Communicating Effectively For Dummies E-Book

Marty Brounstein

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 631

Beschreibung

A friendly guide that teaches you effective methods of communication to avoid common conflicts and make your voice heard in the office Communicating Effectively For Dummiesshows you how to get your point across at work and interact productively with bosses and coworkers. Applying your knowledge and skill to your job is the easy part; working well with others is often the hard part. This helpful guide lets you maximize your personal interactions, even when resolving conflicts, dealing with customers, or giving difficult presentations. Whether you're the CEO of a major corporation, a small business owner, or a team manager, effective and clear communication is imperative to your success. From keeping your listener engaged to learning to become a better listener,Communicating Effectively For Dummiesoffers all the strategies, tips, and advice you need to: * Learn how to become an active listener * Accentuate the positive in negative situations * Find win-win solutions for conflicts * Stay on track when writing e-mails and letters * Handle presentations, interviews, and other challenges * Speak forcefully and assertively without alienating others This friendly and comprehensive guide gives you the keys to a thriving career with expert advice on effective verbal and nonverbal communication. From mastering your own facial expressions (and reading them in others) to being a happy boss, this book covers all the angles: * Becoming aware of your own assumptions * Dealing with passive-aggressive communicators * What to say to help someone open up to you * Communicating through eye contact and body language * Maintaining a positive attitude * Dealing with sensitive issues * Effective conflict resolution models * When to use e-mail, the phone, or a face-to-face meeting * Dealing with angry customers * Coaching your staff to communicate better In today's high-stress work environment, good communication skills are imperative for keeping your cool and getting your point across. With your own copy of Communicating Effectively For Dummies, you'll know what to say, how to say it, and that being a good listener can often be the difference between getting ahead and just getting by.

Leseprobe

Communicating Effectively For Dummies®

by Marty Brounstein

Communicating Effectively For Dummies®

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2001 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 00-111140

ISBN: 978-0-7645-5319-6

Manufactured in the United States of America

15 14 13 12

About the Author

Marty Brounstein is the Principal of The Practical Solutions Group, a training and consulting firm based in the San Francisco Bay area that specializes in management and organizational effectiveness. Marty’s consulting work includes one-on-one coaching with managers and executives, assistance to groups working to become productive teams, and guidance and direction for organizations establishing practices for high performance and employee retention. His training programs target management as well as employee-development issues including leadership, team development, customer service, and effective communications.

As a consultant, speaker, and trainer since 1991, Marty has served a wide variety of organizations from high tech to government, for profit to not-for-profit. He has a bachelor’s degree in education and history and a master’s degree in industrial relations. Prior to beginning his consulting career, he spent a couple of years as a human resources executive.

This is Marty’s fourth book and second for Hungry Minds, Inc. He is the coauthor of Effective Recruiting Strategies: A Marketing Approach and author of Handling the Difficult Employee: Solving Performance Problems. In 2000, he wrote Coaching and Mentoring For Dummies.

To contact Marty regarding consulting, speaking, or training services, call 650-341-8001 or e-mail him at [email protected].

Dedication

To the best father I’ve got. He used to tell me this when I was a kid, and I always reminded him that the competition was rather thin. But as I finish this book, he has just turned 80 years young and is still going strong — for which I am very grateful. So thank you, Cyril Brounstein, for still being the best father I’ve got as I dedicate this book to you.

Acknowledgments

While writing a book is a difficult task in the midst of running a business, to be able to write a book for a major publisher is a wonderful opportunity. I want to thank Kathy Welton and Holly McGuire of Hungry Minds for giving me another opportunity to write a book for you. You’ve been a pleasure to work with on this project. Thanks also goes out to Tere Drenth, whose upfront edits and project assistance made my job as an author so much easier, and thanks to Suzanne Snyder who handled the internal project workings at Hungry Minds. Thanks also to Neil Johnson and Pam Mourouzis for their copy editing skills. My appreciation also goes out to friend and colleague, Carl Welte, for serving as my technical support person on the book.

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

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Contents

Title

Introduction

About This Book

Conventions Used in This Book

How This Book Is Organized

Icons Used in This Book

Where to Go from Here

Part I : Communicating Successfully

Chapter 1: Working at Communicating and Communicating at Work

Sharing the Rope Versus Tugging on It

Hold the Pickles, Lettuce, and Assumptions

Chapter 2: Understanding How People Express Themselves to Others

Understanding the Four Approaches to Speaking

Contrasting the Four Approaches to Speaking

Becoming an Assertive Speaker

Chapter 3: Are You Really Listening?

