Being Assertive

Being Assertive

So many times when coaching individuals, or working in teams, people tell me that they cannot be OK with others when others do things that are wrong or when the other person or people treat them as not OK. However, if we treat others as if they are not OK then this is likely to just escalate the difficulty. This happens the world over from the micro to the macro – and where does it get us? It gets us into conflict on a local to an international scale.

Staying OK/OK with ourselves and others means believing that we all have a right to be in the world, it is what we do with those rights that is important.

Transactional Analysis is a method to improve communication and as such it is important to treat others well, even when they are not being so with us. When this occurs we can “cross the transaction”, namely invite them to respond to us in an OK/OK way. For example, I was giving facilitating what the organisation called a “masterclass” on motivation when a participant said very aggressively that I had not mentioned money as a motivator. At this point I had choices – I could become aggressive and respond accordingly, I could become compliant and feel put down, or I could cross his transaction which was from Criticising Mode to my Compliant Mode. I took the latter option and responded from my Accounting Adult mode “No, that’s right, would you like to know how come I haven’t done that?” At this point he either had to say “Yes” or “No”. I was inviting the participant to come and join me in Adult by asking him a question and contracting with him about what he wanted. Having said “Yes” I informed him of my rational and then moved the dialogue from him to other people in the audience and onto another topic. This same participant made similar comments twice more during the seminar and I was able to keep myself and him okay.

There are times when we need to put in the boundary more overtly than I did on that occasion, and at these times we still need to come from an OK/OK place. In this way we can say that someone has gone over a boundary but not ridicule them or be abusive either. In my experience coaching and training leaders and managers as well as working with shopfloor workforce, this ability to keep in relationship, respecting people and yet still be able to discipline people is a must for a productive organisation. This is more likely to encourage loyalty and increase production as everyone experiences fairness and equanimity.

For more on Okayness take a look at our information on TA on our web site.