Coaching practices for How to Be More Assertive at Work Examples

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I say the firm thing but my voice goes up at the end like a question, my eyes drop, and I tack on a nervous little laugh
• There’s something I need to ask for and I keep rehearsing it and chickening out
• I keep dropping problems on my boss’s desk and waiting for them to tell me what to do, and I can feel it reads as me not owning my work
• I’ve told my people a hundred times they can disagree with me, but they still don’t
• Even when I’ve got the right words, my voice goes shaky and my sentences tilt up into questions, and the apology in my body

Practices that may help

1. Assertiveness Training, Made Practical
   Assertiveness training is a set of learnable skills — using I-statements, the broken-record technique, fogging, and saying no without over-justifying — that let you express needs and limits directly without aggression or passivity. It comes out of behavior therapy and social-skills training and has a genuine clinical basis, taught for decades in therapeutic settings.
2. Match your body to your words
   Assertive words undercut by passive body language read as a bluff.
   Assertiveness Training, Made Practical
3. I-Statements: How to Express Yourself Without Triggering Defensiveness
   I-statements — communicating from your own experience ("I feel…") rather than making claims about the other person ("you always…") — are among the most widely taught assertiveness skills. The theoretical rationale is solid: describing your own internal state is less likely to trigger defensiveness than evaluating the other person’s behavior. Clinical practice supports them; RCT evidence for I-statements specifically is limited, and poorly executed I-statements (disguised accusations) often backfire.
4. DEAR MAN: making effective requests
   Describe, Express, Assert, Reinforce — then Mindful, Appear confident, Negotiate.
   DBT Interpersonal Effectiveness: Getting What You Need Without Destroying the Relationship
5. Bring a proposed solution when you bring a problem
   Describe the problem and your recommended path before asking for a decision.
   Managing Up: Practical Skills for Working with Your Boss
6. Teach speak-up skills, not just encourage speaking up
   Give team members specific language for raising concerns, not just permission to raise them.
   Psychological Safety in Teams
7. Managing Up: Practical Skills for Working with Your Boss
   Managing up means proactively understanding your manager’s priorities, communication style, and constraints — then adapting how you work and communicate to make the partnership effective. Done well it is collaborative rather than manipulative: it reduces friction, builds trust, and creates space for greater autonomy. The evidence base is primarily organizational behavior research on leader-member exchange and practitioner consensus.
8. Appear confident even when you don’t feel it
   Maintain eye contact, a level voice, and an upright posture — confidence is performed before it’s felt.
   DEAR MAN: DBT’s Skill for Asking for What You Want Effectively
9. DEAR MAN for interpersonal effectiveness
   A structured script — Describe, Express, Assert, Reinforce, Mindful, Appear confident, Negotiate — for asking and saying no.
   Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Skills, Made Practical
10. Adapt to Drivers: be direct, results-focused, and brief
    With high-assertiveness, low-responsiveness people, lead with the bottom line and leave out the social warmup.
    Social Style Matrix: Adapting to How People Communicate

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