A Woman in Your Own Right

by Anne Dickson

  In order to achieve a smooth verbal interaction and communicate effectively, you need to indicate that you have heard what the other person said but without getting ‘hooked’ by what they say. Practising this helps you to overcome your anxiety and defensiveness and to continue undeterred. The following examples show how this might be done.

  ‘It may not be usual for you to get complaints but this is not what I ordered and I want a replacement.’

  ‘I know there is a queue of people behind me but I still want an appointment to see Dr Hall this week.’

  ‘I can see you are feeling let down but I really don’t want to go out tonight.’

  ‘I appreciate you being a good friend to me in the past but I just can’t lend you any money right now.’

  ‘I know that you’re tired as well but I’d still like you to do your share of the work.’

  ‘I understand you’re disappointed but I still have to say “no”.’

  In each example, the speaker maintains her statement. She acknowledges the response of the other person without allowing it to deflect her from her main statement.

  It is extraordinary that these techniques appear so simple. Yet anyone who practises them, using role-play, will probably discover how difficult it can be to stick to the point, how easy it is to be side-tracked and how essential it is to decide what you want to say before you begin. An approximation will not do: you need a specific starting point if you want to communicate assertively. Once you become familiar with these basic assertiveness training skills, you will see how often you can apply them anytime you wish to assert yourself more effectively.

  Following on

  1. If you have made the list of situations as suggested in Chapter 4 you will already have a good idea of where to begin. Look towards the top of your list. Using the skills outlined above you can decide what it is you want to say/ ask and then try it out in role-play. Sticking to your statement will probably be more difficult that you think but keep going until you feel the conviction of what you are saying. Practise fielding the response from the other person without getting side-tracked.

  2. You can practise the techniques using the following examples:

  a) You have bought a drill and when you get home you find it doesn’t work. Set up the role-play with someone to take the part of the shop assistant who implies you don’t know how to use the drill because you’re a woman and use the techniques to ask for a replacement.

  b) You want to ask a friend if you can have the book back that you lent them two months ago. The friend has not finished it but you are about to go away and want to take the book with you to read.

  c) You are in a department store and the assistants behind the counter are chatting, apparently oblivious of your presence. Ask for some attention.

  d) You see some appealing apples on display on a stall in the market. You ask for a pound of them but the stall-holder goes to another box of apples which you suspect are not as good as the others. Your task is to ask for some of the apples on display.

  e) You want to make an appointment to see a busy supervisor at work. Your task is to use the skills to approach him or her in the office or in the corridor and reach an agreement on a specific time.

  f) You are sitting on the bus and someone comes to sit next to you: in fact it feels as if they are sitting on top of you! Practise asking them to move over so you have enough room for yourself.

  Use these ideas and adapt them to suit you.

  6

  Rights and Responsibilities

  At this point it is important to consider some basic human rights applicable to all of us, women and men, adults and children. These rights are not new or startling or revolutionary. In fact they may strike some readers as quite ordinary at first but many women have been helped to make a start in changing their behaviour by reviewing these rights. They have also found it useful to remind themselves of these rights at moments when they felt assailed by doubts and conflict over the rights and wrongs of assertive behaviour.

  The need for this chapter may seem an anomaly in 2012 when it is generally acknowledged that one of the trends in the last thirty years has been to emphasise the rights of the individual while neglecting any of the responsibilities that accompany those rights. This is further evidence of the swing towards individualism and aggression rather than a balance between one person’s feelings, needs and limits and those of another.

  I decided to retain this chapter, despite the changing context, because I want to reaffirm the need for this balance. In addition, experience has taught me that, simple though they sound, these rights are relevant at a much deeper level than those of being a customer or a consumer: they are not enshrined in our laws but are instead to be considered more as psychological or emotional rights and this is why it is only after repeated affirmation that we cannot only believe them but act on them with conviction. Paradoxically, in this aggressive rights-obsessed culture, many people find it difficult to grasp the following more meaningful rights and, as a result, fail to assert themselves on many occasions.

  Eleven rights are set out below, with a brief explanation of each one. Keep them in mind as a reference during the following chapters.

  1. I have the right to state my own needs and set my own priorities as a person independent of any roles that I may assume in my life.

  This is fundamental and particularly so for women, whose roles in life often swamp their own personalities. Being a daughter, wife or mother all entail responsibilities and obligations attached to these as well as professional roles which can obstruct the view of what a woman may want for herself.

  I remember Carol’s sense of triumph when she made a decision to go on holiday alone. Her husband wanted her to go bird-watching with him and Carol felt obliged because she had previously spent two holidays with her mother. Her mother wanted her back and Carol felt torn because she was the only daughter. The conflict between these two roles had lasted several months while Carol fretted and postponed making a decision. When the emphasis was placed on what she wanted to do, she suddenly saw quite clearly that she really wanted to go away on her own. When she made this announcement assertively to both her husband and her mother, to her amazement, they both accepted her decision quite easily.

