Things that you would like to change

It is useful to start assertiveness training by finding some situations of your own to work with.

Think of situations in which you communicate, or need to communicate something to another person or other people. They could be big matters or small.

Think of those situations that you wish you could handle better. Handling them better may not mean that you get the outcome that you want, but you feel all right about how you handled them.

Try to think of at least 10 situations and list them in the table.

You may find it useful to think in turn about :

• your relationships
• family
• relatives
• social situations
• work
• dealing with tradespeople
• dealing with officials

Be as specific as you can. E.g. "Telling my boss when I think they are wrong." or better still "Telling my boss that the P/K machine is better than the L/K machine that they are proposing to order." rather than "Dealing with my boss."

One purpose of this list is for you just to notice what you want to change. This on its own often helps people to change things.

The other purpose is for you to have some things of your own to use in learning how to be more assertive. It will help if some of the situations are ones where you need to take the initiative. In other words, you need to set out the situation and communicate what you want to another person. For the next part of the course you will be invited to work with one or two of these situations.

This list is for you to use and you will not have to show it to anyone or to reveal anything from it that you do not want to.

Now, try to think how you tend to handle each situation at present, or how you last handled it. In the column headed "Now" write "P", "A" or "M" - "P" if you handle the situation passively, "A" if aggressively or "M" if manipulatively. If you handle the situation differently at different times, put letters for all the ways you handle it. Assertive behaviour is not included here since the idea is to look at how you handle each situation when you are not assertive.

Finally, in the column headed "Rank" write "1" against the situation that you find most difficult to handle, "2" against the next most difficult and so on until you have a number against each situation.