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Assertiveness Coaching: What It Is, What It Practices, and What the Research Shows

Does assertiveness coaching work?

Assertiveness coaching is working with a coach on saying what you need without caving or blowing up. One 2023 trial of an assertiveness program found large gains; no trial of coaching itself.

Assertiveness coaching is working with a coach, one to one or in a group, on being able to say what you need, want or will not do, directly and without either giving in or going on the attack. Whether it helps is a fair thing to ask before you start, and the honest answer has two parts. Assertiveness training, the skills-practice tradition that coaching draws on, has research behind it, including a 2023 randomized trial of an eight-week online program. We did not find a trial that tested coaching itself, or an AI coach, on assertiveness, so for those the evidence is thinner than the page titles on this subject suggest.

This page covers what assertiveness means, what a coach actually does with it, what that trial found and where it stops, when the difficulty you are having is not a coaching matter, and how to decide where to begin.

What assertiveness is, and what it is not

In the way the word is used in training, assertiveness sits between two ways of going wrong. In one, you swallow your need: you say yes while meaning no, stay quiet, or hint and hope. In the other, you push past the other person: you raise your voice, blame, or win the exchange at their expense. Assertive communication is the third option, stating what you want, feel or will not do plainly and with respect for the other person, while accepting that they may not like it. That is a description of the idea, not a measured category, and different authors draw the lines slightly differently.

Two things follow from this that people searching for help often miss. First, being assertive does not mean getting your way; the other person can still say no, and you then decide what you do next. Second, it is not a personality type. In the training tradition it is treated as a set of behaviors that can be practiced, which is why people who describe themselves as naturally shy or conflict-averse can still work on it. Whether any particular person finds that easy or hard depends on a lot that no web page can see, including their history, their workplace, and who is on the other side of the conversation.

Explore: assertiveness training

What a coach actually does about it

There is no single standard method that we found, and coaches differ in what they emphasize. In general terms, a session is a conversation about a specific situation you are in: the colleague who keeps handing you work, the family member whose comments you swallow, the request you keep meaning to make. A coach will usually ask what you actually want from that situation, what you fear will happen if you say it, and what you tend to do instead. Then comes the practical part, which is putting the sentence into words and trying it out, in the session first and afterwards in the real conversation, and coming back to look at how it went.

The skills commonly practiced in assertiveness training are concrete. They include describing a problem in terms of your own experience rather than the other person's character, giving a short and clear no without a stack of reasons that the other person can argue with, calmly repeating your position when someone keeps pushing, agreeing with what is true in a criticism without conceding the whole verdict, and making your tone and posture match your words. Each of these has a mechanism and a caveat, and several do not suit every situation; the practice page linked below goes through them one at a time. A good coach also notices when a technique is the wrong tool, for instance when what you need is a negotiation rather than a held line.

Explore: assertiveness training · saying no boundaries · nonviolent requests

What the research says

Start with what exists. A 2018 review in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice by Speed, Goldstein and Goldfried describes assertiveness training as a once popular area of clinical research that psychotherapy has since neglected, and argues that assertiveness is relevant across a range of clinical problems and that training in it is a valuable transdiagnostic intervention. That is a review making an argument, and it is about assertiveness training delivered in clinical settings, not about coaching. We were able to read only its abstract-level description, not the full text.

The most direct recent evidence we found is a 2023 randomized trial by Hagberg and colleagues in Internet Interventions. It randomized 210 Swedish-speaking adults to an eight-week internet-delivered program built on cognitive behavioral therapy and aimed at assertiveness, either with a therapist's guidance, without guidance, or to a wait-list. On the main measure of adaptive assertiveness, which participants rated themselves, both treatment groups did better than the wait-list group, by effect sizes the paper reports at about 1.0 at the end of the program and larger, from 1.3 to 1.4, at a one-year follow-up. The guided and unguided versions produced similar results. The authors conclude that assertiveness can be a suitable target for intervention.