  This right does not imply you no longer have to honour the responsibilities within the roles you assume. It simply helps you to be aware that your own needs exist as well as the needs of those for whom you care.

  Julie, a hard-working health visitor, had great difficulty in setting aside personal time and felt that her patients should always have priority. So she always made herself available and fulfilled her role admirably except that her own needs were submerged and went unrecognised. They did not disappear though: her unspoken needs emerged in her perpetual tiredness and tension and when she recognised this, she was able to achieve some kind of balance.

  2. I have the right to be treated with respect as an intelligent, capable and equal human being.

  On a good day, this is an easy right to accept but one of the difficulties is that we often do not treat ourselves with respect. We do not give ourselves equal credit for intelligence or ability. Intelligence is a quality that many women have consciously played down in order to retain a suitably feminine image. Others who feel comfortable in asserting their intelligence can lose sight of it when faced with a situation in which they feel disadvantaged by lack of technical expertise. After paying a lot for a service on your car, for instance, you find that your brakes do not work any more effectively than they did before. You confront the garage manager who rattles off all sorts of explanations that you suspect are flannel. It is easy to feel confused in this sort of confrontation and it is important to hold on to the fact that you know that your brakes are not working, rather than being pushed against the wall by the force of an argument which has you doubting your own intelligence and common sense.

  3. I have the right to express my feelings.

  One of the most important lesso
ns is to recognise what you are feeling at the time. Often we agonise over an event hours, days or even months after it happens before we finally register what it was we felt. It is important to identify and to accept that you feel and permit yourself some verbal expression. (As we will discuss later, in Chapter 11, there is a difference between expressing of what you feel and acting on it). This right has three aspects: recognising and identifying your feelings, accepting rather than denying them and taking responsibility for expressing them appropriately.

  4. I have the right to express my opinions and values.

  This includes the right to stand up for your opinions if you choose. This is not to say that you should be bullied into justifying a particular viewpoint if you do not want to, but it means that you have the right to your own opinions even if they stand in disagreement with those of the majority. It is not a question of right or wrong but of differences in perception.

  Sometimes we lose sight of our right to assert our own values. Michelle, for example, loved collecting pieces of old china but she agonised over what to say to a friend who treated these objects around her home with a careless disregard for their fragility and value, even on one occasion damaging one of them. When I asked her why she did not confront him, she replied that she felt she had no right: ‘It shouldn’t matter to me,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t mind about things that much.’ She felt that her friend’s more casual attitude should be just as acceptable as her own and didn’t want to appear too petty. She therefore denied her own values but inside she continued to carry a grudge. It took a long time for her to acknowledge openly that she did feel irritated. Eventually she was able to give herself permission to follow through with those feelings, to consider that her own values were different but equally important to those of her friend. She was then able to take responsibility for herself and ask him assertively to treat her objects with the care that she felt appropriate.

  5. I have the right to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for myself.

  This sounds simple but is very much connected with the first right about roles and responsibilities. Making a choice for yourself because you want or do not want something becomes more difficult when you have other roles to fulfil.

  Deidre’s partner, Mike, had two daughters by a previous marriage and one of them was getting married. Bowing to the resentment of Mike’s ex-wife, his daughter had arranged for Deidre not to sit at the top wedding table but had allocated her a place at a table much further away where she would be surrounded by people she didn’t know. This was a real dilemma: she and Mike had been together for five years and they were happy but she did not feel at all comfortable with the proposed arrangement. She talked it through with Mike, who felt divided of course but, in the end, he respected and accepted her choice not to go the wedding because she was clear she really did not want to go where she was obviously not welcome.

  6. I have the right to make mistakes.

  Many of us find it extraordinarily difficult to accept this right. If someone points out a mistake or criticises an action, we often feel a level of embarrassment and confusion out of all proportion to the seriousness of the actual error. Whether it is the experience of being punished as children for mistakes or the whole educational construct – of right and wrong, good marks and bad marks – I am not sure, but many of us believe that making a mistake is unacceptable and that it shows we’re stupid.

  You can learn to shrug your shoulders and accept you mistakes without disappearing into a pit of self-reproach or defensively denying your error. It is important to see that you can do something wrong – behave foolishly, make an unwise bad move, misread a situation, answer incorrectly – without it indicating some chronic personal inadequacy. This right can permit us to acknowledge the mistaken piece of behaviour without losing touch with that central core of self-belief.

  You may believe you already have this right but check what happens to your convictions when someone has criticised a mistake in your work? Or when your ‘brainwave’ turns out to be not so brilliant? Or somebody points out that your argument is full of holes? Or the new hair colour you thought would be perfect really doesn’t suit you?

