing a corresponding loss of intrinsic values such as gamesmanship, teaching, healing, governing, informing, entertaining and intellectual achievement. The same economic policies have spread through the world with dramatic political and social repercussions and the absence of equality as a consequence (economic, social, access to physical resources, education and healthcare, job opportunities and life-expectancy) has been irrefutably documented.

  Although it was always crucial to distinguish between an assertive and aggressive response, it is even more difficult to understand the distinction when we all now live within a society where much higher levels of aggression are countenanced as acceptable and often completely normal. One reason for this is that business has become a metaphor for life in the Western world. We are expected to be more entrepreneurial (streamlined, aggressive and profitable) in everything we do: this goal requires the most up-to-date technology, adequate resources, a high profile, the right image and cost-effectiveness. Winning takes priority which means that the ethos of competition has extended its domain from the sports arena and workplace to infiltrate even our closest relationships. Time and time again, we fail to communicate effectively because we are hampered by seeing the other person solely as potential ‘winner’ or ‘loser’: every interaction becomes a contest in which the success or failure of the outcome is apparently dependent on our respective strategies.

  Within this wider shift, women’s roles in our culture have also altered: the current generation of young women enjoy more independence from the restraints of stereotypically female roles than their mothers did: self-expression, educational attainment and professional achievement are now far more accessible. In earlier years, the concept of the Compassion Trap, for example, was an important aspect of early training programmes and immediately identifiable to women then as a stumbling block to finding the words to make an effective refusal, i.e. to put their needs before those of others. This concept appears less relevant to younger women today who are more certain of their ground when claiming their individual rights.

  How and why is this book different from the original? Although the core content remains the same, the evolution of assertiveness training during these three decades means that presenting the subject matter in 2012 is a new challenge. My own experience of teaching and training in a diverse range of contexts and cultures gives me a particular perspective on the path taken by assertiveness training: how it began, how it developed, why it gained popularity and how it eventually came to lose its essential meaning. The following brief history provides some insight into what being a
ssertive means, and doesn’t mean, today.

  Assertiveness Training 1982–2012

  A Woman in Your Own Right first came into being in 1982 in response to the demand for assertiveness training classes. Four years previously, I had taught the first class in this country and the relevance of the topic to women’s lives and their consequent interest in learning the skills was immediately and overwhelmingly evident. Adult Education institutions, initially wary of being associated with any ‘feminist’ agenda, were persuaded by over-subscribed classes and consistent attendance throughout the full ten weeks to open their doors more enthusiastically. Participants in these classes discovered a new concept of empowerment: one that embraced the importance of communicating feelings and recognising an essential equality with others.

  Within a couple of years, the demand for classes and teachers grew exponentially and as a consequence, I established a national and later an international training association which offered a twelve month, in-depth training in assertiveness and sexuality for women who wanted to run courses within their own personal and work contexts.

  I wrote the book both to spread the word and to enable women to benefit from some of the principles even if they didn’t have access to a class. I could never have imagined how far the relevance of assertiveness would reach: in subsequent years, the book has been translated into over a dozen other languages and it soon became clear that women of very differing cultures identified with similar problems of communication, low self-esteem, expressing anger and problems with confrontation.

  In the late-eighties, assertiveness training became trendy here in the UK and inevitably many people jumped on the bandwagon, establishing themselves as trainers of assertiveness, often with little or no experience. The disadvantage, from my point of view, was that the core significance of assertiveness training became diluted as the more radical elements were filtered out. Only the easier and less challenging aspects were retained and this meant, for example, that management of emotions, especially anger, handling criticism and confrontation and crucially, the importance of equality, were often side-lined or omitted altogether from the majority of training programmes.

  A second major influence was the issue of gender. In the early days women were able to identify strongly with the disadvantages of not being able to speak up or set limits because of their awareness at the time of obvious inequalities with men in both personal and professional contexts. Men on the whole showed little interest in learning these skills. An unassertive person was stereotypically passive, weak, shy and unable to give orders: an ineffectual image that most men were able to dismiss as entirely irrelevant to their own needs. Over time, however, as they witnessed changes in their colleagues, partners, sisters and friends, some men could see that there was more to being assertive than they had first imagined. In response to a growing demand, mixed courses became available. The early feminist agenda (assertiveness training had been originally taken up by the women’s consciousness-raising movement in the US in the mid-70s) slowly evaporated.

  As this shift was occurring, assertiveness was taken up within the corporate sector. The early grass roots image of assertiveness changed into a big business image, taught within companies in the private and public sector, as well as academic and medical institutions, usually for men and women together. It was impossible to avoid compromise, I remember, knowing that a breakthrough in understanding and practice that often occurred for individuals during a training programme fell short of challenging the prevailing ethos of competition, dominance and hierarchy within the organisation as a whole.