The limits matter as much as the result. The participants were recruited through advertisements on social media and other websites, were mostly women (79 to 93 percent depending on the group), had an average age in the low to mid 40s, and were not clinically interviewed; people with a PHQ-9 depression score of 15 or higher, or who were in other psychological treatment, were excluded. The outcomes were self-reported. The authors note that depression worsened in some people on the wait-list, which may have inflated the comparison, that only two therapists took part, and that the program had no effect on generalized anxiety. It was a structured self-help program, not coaching, and it was not delivered by an AI coach.

Taken together, this supports saying that structured assertiveness practice, delivered online over about two months, was associated with higher self-rated assertiveness in one group of Swedish adults, and that the gain was still there a year later. It does not show that a coach does better or worse than a book or a program, that any one technique carries the effect, or that the result holds for a different population. We did not find a trial of coaching, human or AI, on assertiveness specifically. If you see a page claiming a success rate for assertiveness coaching, it is worth asking what it is based on.

Why it is hard to do alone, and where practice comes in

Most people who search for this are not short of knowing what assertive means. The difficulty tends to be in the moment: the other person is in front of you, your heart is going, and the sentence you rehearsed in the shower is gone. That is one reason skills practice is built around rehearsal and small real-life attempts rather than only explanation. Trying a sentence out loud, getting it into your own words, and then using it first in a lower-stakes situation is the shape that the training programs and the trial above share.

If you tend to cave, the work often involves noticing what you expect to happen if you say no, and testing that expectation in small ways. If you tend to blow up, the work is usually earlier in the sequence: noticing the point at which you stop speaking up and start storing resentment, and bringing the request in sooner and smaller. These are patterns people describe rather than established subtypes, and many people do both depending on the setting.

Explore: difficult conversations · nonviolent communication · setting boundaries

When this is not a coaching matter

Some situations need more than assertiveness skills, and a few need something other than skills. If the person you cannot speak up to is someone who frightens you, controls your money or movements, threatens you, or hurts you, the issue is safety rather than communication style, and being more assertive can be risky in that situation. A domestic violence advocate can help you think through your options. In the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline lists 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE), text START to 88788, and live chat, described on its site as free, confidential and available 24/7. Outside the United States, findahelpline.com lists verified helplines in more than 175 countries. If you are in immediate danger, call your local emergency number.

A second group is people for whom speaking up is hard because of fear that is intense or has taken over daily life, such as dreading or avoiding most social situations, panic, or low mood that will not lift. Assertiveness practice can be one part of treatment for some of these, but a licensed clinician is the right first conversation, since a coach is not designed to diagnose or treat a mental health condition. The trial above excluded people with higher depression scores, which is one more reason not to read its results as applying to them. If you are having thoughts of ending your life, in the United States you can call or text 988, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline; findahelpline.com covers other countries.

A third is a situation that is mainly a structural problem, such as a workplace where speaking up carries real consequences, or a discrimination or harassment issue. Better phrasing can help you document and raise it, but it does not make the situation fair, and an employment adviser, a union or a lawyer may be the more useful call.

Coach, therapist, group, book or app: how to think about the options

If the difficulty is a pattern in otherwise ordinary life, such as over-agreeing at work, struggling to decline requests, or dreading one specific conversation, coaching is one reasonable option, alongside assertiveness groups, books and workbooks, a trusted friend who will play the other person, and structured online programs like the one studied in the trial above. If the difficulty comes with distress that feels clinical, a therapist who works with cognitive behavioral approaches is the better starting point, and many therapists include assertiveness work. Our separate pages on therapy and coaching set out how the two differ.

When you speak to a coach, it is reasonable to ask what a first month looks like, whether they claim specific outcomes and on what basis, and what they do if what you describe sounds like something other than a coaching topic. A coach who answers those plainly is easier to trust than one who promises a transformation.

Where IX Coach fits

This page is published by an AI coaching company, which belongs on the table plainly. IX Coach is an AI coaching system you can talk to directly, designed around reflection, goal clarity and moving from insight to action, and available at any hour. If you recognize the pattern above, a conversation there can be one place to put the sentence you have been avoiding into words before the real conversation, and to look at what you expect to happen if you say it. It has not been tested in a trial on assertiveness, so nothing here should be read as evidence that it improves it. It is not designed to be a therapist, a crisis or domestic violence service, or a replacement for people who know your situation, and if what you are carrying matches the section above on when this is not a coaching matter, that is where to go first.

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