Assertiveness: how to say what you want without aggression or apology

“Sorry, I don’t know if this even matters, but … maybe, if it’s not too much trouble, you could tidy up after yourself now and then? It’s no big deal.”

That is a sentence someone rehearsed for three days. And when it was finally said, it sounded as though the speaker was apologising for existing. The partner nodded, said “yes, of course”, and the following week everything was as before. A month later the same person slammed the kitchen door and shouted: “Am I your maid?!” This time the partner heard her — but what he heard was mostly the shouting, not the request.

A lot of people live between these two extremes — apologising and exploding. Not because they don’t know what they want, but because it seems there are only two options: swallow it or blow up. There is a third. We call it assertiveness, and this post is about how to learn it.

What assertiveness is — and what it isn’t

Assertiveness is the ability to say clearly and respectfully what you think, feel, want or don’t want — without trampling on the other person and without trampling on yourself. There is a short definition in the knowledge base under assertiveness; here I would like to go deeper.

It matters what assertiveness is not. It is not loudness, it is not pushiness, and it is not “saying whatever comes into your head”. Many people who think of themselves as direct are, in truth, mostly inconsiderate. And many quiet people are very assertive: they say little, but they say it clearly. I wrote more about this in Confidence isn’t volume: what trusting yourself really means.

The concept entered psychology in the 1950s. The psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe noticed that people who could not stand up for themselves in relationships often suffered from anxiety — and that the anxiety eased once they learned to express what they felt. In the 1970s Robert Alberti and Michael Emmons wrote a book called Your Perfect Right, which brought assertiveness to a wider public. Their central idea is simple: you have a right to your wishes, and others have a right to theirs. Assertiveness is a way of holding both rights at once.

Why it feels as if you are too much

People who find it hard to stand up for themselves often say the same thing: “I’m afraid I’ll come across as rude.” Interestingly, research suggests this fear is mostly misplaced. The psychologists Daniel Ames and Abbie Wazlawek studied how people judge their own assertiveness in negotiations. They found a phenomenon they called the line-crossing illusion: in more than half of cases, people who were convinced they had been too demanding came across to their counterparts as appropriately assertive — or even not assertive enough.

In other words: when you feel you have overdone it, it is quite likely that you have only just reached the middle. The inner alarm that tells you “now you’ve gone too far” is set far too low in many people. And anyone who follows it starts retreating before the other person has even noticed that anything was said.

Where does such a sensitive alarm come from? Often from the family. If expressing wishes in your family was punished, mocked or simply ignored, you learned that it was safer not to ask. If one of your parents was unpredictable, you learned to read their mood and adapt before they had said a word. This is not a flaw of character. It is a survival strategy that once made sense and now costs you. You can read more about this pattern under people-pleasing.

Four ways of saying what we want

When people express their needs, they usually move between four styles. They are not best understood as types of people — most of us use all four, depending on who we are with and how much is at stake.

The passive style means setting your wishes aside so as not to bother anyone. “Whatever you like.” “It doesn’t matter.” In the short term it brings peace; in the long term it brings resentment, tiredness and the feeling that nobody really sees you. Passive people are often well liked — but they feel lonely in their relationships, because others don’t know who they are.

The aggressive style means getting your way at the other person’s expense: by shouting, insulting, threatening, using sarcasm or pressure. It is often not a constant style but an outburst that follows a long period of patience. That is exactly why people experience it as unfair — the other person had no idea that anything was building up.

The passive-aggressive style is anger that is not allowed to be spoken, so it finds another route: being late, “forgetting”, silence, digs, excessive politeness with a chill underneath. It is the hardest to talk about, because every attempt to name it is met with “but I didn’t say anything”.

The assertive style means saying what matters to you while staying open to what matters to the other person. It doesn’t guarantee that you will get what you want. But it does guarantee that the other person will know what you want — and that is the precondition for any serious agreement.

I-messages: the basic form

The best-known tool of assertiveness is the I-message. It was devised by the psychologist Thomas Gordon in the 1960s, originally for parents who wanted to talk with their children without threats or moralising. Later it became the foundation of almost every communication skills programme.