Recognizing the Impact of Listening

Following the Three Stages of the Listening Process

Avoiding Ineffective Patterns for Listening

Seeing How People Listen

Batteries Required: Making Active Listening Work

Part II : Tuning In to the Power of Active Listening

Chapter 4: Fixing Your Radar on the Speaker

Capturing the Whole Message

Attending or Pretending to Listen?

Avoiding Barriers to Listening

Chapter 5: Putting Active Listening Tools to Work

Drawing Out the Speaker’s Message

Verifying Your Understanding of the Message

Watching Active Listening in Action

Chapter 6: Giving a Dose of Empathy a la Mode

Showing Empathy, Not Sympathy

Avoiding Verbal Barriers: Nonempathetic Modes of Listening

Seeing Empathy in Action

Discovering Seven Listening Tips

Part III : Speaking Assertively

Chapter 7: It Isn’t Just What You Say, but How You Say It

The Eyes Have It: Communicating with Eye Contact

Your Body Is Talking; Make Sure It’s Supporting Your Message

Putting the Oomph in Your Voice

Managing Your Pace

Chapter 8: Speaking in the Positive

Being Powerfully Positive: The Can-Do and Will-Do Uses of Language

Say What? Communicating Your Messages with Clarity

Employing the Language of Solutions

Staying Away from Speaking in the Negative

Chapter 9: Keeping Your Listener Engaged

Making Your Conversations Open-and-Shut Cases

Helping Your Listener Stay Involved

Developing a Plan for Sensitive Issues

Part IV : Win-Win Conflict Resolution

Chapter 10: Approaching Conflicts Constructively

Taking the High Road or the Low Road?

Get Mad? Get Even? Get Over It? Oh, So Many Choices

Using the Assertive — and Best — Approach

Becoming Assertive: A Guide for Those Who Aren’t

Chapter 11: Communicating to Keep Conflicts Cool

Getting Started on the Right Foot

Be First in Showing Understanding

Give Me a Description of the Suspect

I’ve Got a Thought and a Feeling to Share

Chapter 12: Bringing the Conflict to Resolution

Preparing for Solutions and Success

Using the Resolving-Concerns Conflict-Resolution Model

Understanding the Needs-Based Conflict-Resolution Model

Dealing with the Challenging Reactions

Part V : Tackling Communication Challenges

Chapter 13: You’ve Got Mail: Managing E-Mail Communications

To E-Mail or Not to E-Mail, That Is the Question

Staying on the Right Track When Writing E-Mail

Chapter 14: Oh, No! I Have to Do a Presentation!

Hitting the Essentials of Effective Presentations

Becoming Content with Your Content

Special Delivery: It’s a Presentation Given with Impact

For Best Supporting Actor, Your Supporting Materials

Live on Stage in Front of an Audience

Chapter 15: Hurdling Customer Challenges

You’re Selling, but Are They Buying?

