How do you feel about your interactions with your family and friends? With your colleagues and managers at work? Are they quite balanced or mostly one-sided? Do you often feel being taken advantage of or struggle to ask for what you want? Can you express what you want confidently and respectfully? Do you let others express their desires and preferences?

You have a choice as to how you approach your interactions with others. You can be aggressive, passive, passive aggressive, or assertive. Being assertive means being able to stand up for what you believe is right, ask for what you want, and say no to what you don’t want in a way that’s confident, calm, and respectful.

In a broader sense, being assertive in your interactions is all about being effective in pursuit of your goals. How you engage in conversations with others often determines the effectiveness of your interactions. In this course, we will discuss the four basic styles of communications, review the structure and process of conversations, discuss the principles and practices for being assertive and improving their effectiveness, and practice the learnings in a few exercises.