The idea is simple. Instead of talking about the other person (“You never listen”), you talk about yourself (“When you look at your phone while we’re talking, I feel unimportant. I’d like us to talk when you can be fully here.”). The first sentence is an accusation, to which the other person almost inevitably responds by defending themselves. The second is information they can take in.

A few things people often overlook with I-messages:

• “I feel that you’re selfish” is not an I-message. It is an accusation dressed up as a feeling. A feeling is one word: angry, sad, frightened, hurt, ashamed.
• The fact should be what a camera would record. “Yesterday you came at nine; we’d agreed on seven” is a fact. “Once again you don’t care about me” is an interpretation.
• The request must be doable. “Be more attentive” is not a request anyone could fulfil. “When you get home, ask me how my day at work was” is.
• A request is not an order. If the other person isn’t allowed to say no, it isn’t a request. Assertiveness also includes hearing a refusal and talking about it.

The broken record and other techniques

In the 1970s the psychologist Manuel J. Smith wrote a book called When I Say No, I Feel Guilty, in which he described several techniques for moments when someone is pressuring you. The best known is the broken record.

The idea is to repeat the same message calmly, without adding new justifications. You don’t raise your voice and you don’t get drawn into a debate about whether you are right. You simply repeat. The technique is useful above all where someone is trying to win you over with sheer quantity of arguments — a salesperson, a colleague offloading work, a relative who won’t accept no. Every new reason you give is a new point to negotiate over. A short answer that is repeated offers nothing to grab hold of.

This is how it might sound (a composite, not a real person):

“Could you take the on-call shift this weekend? You know I’ve got nobody else.”
“I understand you’re in a bind. I can’t this weekend.”
“Just Saturday. You’ve got nothing special on, have you?”
“I can’t this weekend.”
“It would really help me. Last time I did it for you …”
“I’m grateful to you for that time. I can’t this weekend. Next week I can see whether Friday might work.”

The broken record isn’t meant for every conversation with your partner or child — there it would come across as cold. It is a tool for pressure, not for closeness. Smith described two related techniques that are also useful in warmer relationships:

• Fogging: when criticised, you acknowledge what is true without accepting the whole accusation. “It’s true, I forgot to call. I understand that made you angry.” You neither defend yourself nor put yourself down.
• Workable compromise: when the other side has a reasonable point, you offer something that doesn’t cross your line. “I can’t do the whole weekend, but I can do Friday afternoon.”

Assertiveness is not the same as setting boundaries

People often mix up these two ideas, so I would like to separate them. I wrote about boundaries in detail in Setting boundaries: why it feels selfish even though healthy relationships depend on it, and there is also an entry in the knowledge base under boundaries.

A boundary is a decision about what you will accept and what you won’t — and what you will do if it is crossed. Assertiveness is broader: it is a way of communicating that you need even when no boundary is involved. When you want to say that something made you happy. When you ask for a pay rise. When you tell a friend you’d rather go to the cinema than to a concert. When you voice a different opinion in a meeting. Every boundary needs assertiveness, but not all assertiveness is a boundary.

The distinction also matters because people who have heard about boundaries sometimes learn mainly to say “no”. Assertiveness also includes “yes, please” and “I would like”. For many people that is harder than refusing — because a wish shows what we care about, and with it, where we are vulnerable.

What lies beneath the apologising

If you listen to your own requests, you may notice small words that soften them to the point of being unrecognisable: “just”, “maybe”, “if it’s not a problem”, “sorry to bother you”. In themselves there is nothing wrong with them — politeness is not a weakness. They become a problem when there are so many that the request disappears among them.

Underneath excessive apologising there is often shame: the feeling that having needs means being a burden. Knowing the techniques doesn’t make that feeling go away. You can know I-messages by heart and still not say them, because at the very moment you would, an old voice pipes up: “Who do you think you are?” I explained the difference between guilt and shame in Guilt and shame are not the same — and the difference matters; for assertiveness it is crucial, because guilt says “I did something wrong”, while shame says “I am wrong for wanting something”.

Underneath aggressive outbursts there is often the same thing, just with the opposite sign. Someone who stays silent for a long time because they feel they have no right to speak only speaks up when the anger is so big that it carries them along. Anger is not the enemy of assertiveness; it is an often overlooked source of it: it tells you that something matters to you. If you hear it early, while it is still small, you can say what you need calmly. If you ignore it, it will speak for you. There is more on this in Anger is not the problem: how it turns from helplessness into energy for change.