Quality Customer Service Is Not an Oxymoron

Say, Mate, Your Customer Is Irate

Remember the Alamo and Your Internal Customers

Chapter 16: Interviewing from Both Sides of the Table

Knowing What You’re Looking For

Asking Your Questions

All Aboard: Conducting an Effective Interview

The Other Side of the Table: Preparing Yourself to Win the Job

Scoring a Big Hit in the Interview

Chapter 17: Conquering the Challenges of Management

Coaching Your Staff

Managing Upward

Managing Outward

Part VI : The Part of Tens

Chapter 18: Ten Ideas for Effectively Handling Telephone Interactions

Start with a Smile in Your Voice

Give a Professional Greeting

Direct People to the Right Resources

Put the Caller on Hold Smoothly

Sound Alive, Not Scripted

Converse with Patience

Tune In to Your Speaker’s Tone

If Your Time Is Short, Say So

Close the Call before You End It

Leave Messages Worth Returning

Chapter 19: Ten Tips to Enhance Teamwork

Make Newcomers Feel Welcome

Keep Information Flowing

Teach So that Others Can Learn

Offer Assistance

Ask for Help

Speak Up in Meetings

Talk in Terms of Outcomes

Give Feedback Supportively

Take Problems to the Right Source

Maintain a Sense of Humor

Chapter 20: Ten Actions that Lend Credibility to Your Communications

Following Through

Returning Phone Calls

Being Passionate

Demonstrating Expertise

Disagreeing without Being Disagreeable

Staying Calm under Pressure

Taking Positive Approaches to Problems

Listening First, Acting Second

Showing Sincerity

Being Straightforward

Introduction

If you’re like most people I meet, you find applying your knowledge and skills to the tasks of your job is pretty easy. The harder part of your job is interacting with people. Aside from working in a lighthouse, few jobs exist in which working with and getting along well with others is unimportant.

As you probably know, success in your work comes from more than just having expertise in your field or discipline. It also comes from being able to express that expertise so that others can understand it, from hearing what others need so you apply that expertise to serve them, and from working with others in ways that build, not damage, relationships — especially when you’re in a leadership role.

For many people, the biggest challenges they face in their jobs deal with communicating with others. From coworkers and direct reports to your boss and other members of management, from customers to vendors, you have to communicate with people to get your job done.

About This Book

I wrote this book to help you — someone who takes your job seriously, who wants to perform to your best, and who realizes that the greatest challenges at work usually come from dealing with others. The words in this book apply to you whether you’re an individual contributor or a top executive.

This book provides you with tips and tools to handle these communication challenges and achieve results such as the following:

Be heard in the way you want to be heard.

Solve problems and conflicts.

Understand what others really mean regardless of their communication styles.

Serve customers in ways that meet their needs.

Influence and build cooperation with others to get work done.

Present ideas that capture the attention of others.

Hire well and get hired.

Use e-mail effectively.

The book helps you discover the best ways to maximize your interactions with others — listening actively and expressing your messages to others assertively — even when resolving conflicts, dealing with customers, giving presentations, and so on.

Conventions Used in This Book

Throughout this book, you’ll see references to active listening and assertive speaking. People listen in a variety of ways, but active listening is the most effective. When you listen actively, you achieve an understanding of the speaker’s message as that person meant it. People also speak (express themselves to others) in many ways. Assertive speaking is the most effective way: You express your messages in a direct, positive, and confident way that maintains respect for those who hear them.

This book gives you tools to become an active listener and an assertive speaker. Tools is a term that participants in my seminars often use; it refers to techniques and skills that you can apply on the job right away.

How This Book Is Organized

This book first lays a conceptual framework to get you thinking about how you communicate. The rest of the book shows you how to communicate effectively at work in your person-to-person interactions. Here’s an overview of what you’ll find in each part of the book.

Part I: Communicating Successfully

In this part, you explore the four ways in which people express themselves and the four ways in which people commonly listen to others. You see the behaviors in each way of expressing yourself and listening, many of which come from old habits and are spurred by feelings of stress. I also introduce you to the most effective forms of each side of the interaction, assertive speaking and active listening.

Part II: Tuning In to the Power of Active Listening

In Part II, you find out all about active listening — how to do it and what it takes to make it work. You discover what to listen for when others speak to you and find out how to draw out their messages and understand them. In addition, I tell you about verbal and nonverbal behaviors to avoid when listening because they turn off the speaker and interfere with your effort to truly capture what the speaker means. Most important, you find out that active listening works best with empathy: the sincerity and understanding that make you genuine — someone worth talking to.

Part III: Speaking Assertively

In this part, you discover how to express your messages assertively and learn that how you say things often carries more weight than what you say. You find out all about the nonverbal tools of assertive speaking, gain tips and tools on improving the content of your messages, and discover how to use language in its most powerful and positive form to convey your messages. You also find new ways to organize your messages so that your listener understands them clearly and receives them positively.

Part IV: Win-Win Conflict Resolution

Conflicts — differences — are a part of every workplace, but handling them constructively is no small feat. This part gives you tools and problem-solving models that can help you deal effectively with any kind of conflict situation. You also uncover an assertive approach to working relationships, being consistently respectful, that builds relationships long before conflicts happen.

