Assertiveness is a journey, not a desination

When people come to you and want to express themselves more confidently, it’s because they’ve buried a piece of themselves under another piece of themselves.

Usually, people seeking assertiveness training are “passive” meaning they are putting the needs of social rules, peacefulness and the needs of others before their own. This is a shortcut to feeling like a good tribe/community/team/family member, but it’s also a way to suppress any development of an entire macrosystem of human intelligence.

For people closer to the passive end of the assertiveness scale - they have figured out the bare minimum of personal self expression in order to get by, and keep the people they respect around them happy.

Eventually with training and repetition, people start to figure out how to be around the people of their communities and simultaneously say what they want to say - which we call ‘assertiveness’. But the journey isn’t over there.

After you start to feel more comfortable making requests of others, speaking up about standards that aren’t met, and saying no to things you don’t want to do - there’s an interesting thing that happens afterwards...you start to understand more about what you want.

In our training we focus strongly on positive ways of expressing yourself and raising your status without dunking on people, threatening people, or demeaning people. When you rely on one set of intelligences to get by, you automatically deprioritize another set. In this case, you reject your sense of personal self expression, status, and desire.

When a person suppresses their self expression for the sake of their community into adulthood - their sense of self expression is still child like. So the adult expressing themself will naturally feel anxious or even afraid of the powerful intelligence locked within them.

After you are able to express the bare minimum in order to better communicate to your friends and family who you are, what you like and don’t like - you’re opening the door to a lifelong exploration of an entirely new part of your personality.

You’ll learn new things about yourself. About your leadership skills. About things you’ve kept hidden from yourself a long time.

The part of yourself that you’ve kept in a suppressed state includes a whole lot more than just self expression - that’s only the beginning. But there is no ‘beginning’ without learning to express ones self.