  A lot of us set store by competence and achievement and in a competitive society it is difficult to create options other than ‘I’m right’ and ‘you’re wrong’ or vice versa. In the Introduction, one of the changes I described since the first edition of this book is the increased acceptability of aggression in many contexts. One facet of this trend is defensiveness about mistakes. This is partly due to what is called the culture of litigation which increases fears about the repercussions of being sued and propels individuals and institutions into a kneejerk denial of responsibility for professional wrongdoing, through fear of incurring financial or criminal penalties. What concerns us here is that, even on a personal level, mistakes have become less acceptable as a means to on-going learning and more often equated with being the ‘loser’.

  This helps to explain why an assertive acknowledgment of a mistake by any individual and a willingness to assume responsibility for it is a very rare spectacle in either a private or public context.

  7. I have the right to change my mind.

  This right can be invaluable during the early stages of learning to make assertive choices, that is, choices which reflect what you really want rather than what you feel is expected of you or what you think would please the other person. As you look more carefully at the process of decision-making you will develop an awareness of how you make many decisions for the wrong reasons. A wrong decision brings regret. You then have to try to back out in some way. There is usually a period of practice needed before being clear enough to make the right decision at the start and so, at least while you are learning, it is helpful to remind yourself that you can change your mind rather than proceed with a commitment you are unhappy about. This right incorporates the responsibility to communicate your change of mind clearly and assertively giving the other person due notice rather than avoiding them and going into hiding.

  8. I have the right to say I don’t understand.

  Have you ever found yourself in a group of people, with everyone listening in rapt attention to the speaker while you sat confused and uncomfortable because you felt unable to speak up and admit you didn’t understand and ask for further explanation? If so, then you will recognise the importance of this right. As with the right to make mistakes, we feel an undue amount of discomfort as adults in acknowledging lack of comprehension and ignorance. We can hardly expect to know everything about everything any more than we can expect to be perfect. But to say ‘I don’t understand’ or ‘Could you explain that again?’ remains difficult for many of us to say without framing it as an apology for one’s own limitations.

  It is so simple to ask but we hold back time and time again. With this right in mind you can learn to acknowledge confusion or non-comprehension without putting yourself down for being stupid and also to ask for more information or a clearer explanation without feeling ridiculous. It should be added that when you do so, you’ll probably find you are not alone!

  9. I have the right to ask for what I want.

  Again this sounds quite straightforward. No one would argue with you. Until, that is, it conflicts with someone else’s wishes or expectations so asking for what you want means displeasing them in some way. Whether the conflict is imaginary or real, the fear of displeasing another person can exert a lot of psychological pressure to ignore this particular right which means that a direct request is something that many women avoid. They feel they risk refusal with a direct approach so subtle hints and suggestions are much safer. It is easier to sigh with tiredness and complain of a backache than to ask someone directly to empty the washing machine or move a heavy table.

  Many women will go along with what someone else wants for the sake of peace and quiet. I remember a good example of this. At the table next to mine in a restaurant sat a man, his wife, his mother and their teenage daughter. The proximity of our ta
bles and my insatiable fascination with other people’s conversations allowed me to overhear the following dialogue.

  Husband: (as they all sit perusing the menu) Now, Mum, what would you like?

  Mother: I think I’ll have the Chicken Madras

  Husband: (in disbelief) Chicken Madras? Have you ever tasted a Madras? It will be far too hot for you!

  Mother: (a little hesitantly) But I like it hot.

  Husband: Maybe, but you don’t really know what you are talking about. A Madras is the hottest curry you can get.

  Mother: But I like it hot.

  Wife: It really is very hot, you know, are you sure?

  Grandchild: It really is hot, Gran.

  Grandmother: Well . . .

  Husband: Look, Mum, if you insist then I will order you a Madras, but don’t blame me when you can’t eat it. (Waiter arrives to take the order.)

  Husband: Well, Mum, you’ve decided on the Madras curry then have you?

  Mother: Emm, I think I’ll have a Chicken Korma. Is that a mild one?

  The rest of the family sat back in satisfaction, convinced that she had made the right choice. Maybe the Madras would have been too hot but I’ll never know: what mattered to me was the way she gave in. It is sometimes easy to spend your life going along with what others want and what other people expect you to want. Too often we settle for something that is not quite right because we don’t feel we have the right to persist.

  10. I have the right to decline responsibility for other people’s problems.

  If there’s one right that has been most obviously affected by three decades of social change, I suspect it’s this one. One can almost discern a generational gap in this regard between women now in their fifties and sixties and those in their thirties and twenties. Younger women today would appear to be less conflicted about the concerns of others than their mothers were and many are also more comfortable with asserting their own personal needs on a par with anyone else’s.