Part V: Tackling Communication Challenges

This part takes you through some of the most common challenges people face in their jobs and uses the tools of active listening and assertive speaking to deal effectively with them. It starts by exploring the technology of e-mail and its use in person-to-person communications — how best to use it and the pitfalls to avoid. You also find out how to organize and deliver formal presentations effectively, manage sales situations and service challenges, and deal with difficult customer situations. This part also shows you how to interview effectively, whether you’re interviewing prospective employees or trying to land a job yourself. Finally, I let you in on some communication tips that help you coach employees, run meetings, and manage upward and across your organization.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

This part gives you quick tips and ideas for specific communication situations. You find out how to handle telephone interactions effectively and how to enhance teamwork. You also get a summary of ten actions that make you more credible in your business communication.

Icons Used in This Book

Throughout this book you may notice small graphics in the margins, called icons, which are meant to grab your attention and support what you’re reading. Here are the icons you’ll see in this book:

This icon points to practical ideas and tips that enhance your interpersonal communications.

This symbol serves as a reminder about an idea or point that you’ll want to keep in mind.

The icon alerts you to behaviors you want to avoid — ones that will hinder your effectiveness in communicating with others on the job.

Where you see this icon, I provide either a more-detailed explanation of a communication skill or an anecdote that gives you a clearer picture of that skill and how to put it into practice.

This icon symbolizes a how-to skill that you’ll want to apply in your communication practices on the job.

Where to Go from Here

I wrote this book so that each chapter stands on its own, so if you want to skip around when you read, you can do so and not feel out of place. Sometimes, I refer to key skills or tools covered in other chapters, but you can easily turn to that chapter to find what you need. You may, however, want to start with Chapters 1, 2, and 3 because they give the conceptual foundation that the rest of the book builds upon.

Part I

Communicating Successfully

In this part . . .

People express themselves and listen to others in a variety of ways. In this part, you find out what these common ways are and what makes assertive speaking and active listening the most effective ways to communicate at work.

Chapter 1

Working at Communicating and Communicating at Work

In This Chapter

Recognizing the goal — and challenge — of effective communication

Exploring the impact of assumptions in interpersonal communications

Who needs to communicate effectively with others to be successful at work? In today’s often fast-paced and ever-changing world of work, the far more enlightened answer to this simple question is: “Who doesn’t?” Most must interact in the workplace with bosses and low-level employees, superiors and underlings, managers and the managed — co-workers in some way, shape, or form — to be successful at their jobs. That challenge begins here.

Fewer and fewer jobs today require employees to do tasks by themselves. Instead, many organizations, in the public as well as private sectors, stress that all have customers that they must serve. The two basic types are

External customers:These are people outside your organization who need the products and services that your business provides. In the broadest sense, external customers are people outside the workplace with whom you need to build good working relationships for success on the job. That includes a variety of folks ranging from suppliers to investors.

Internal customers: These are your fellow employees, inside and outside the department where you work, to whom you provide services or assistance.

In addition, the workplace is often structured so that employees do their jobs in cooperative, team-like situations for part or most of their workdays. And if you work in management, most of the demands placed on your job require being able to effectively interact with others — staff, peers, and bosses.

In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any job function or field of employment where communicating effectively with people isn’t vital. Regardless of your job title or the type of organization or industry you work for, if you’re like most people, the greatest challenges you face lean less toward the technical side of your job (your area of expertise) than they do toward interacting with other people.

Sharing the Rope Versus Tugging on It

Ever play tug-of-war? The two teams on opposing ends of a rope try to pull each other across a dividing center line — sometimes across and into a hole filled with water and mud. It’s a really dirty competition.

Interactions between people at work often are like tugs-of-war. The rope serves as a metaphor for the bond or connection between two people as they interact. The more it gets tugged between the two parties, the higher the tension, and the less productive the conversations. Alternatively, when neither party makes an effort to hold onto the rope, the bond is broken. In either case, you have varying degrees of a tug-of-war — the stresses and strains that block effective communications.

The goal of successful communications is sharing the rope so that it is strongly held but no one gets dirty — a big challenge but key to the success of communicating on the job.

Understanding where the tug-of-war comes from

As a human being, you communicate with other human beings through four means:

Listening

Speaking

Reading

Writing

While the advent of the computer and the Internet increased the use of the reading and writing as channels of communication, human beings generally spend more time in the live person-to-person forms of communication: listening and speaking. And remember, speaking includes both the verbal and nonverbal ways people express their messages to one another.

