Being Assertive: Finding the Sweet-Spot Between Passive and Aggressive

You said yes again. You meant no, you wanted to say no, and somewhere between the thought and the words it turned into "sure, no problem". Or perhaps your trouble runs the other way: you said exactly what you thought, at volume, and have been repairing the damage ever since.

Being Assertive: Finding the Sweet-Spot between Passive & Aggressive is a compact guide to the ground between those two mistakes. David Tuffley starts from a simple and clarifying idea. Assertiveness is about rights. The aggressive person tramples other people's; the passive person surrenders their own. The assertive person looks for the arrangement in which nobody's are violated. Seen that way, assertiveness stops being a temperament you either have or lack and becomes a skill you can practise.

The book begins by teaching you to hear the difference. Each of the three styles is described closely enough to recognise in a meeting or across a kitchen table: the passive speaker's trailing sentences, apologies and averted gaze; the aggressive speaker's speed, sarcasm and jabbing finger; the assertive speaker's even, unhurried voice and steady eye. Most readers will find themselves in more than one portrait.

Then it goes to the root. Tuffley sets out eleven beliefs that keep people quiet, among them "don't make a fuss", "it is selfish to state my desires" and the conviction that a real friend would simply know what you want. You are asked to score how firmly you hold each one. Against these he places the assertive rights set out by the psychologist Manuel J. Smith: the right to say no, to change your mind, to make mistakes, to say "I don't know", and to decline responsibility for problems that are not yours. Each right, he is careful to add, carries responsibility for its consequences.

The practical chapters follow, and they are where the book earns its keep. There are six techniques for asserting yourself, from the plain statement of what you need to a four-stage method for raising something that has been making you angry, each with wording you can borrow. He advises practising them in low-stakes settings before the difficult ones. There are three rules and six distinct ways of saying no, including one for pushy salespeople. There is a chapter on criticism: how to accept what is fair, question what is vague, reject what is exaggerated, and take the heat out of an attack without conceding it. A companion section shows how to give criticism that someone can actually use. Shorter chapters deal with disappointment and, less expectedly, with compliments, which many people find harder to receive than complaints.

Tuffley is frank about the limits. Assertiveness will not get you everything you want; nothing does. The people who have grown comfortable with a more compliant you may not welcome the change. What it offers, he argues, is fewer arguments, steadier relationships and a better opinion of yourself.

The whole can be read in an evening. Its examples come from offices, friendships and households, and its tone is that of a sensible friend who has thought the matter through. If you have ever rehearsed in the shower the thing you should have said in the room, this book will help you say it in the room next time, calmly, clearly, and without an apology attached.