  The deteriorating financial climate was another factor: specialists like myself were no longer economically viable. Those in charge of training departments economised by offering an in-house training package which typically included stress-reduction, time-management, team-building and confrontation skills: assertiveness simply became part of this package. People did the best they could but the central elements of assertiveness training were ever further weakened and the practice of role-play disappeared completely.

  When role-play is either not used at all or used inappropriately, group participants learn the concepts intellectually but without the essential opportunity to practise these skills within a safe setting in order to be able to transfer them to real life. The more recent trend towards personal coaches and mentors has further diminished the use of role-play and placed more emphasis on ‘the professional pundit’ for guidance and advice.

  Absence of effective role-play has serious consequences: the individual is unable to be in charge of their own change but more importantly, the function of role-play is to allow the individual to actually feel anxiety and to move through that anxiety at both a psychological and physiological level simultaneously. It is this experience which can be carried forward into real life encounters in a way that simply talking about what you would like to say will never achieve. Without this opportunity, the potential for effective and lasting behaviour change is negligible.

  The combination of all these influences has led to the current anomaly whereby the concept of assertiveness is familiar to a large part of the population and many women have received assertiveness training in some form, though often with only superficial benefit. The practical consequences are seen in organisations. There are many more women managers than there were thirty years ago but women in the most senior positions still remain a tiny minority. Despite occasional optimism and the good intentions behind various government-funded initiatives, the aim of substantially increasing the number of women in senior positions has not been achieved. Women who are either middle or senior managers rarely operate from a core of high self-esteem and often, privately, feel lonely, unsupported, unconfident and believe they have to work harder than male colleagues because of a need to prove themselves ‘equal’.

  When people refer to assertiveness training, we assume we are all referring to the same thing but this simply isn’t the case. Since this book is a new edition, it presents me with an opportunity to emphasise how the model of assertiveness promoted in these pages is fundamentally at odds with the contemporary stereotype of ‘an assertive woman’. Although outright hostility and overt aggression are less socially sanctioned in a work environment these days, a more subtly aggressive mode of behaviour has made an appearance.

  Being assertive is now associated with being confident, articulate, prepared, unfazed, invulnerable and effective: in short, always and in every way a winner. This goal is generally understood to be achieved by learning verbal strategies, with an appropriate script and delivery, thereby implying one’s behaviour is based on mastering particular techniques.

  So if you believe that you just need a few techniques under your belt to be assertive because otherwise you’ll automatically be a ‘loser’ or if you think being assertive means being able to be tough and sassy and yet always end up being liked by everybody, think again.

  This stereotype is more a deterrent than an inspiration: when being assertive implies never being vulnerable or caught on the hop; never confused, lost for words, mistaken or uncertain, in other words, never human, we end up waiting. We rationalise our hesitation to deal with difficult situations by telling ourselves ‘When I am confident and calm and clear and articulate, then I’ll speak up’: and so we wait.

  Instead of being seen as a normal indication of the difficulty of the task ahead, anxiety is interpreted as a weakness, as a sign of inadequacy. The assumptions that guilt or anxiety must be denied (or conquered) or that one must conform to a stereotype of how one should behave are both counterproductive. In fact anxiety can be managed much more effectively and with far longer-lasting effects through proper in-depth learning and practice of assertive skills.

  In an age when we are encouraged to dedicate ourselves to the expression of our unique individuality, it must be emphasised that this book goes beyond mere self-empowerment: it concerns both the methods and consequences of self-empowerment. It questions the current norm of gettin
g what you want at the expense of everything and everybody else; it also examines the psychological repercussions of both subtle and obvious aggression on all our interaction with others. If you personally are not comfortable with aggression, then you will learn how to avoid it without backsliding into ineffectual compliance: this is assertiveness in action.

  A Woman in Your Own Right 2012

  The format of this edition roughly follows the original: the sequence remains very similar but with some additional chapters. Like everything else in this thirty year period, the material itself has not stood still and nor has my teaching. I have developed and extended the concepts, with some aspects taking more prominence than in the original version. In this time, I have also expanded several of the original chapters into individual books: sexuality (The Mirror Within 1984); assertiveness in the workplace (Women at Work 1999); body image and power (A Voice for Now 2000) and the art of confrontation (Difficult Conversations 2004). The original chapters on feelings and anger have evolved into Reconnecting with the Heart (to be published in 2013).

  The basic assertive techniques explained in this book are the same although self-disclosure now moves to the fore with its own separate chapter. This is because I have found through experience that this is the quintessential skill, without which an assertive interaction always founders despite our best intentions.

  An additional theme throughout is an inevitable reflection on generational differences: despite some obvious contrasts, my observation tells me that younger women are no more able to challenge authority, be honest, express how they feel or give a clear and effective refusal to a request, than their parents were. At a deeper level I also question whether self-esteem is genuinely higher among younger women of today: once one looks beneath the popularly assumed ‘rights’ to both freedom of expression and individual fulfilment, there remain deep and pervasive anxieties about appearance, self-worth and a difficulty in remaining independent of the approval of peers, especially of those of the opposite sex.