Although you’re taught the traditional Three Rs (Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic) from elementary school through high school, if you can read and write, you’re considered literate. On the other hand, you probably didn’t receive any formal instruction about how to listen effectively and express yourself constructively while interacting with others. Seldom are these interpersonal channels of communication a part of the curriculum in basic education. Yet listening and speaking are more critical for people to understand each other, work together, and solve problems with one another.

While you probably weren’t exactly schooled in how to listen, you’ve been told certain things about listening, such as, “Listen up,” “Be quiet,” or the ever-popular “Shut up (and listen).” Imagine if you were taught to read that way — “Here’s the book, read it!” You’d be illiterate.

Add elements like stress, tension, and challenge to your picture of the workplace — from encountering differences of opinion to facing demanding customers — and you see how easy it is to get caught up in that tug-of-war feeling. Because the skills needed to effectively handle stressful situations seldom are taught, you may have trouble sharing the rope. Instead, communication is more adversarial, ranging from waging verbal war against the other person to appeasing that person just to get past a difficult situation to using a subtle but negative get-even approach. Adversarial ways of communicating, represented by the tug-of-war, block people from working out their differences and interacting respectfully.

Achieving the goal in communicating: Mutual understanding

Interpersonal communications involves senders and receivers. A sender is the speaker, expressing his or her message to other parties. A receiver, on the other hand, is a person who listens to one or more speakers. In a good conversation, participants take turns being senders and receivers. When participants in a conversation try to be senders at the same time, the tug-of-war rope stretches taut. Or if one participant is a receiver but tunes out the sender, shows little interest in the conversation, or passes judgment on nearly every point that the sender makes, the tension mounts as the tug-of-war goes on.

The goal of the communication process is mutual understanding — sharing the rope together and maintaining its strength. When this goal is achieved, participants hear each other out and understand where everyone is coming from. They don’t battle as adversaries or competitors. Instead, they communicate in a collaborative fashion — a conversation characterized by respect and sincerity. They may have their differences, but differences aren’t an excuse to have a tug-of-war; rather, differences are issues to work through to reach the desired outcome.

Achieving mutual understanding is no small feat because most people aren’t taught how to communicate as senders and receivers. As a result, when they express messages (that is, when they speak), they use four common approaches that are primarily based on old habits (discussed in further detail in Chapter 2). Those four approaches include

Aggressive speaking

Nonassertive speaking

Passive-aggressive speaking

Assertive speaking

People commonly engage in four similar ways of receiving (that is, listening) messages (see Chapter 3 for further details), including the following:

Passive listening

Selective listening

Attentive listening

Active listening

Of these common approaches to speaking and listening, the more effective forms of communication — the ways that help you achieve the goal of mutual understanding — are:

Assertive speaking, or the act of expressing yourself directly, positively, and with confidence, so that your point comes across clearly and so that you maintain respect toward others.

Active listening, or the act of providing nonverbal and verbal feedback to a speaker that allows his or her message to be expressed and shows understanding of that message.

To communicate successfully, you must be able to combine active listening and assertive speaking.

Keep in mind that active listening and assertive speaking don’t provide you with special formulas to get people to do what you want. If that is your only intent, you’ll come across as a manipulator.

Hold the Pickles, Lettuce, and Assumptions

To listen actively and speak assertively, you must first become aware of and perhaps even change the pattern of your assumptions when interacting with others. That is no easy feat.

Understanding assumptions and how they can help

An assumption is a belief that something is true without proof or demonstration, or that a person is going to behave a certain way before that person has a chance to act. Assumptions are part of the human condition. You’ve probably been making them (and have had them made about you, too) all your life. But not all assumptions are negative:

Processing stimuli: Assumptions help you gather the information and stimuli to make sense of the world around you. When you’re driving, for example, assumptions help keep you alert and aware of what other drivers may do so that you stay safe.

Anticipating problem situations: Assumptions can help you prepare for problems and plan how to respond appropriately if difficult challenges arise.

Trying new things: Assumptions can help you make educated guesses about new people or situations. They can aid you in drawing upon past experiences and determining how to apply them in future situations — in essence, allowing you to take risks and do something new and different.

Avoiding the downside of assumptions

You’ve no doubt heard that old saying that goes something like this:

“When you assume, you make an A S S out of U and ME.”

