Brilliant Confidence

108 brilliant confidence

So, ask yourself if any of the following words describe the way

you behave or treat people:

quite right with her approach and manner but she hadn’t been able to

put her finger on it. It wasn’t until her boss explained it that she realised.

Pauline thought she was being ‘confident’, not aggressive. She thought that

it was part of a teacher’s job to behave like that.

We talked about this during the confidence-building course she attended.

It soon became clear to her that her behaviour was weighing down the

aggressive side of the seesaw; the passive side was way out of reach and

almost in the clouds. She was strong at putting her point of view across

but couldn’t see that others were feeling threatened by her behaviour. The

pupils were scared to ask questions and her colleagues felt uncomfortable

working with her.

She started to see that she was shutting out other people’s views and

needs. She had genuinely thought she was an assertive person when, in

fact, she was aggressive. She left the course with the aim of developing her

passive side and her listening skills.

Pauline found the ‘Turning the clock back’ exercise (Chapter 1) very useful.

She recalled a number of experiences she had had. These experiences had

led her to feel insecure and uncertain of herself. Her aggressive behaviour

was actually a ‘smoke screen’ that she deployed to hide these hidden

vulnerabilities. She’d become very adept at this, so good in fact that no one

had any idea she was acting. So, aggression wasn’t her natural behaviour

at all; when she relaxed and we got to know her better, we started to see

her passive side coming out.

Understanding the need to find the middle ground to achieve true

assertiveness was a major step forward for Pauline. Whereas before she’d

felt that revealing her passive side would make her more vulnerable, during

the course she started to see that showing your passive side is a critical

part of feeling and being confident.

Truly assertive communication 109

Humiliate, dominate, criticise, blame, threaten, interrupt,

order, shout, bully . . .

These are aggressive, not assertive behaviours. Don’t be mis-

taken by thinking they are confident behaviours – they might

seem confident in the simplest of physical senses but actually

they’ll work against you and hinder your self-belief and self-

confidence eventually. You can’t get away with behaving in this

way for ever. People just won’t accept it.

Passive-aggressiveness

Passive-aggressive people get their way by subtle, underhand

means.

This is a style of aggressiveness that a very small minority of

people demonstrate. As the name suggests, passive-aggressive

behaviour is a style that mixes passiveness with aggressiveness.

People appear passive on the surface but have an aggressive

streak in their character. This aggressiveness isn’t seen physi-

cally in the person’s behaviour; they will strive to get what they

want through subtle, indirect and hidden means. They will smile

and look cooperative, but behind this veil they’ll be plotting and

scheming to get their way.

This behaviour goes completely against the concept of assertive-

ness because it is not open. Assertive people create a two-way

dialogue which takes both people’s viewpoints, feelings and

needs into consideration. People who act in a passive-aggressive

way tend to behave as they do because they feel incapable of

dealing directly with people.

Passive-aggressive people will use facial expressions that don’t

match how they feel, they’ll smile when they are angry, they

are often sarcastic and they’ll deny there’s a problem when they

know there is one.