The view from relational family therapy

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we see difficulties with assertiveness as something that arose in a relationship and also repeats itself in relationships. It is not just that someone “doesn’t know how” to say what they want. It is that their body still expects the response they used to get — rejection, mockery, silence or an outburst.

And so something interesting happens: people often choose a partner or a job where this old response really does repeat itself. Not on purpose. But because it is familiar. Someone who learned as a child that their needs did not matter may find themselves beside a partner who genuinely overlooks them — and so receive confirmation of the old belief. When, in such a relationship, they say clearly and calmly what they want for the first time, they are not only changing a conversation. They are changing a pattern that is decades old.

This is also why assertiveness is not just a skill you learn on a course. It is an experience you need to have many times: that you say what you want and the world doesn’t fall apart. Small actions that build confidence help here — every such moment is evidence that thinking alone cannot provide.

Exercise: your first I-message

For this exercise you need paper, a pen and fifteen minutes. Choose a low-stakes situation — not the biggest conflict in your life, but something that has been quietly bothering you for a while.

1. Write down the situation as a camera would see it. No adjectives and no “always”. “For the last three weeks I’ve been the one to take out the rubbish every time.”
2. Name the feeling in one word. If you write “that he doesn’t respect me”, you have written an interpretation. Ask yourself: how does this make me feel? Angry, sad, tired?
3. Write down what matters to you. Fairness? Being noticed? Having more time for yourself?
4. Form one concrete request. One where the other person would know exactly what to do. Then read it aloud and listen for “just”, “maybe” or “sorry”. Cross them out.
5. Say it within the next two days — and write down what happened. Not only what the other person said, but also how you felt before you spoke, and afterwards.

It doesn’t have to go smoothly. What matters is that you find out what happens when you speak. For many people it is less dramatic than they expected — which fits the findings on the line-crossing illusion.

If you are afraid the conversation will turn into an argument, it helps to know that recurring arguments are rarely about what they seem to be about. I wrote about this in It is not about the dishes: what really lies underneath recurring arguments. A clear I-message is often the first step in moving a conversation from the surface to what lies beneath it.

Where assertiveness is not enough

I want to be honest here, because assertiveness is sometimes sold as the answer to everything.

Assertiveness does not replace safety. In a relationship where there is violence — physical, psychological or financial — clearly expressing your needs is not protection and can even increase the danger. If you are afraid of your partner’s reaction because they have been violent in the past, the problem is not your communication. Then the first step is safety: in Slovenia, the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence is 080 11 55, and in an emergency the police are on 113.

Assertiveness does not guarantee an outcome. You can say everything perfectly and the other person may still say no. Assertiveness is not manipulation designed to get someone to do what you want. It is a way of staying true to yourself and clear with the other person — what they do with that is their decision.

There is no single right amount. Research by Ames and Flynn showed that the relationship between assertiveness and leadership effectiveness is curved: leaders who were not assertive enough did not reach their goals, while those who were too assertive lost relationships. The right amount also depends on culture, position and the relationship. The same sentence can sound very different in a conversation with your manager and with a friend.

Sometimes silence is the wise choice. Assertiveness doesn’t mean you have to say everything. Sometimes the decision not to raise something, because it isn’t worth the energy, is entirely mature. The difference lies in whether you chose the silence or were pushed into it.

And if you notice that the same pattern keeps repeating in every relationship — that you retreat until you explode — it may be a sign that something deeper than a missing skill is at work. Then therapy is a place where you can explore where the pattern comes from and try something different within a safe relationship.

What to remember

• Assertiveness means saying clearly and respectfully what you want — without trampling on the other person or on yourself.
• Most of us swing between the passive, aggressive and passive-aggressive styles; an outburst often follows a long silence.
• When you feel you were too forceful, you usually came across to others as just right.
• An I-message has four parts: fact, feeling, need and a concrete request.
• Assertiveness doesn’t guarantee an outcome and doesn’t replace safety — but it is the precondition for any serious agreement.