Reporting the downside of assumptions

A reporter for a local newspaper wrote a story about an accident. A priest from the local parish was struck by a car and suffered a head injury while riding his bicycle. The reporter writing the story assumed that the good father was not wearing a helmet when the accident occurred.

The next day, the priest called the reporter to inform him of a major error in the story: The priest had, in fact, been wearing a helmet at the time of the accident and the assumption made him look irresponsible. By acting on his assumption without knowing all the facts first, the reporter was the biggest donkey of all.

When you assume, you make a donkey out of yourself, but you also affect others and make them look or feel pretty silly, too. Worst of all, by acting on your assumption, you’ve probably hurt someone else. In other words, using assumptions a lot, especially when dealing with other people, is a mistake.

The problem with assumptions is that they can lead to mistakes, misunderstandings, and strained relationships when they’re acted upon as absolute facts. The following is a list of common assumptions that people make:

Jumping to conclusions: In this scenario, you know what someone is going to say or whether something can work before you get the whole story. This assumption usually manifests itself in several annoying ways, including

• Finishing people’s sentences for them

• Interrupting before a message has been fully stated

• Tuning out as soon as a person whom you find unfavorable starts talking

• Dismissing a new idea before hearing the rationale for it

Although jumping to conclusions can be useful if you’re playing Name That Tune, it tends to have little benefit in work situations.

Focusing on intentions: People have intentions and they have actions, and you can only see the actions. Yet people often make assumptions on what they perceive are someone else’s intentions — and quite often assume the worst about those intentions. Focusing on intentions instead of actions sometimes causes you to interpret inconsequential actions (the little things) as destructive or of ill will. When you focus on someone’s intentions, you often approach people with undue suspicion.

Thinking you know best: When you think you know best, you’re already taking actions or making decisions for someone else without first checking with the person who is affected directly by what you do. These actions range from making commitments to initiating changes. Quite often, the person most affected doesn’t find out about these changes until after they’re made. Save such surprises for birthdays.

Stereotyping: The term stereotyping means assuming that anyone who is from a different group than you — whether in race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, occupation, or other grouping — behaves and thinks in the same way as the group. Engineers all do one thing, men are all like that, all women do that, and so on. Stereotypical remarks often offend others and do nothing more than show your ignorance and biases.

Becoming aware of your own assumptions

Although assumptions are a normal part of the human thought process, you need to become aware of your own assumptions to have effective interactions. Here are a few tips to help:

Deal with each person as an individual. One person doesn’t represent millions. Get to know each person you work with or each customer you serve as an individual. The more you understand others, the better you can communicate with them.

Listen first. Hear people out. Ask questions and check your understanding after you’ve heard the message so that you know what someone really means. When something sounds contrary to your thoughts, avoid reacting quickly with a negative comment or disagreement. Instead, ask the person the rationale or benefits of the idea or proposal at hand. Get the facts first.

Avoid generalizations. Generalizations about people often come off as stereotypical remarks. By taking a few experiences with a limited number of people and attempting to make those experiences sound like absolute facts, you ignore profound individual differences. Rather than talking in generalizations, tie the comments you make to your own experiences and do so only when it is relevant.

Communicate first; act second. Because so much of work requires cooperating and coordinating efforts with others, check with the people involved first, making sure that everyone is on the same page before you take action. No matter how well intentioned you are or how brilliant an idea you have, when you don’t consult important people first, they’re often upset, and as a result, may even reject a legitimate action or idea.

Make the safest assumption of them all. The safest assumption to make when working with others is to assume that the other person means well. Put all conspiracy theories aside. (What a relief!) This assumption allows you to see and deal with the actions and ideas of others at face value.

Chapter 2

Understanding How People Express Themselves to Others

In This Chapter

Outlining the four ways in which people express themselves to others

Understanding how to begin speaking assertively

The strain (or tug-of-war) that stems from the stressful and challenging situations you encounter often mars your interactions. What those stressful and challenging situations are, how often they occur, and with whom they occur vary greatly from individual to individual. One person’s stressful encounter can be a no-big-deal situation to someone else. For some people, the workday is filled with constant stress, while for others, the day is peaceful and friendly. Your approach to interacting with others greatly influences how stressful and challenging your work situations have been and will become.