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Assertive Communication: A Key to Honesty
As a human being, communication is part of our life to interact with other human beings. The reason why we take this topic in this webinar is because Act Global is focusing on the youth sector, we realize that it is important to share the knowledge of communication with the youth because they are biologically their emotions are not stable.
On 23th of July 2022, we held our Assertive Communication webinar with Ayu Paramita Antari, M.Psi.Psikolog as the speaker. And as we expected that this topic is very relevant with the youth, we had many participants in this webinar, around 40 participants. From this we can see that the youth interest in this topic is quite high. Because honestly from my personal experience, I find it quite hard to communicate, not because I don’t know how to talk or have nothing to say, but because I don’t know how to do it in a correct way because we need to adjust the way we communicate with different people. I think my peers also feel the same.
Before we went deep into assertive communication in the webinar, Ayu gave us the list of communication types and what the differences are. The 3 communication types are: Aggressive, Passive, and Assertive.
The most common communications style that we know are aggressive and passive:
Aggressive
Aggressive communication is a communication style by expressing our feelings or opinions strongly as they occur.
These are some examples of aggressive communication:
“I don’t care what you have to say”
“Do what I asked you to do”
“This is all your fault”
The traits of an aggressive communicator are dominating and this shows up in behavior like being bossy and sarcastic.
Passive
Passive communication is a communication style in which the individual tends to avoid expressing their feelings or opinions. The characteristics of a passive communicator are self deprecating, being apologetic, and indecisive.
And in this webinar, we were focusing on Assertive communication as this is the most ideal way to communicate. So what makes assertive communication so different?
Understanding assertive communication can help you to handle difficult relationships like with family, coworkers, and friends easier. What exactly is assertive communication? Assertive communication is the ability to express positive or negative things or ideas in an honest and open way while still respecting others rights. And it also allows us to take responsibility for our actions.
Communicating in assertive manner can help us to:
-Have our needs better met
-Avoid conflict
-Control anger
-Have more positive relationships with family, friends and others.
-Assertive communication is focusing on the met of our needs instead of pointing which one is right or wrong.
How to communicate in an assertive way?
– Know what is our needs in the communication
-Be sure about what we need and observe other people’s behavior
-Be clear about our feeling
-Make request either to yourself or others
Ayu, our speaker also gave the participants a little nice exercise with the given case, so the participants can imagine and put themselves in a particular situation and decide what they need to do if they were there.
“Being assertive doesn’t mean attacking or ignoring others feelings. It means that you are willing to hold up for yourself fairly-without attacking others.”
-Albert Ellis
Written by: Nevy Pangestika
