Tuesday 14 July 2015

Learning to be more assertive

Many years ago a very good trainer introduced me to the concept of training people to be more assertive. Prior to that I believed assertiveness was a personality trait that you either had or if not you were pretty much destined to become someone else's dogsbody! We started training people and the results were excellent and a great lesson to many of us.

As part of our contribution to the community we worked in we developed a two day life skills course for 15 - 16 year old students and ran it in the Kingston  upon Thames area. It was very successful and ran for 8 years before someone pulled the plug on the programme. The reason I mention this is we built assertiveness training into the programme and it played a big part in getting these kids fired up to do more with their lives. After one run of the course I received a call from a health visitor who had been working with a young girl for 9 months, who struggled with anorexia and she had struggled to get her to communicate.She said a wonderful thing had happened as somehow our life skills programme had opened the door and this young girl was 'alive' again. This was am amazing moment which still brings tears to my eyes.

What I learnt over the years was assertiveness could most definitely be taught!

If you want to find out more we were using the superb work of Ken and Kate Back, please just click on the book to link to Amazon.



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