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The Art of Assertiveness |
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Here’s one we made earlier - need help getting your point across? We recently showed Channel 4 "The Art of Assertiveness"Sounds like a job for Jacqui. Jacqui Dove is one of our experts on assertiveness with a broad professional background in NLP, training and coaching. She recently showed a group at Channel 4 “The Art of Assertiveness”.
What did we do?The challenge was to help the Channel 4 team understand people’s behaviour and know how to react assertively and with confidence when faced with difficult, aggressive or uncooperative people. We tweaked our standard “Art of Assertiveness” programme for Channel 4 adding some specific tools and techniques to ensure the training was focused to the individuals attending. The workshop was interactive and directly involved each individual for maximum personal impact.
How did we do it?What is assertiveness?What is it? And how assertive are you? People have different perceptions of what “assertiveness” really is. Breaking it down to its essentials, assertiveness is about communicating confidently and competently with others in an open and appropriate way. Attendees were invited to rate their current assertiveness level on a scale of 1 to 10, we then discussed how assertiveness affects everything from self esteem to how much confidence others have in us.
Setting personal intentionThe background set and with assertiveness focused clearly in participant’s minds we invited attendees to think about their “intention” and what it is they really wanted to get out of the session. By encouraging personal engagement we could deliver individual benefit to attendees. Next we examined the “impact” our combined body language, voice tone and the words we use can have. It’s not always what we think and, interestingly, when communicating with someone face to face our words can have the least impact on our message, especially when we meet someone for the first time. We actually communicate much, much more through our tone of voice and our body language.
Delivering techniques - credibilityThe key to the art of assertiveness is to appear credible. To help participants to understand and improve their credibility we armed them with 2 robust, tried and tested skills to help them to become "credible" in situations were they need to be assertive. We examined how to "look" confident and credible and how to "sound" confident and credible. To bring these tools to life and embed them meaningfully, each member of the team had a go, using the credible patterns and applying them to their own, very real, situations. Feedback followed where participants were invited to get together and discuss how they came across. Were they friendly, approachable, credible, confident, shy, bored? Delegates then spent some time thinking about how they could apply the techniques learnt to actual situations highlighting a particular area of development.
Delivering techniques Just say no!One of the most challenging aspects of appearing credible is to learn the art of saying No. We can all articulate the word “no” but some find it really difficult to get the message across. We spent some time looking at those things that stop us saying no, and then worked on how we can become better at doing it.
The perceptual positionsWe then looked at the situation from someone else’s point of view. It’s a bit like when you watch a film and you see the same event from several different people’s perspectives. We can actually learn a great deal from an outsider’s viewpoint.
Top TipsWe came up with 10 top tips for participants on making assertive requests. Armed with these tips and with a plan to take them forward, they decided on the actions they were going to take straight away.
BuddiesFinally we encouraged attendees to partner with a “buddy” who they arranged to meet 3 weeks after the workshop. Setting up this simple support structure with a pre arranged meeting time to ask questions and swap experiences promotes action and helps to embed the learning. Feedback on the event was extremely positive and left delegates energised and with plenty of effective techniques to help them confidently and assertively communicate. If you would like to talk to us about assertiveness contact linzi@you-unltd.co.uk.
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Helena Ward, Project Manager at The Research Centre |
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A company that practises what it preaches. Empathetic, insightful, knowledgeable and practical.