A Woman in Your Own Right: The Art of Assertive, Clear and Honest Communication

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In the decades that followed political and cultural shifts in the UK encouraged a more individualistic focus. The core message of assertiveness was gradually weakened, with less emphasis on equality and more on believing you had the right to get what you want, whoever you had to override to get it! I continued to teach my model but with an awareness that it was increasingly countercultural. I had already been teaching assertive skills for a couple of years when I wrote my book A Woman In Your Own Right in 1982. I wanted the material to be accessible to women who couldn’t get to my classes, or to those of the women whom I taught to lead classes of their own. I must have bought at least 20 copies since, but I've given them all away during my practice as a volunteer in miscarriage support. Grief and bereavement can cause serious breakdown in clear conversation. Everybody thinks they know what you are going through and how you should act, but they don't as "they" are not you. Being able to tell your truth in a clear, consistent and honest way literally does save relationships at these overwhelming times and allows the right things to be said and understood and for grief to flow fluently. Honestly? In most situations I'm not really one of those people. I have my bad days like anyone else but mostly I do ok. So the book isn't really aimed at me. I read it knowing this and thinking it would help me to be more effective when communicating with people who might struggle with assertiveness. If nothing else, I thought it would be an interesting read to see that perspective. Then came the section on how to accept a compliment and that one was personally helpful. The section on how to ask your boss for a pay rise was fascinating. The section on loving your own body and accepting yourself was astonishingly uplifting.

I first read this book some 20 years ago. It quite literally changed my life. I learned how to say what I needed to say at the right time and in the right way. No more misunderstanding, ambiguity, manipulating, martyrdom from myself towards others or them towards me! Conflict isn’t welcomed by everyone, however, and many of us try our best to avoid it. Instead of speaking up, we keep quiet. We smile, pretend to agree, play along, or turn a deaf ear. Over time we allow ourselves to be reduced to being mere bystanders: both in our immediate environment and in the world at large. While younger women in the West today have more independence than their mothers and a wider range of options, sexist assumptions persist. Grosser forms of sexist behaviour are less visible, thanks to policy changes, but sexist attitudes have not disappeared. They simply operate at a different level and only come to light when events such as the outpouring of the #MeToo movement demonstrate that the equality enshrined in policy is not reflected in the lived experience of countless women.When we start learning assertive skills, we are usually unaware of our habitual style of communication. With practice we come to realise what is unhelpful and detracts from what we want to express. We learn to take responsibility for what we want and feel, instead of expecting others to be telepathic. We learn how to be unafraid of our anxiety and work through it to strengthen what we want to say.

I am a psychologist by profession and have for over three decades been working as a trainer and educator. To those who already know of my work through reading one of my books or attending a workshop or lecture, a warm welcome too. The conditioning of the past is still deeply embedded in women’s psyches, which means that simply having more equal opportunities doesn’t always translate into the ability to grasp them. We’ve made giant strides towards equality over the decades, but... this advice is even more pertinent today' LINDA KELSEY, DAILY MAIL There is no one-size-fits-all model of personal power, but each woman can find it within herself. Assertive personal power means saying ‘no’ clearly when that’s what you want to say; it means expressing your needs and challenging an unfair criticism; it means initiating a difficult conversation with someone you care about – and doing all of this without inadvertently eliciting aggression in response.Last year I was approached by a new publisher who proposed a 40th anniversary edition. This gave me an opportunity to update my book in some ways – there is a new section on assertiveness in social media, for example – but much of the material remains as relevant now as when it was first published.