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| Our inherited survival responses; coping with other people by fight, flight, or verbal assertiveness | |
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| Problems other people give us: is conflict inevitable? | |
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| Our primitive survival behaviors: how we become so aggressive or tend to avoid other people | |
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| Our verbal problem-solving ability: the unique difference between us and other animal species | |
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| How learning to feel anxious, ignorant, and guilty as children can make us passive, manipulable, and nonassertive as adults. Can parents control their children's behavior without making them feel anxious, ignorant, or guilty? | |
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| Our prime assertive human right--how other people violate it | |
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| How we are manipulated into doing what others want | |
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| Assertive Right I: You have the right to judge your own behavior, thoughts, and emotions, and to take the responsibility for their initiation and consequences upon yourself | |
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| How we can stop being manipulated by other people | |
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| The manipulator's basic tool: external structure. Need there be rules to cover every situation? | |
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| Three ways to simplify how you look at your relationship with anyone else: commercial, authority, and equal interactions | |
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| Is being assertive immoral or illegal? | |
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| Our everyday assertive rights--the common ways other people manipulate us | |
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| Assertive Right II: You have the right to offer no reasons or excuses for justifying your behavior | |
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| Assertive Right III: You have the right to judge if you are responsible for finding solutions to other people's problems | |
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| Assertive Right IV: You have the right to change your mind | |
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| Assertive Right V: You have the right to make mistakes--and be responsible for them | |
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| Assertive Right VI: You have the right to say, "I don't know." | |
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| Assertive Right VII: You have the right to be independent of the goodwill of others before coping with them | |
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| Assertive Right VIII: You have the right to be illogical in making decisions | |
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| Assertive Right IX: You have the right to say, "I don't understand." | |
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| Assertive Right X: You have the right to say, "I don't care." | |
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| The first thing to learn in being assertive: persistence | |
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| Assertive rights and assertive behavior: Both are important in living assertively | |
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| Substituting verbal persistence for silent passivity | |
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| The systematic skill of Broken Record | |
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| Habit: How people talk you into doing what they want | |
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| Practical goals in being assertive: Workable Compromise, keeping your self-respect, and the limits of being assertive | |
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| Assertive social conversation and communication | |
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| Why are we often tongue-tied? | |
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| The conversational skills of following up Free Information and Self-Disclosure | |
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| Disclosing your own worries to other people: One way to stop manipulation | |
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| Eye-to-eye contact: An important part of assertive behavior | |
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| Assertively coping with the great manipulator: criticism | |
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| Nonassertive critics: How they manipulate you into doing what they want | |
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| The systematic skill of Fogging | |
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| Agreeing with critical truths and still doing what you want | |
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| Agreeing in principle with logical criticism and still doing what you want | |
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| Agreeing with the odds that you will fail and still doing what you want | |
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| The systematic skill of Negative Assertion | |
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| Asserting your negative points: What you can do when you are 100 per cent in error | |
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| Coping with compliments or criticism: They are no different when you are assertive | |
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| Prompting people you care about to be more assertive and less manipulative toward you | |
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| Assertively inquiring about yourself and what you do: How this eliminates right and wrong statements used to control your behavior | |
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| The systematic skill of Negative Inquiry | |
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| Prompting criticism: How it can reduce manipulation | |
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| Prompting criticism about your work performance: How this can lead to a promotion | |
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| Prompting criticism about yourself: How this can lead to a closer relationship with people you care for | |
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| Everyday commercial situations--assertively coping where money is involved | |
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| Putting the systematic skills together to cope with typical commercial conflicts: Door-to-door salesmen. Returning defective merchandise. Angry customers. Getting defective merchandise fixed. Dealing with the public. Getting repairs or refunds from auto dealers. Problems in getting and giving professional medical treatment | |
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| Everyday authority situations--assertively coping with supervision or expertise | |
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| Using systematic skills to assert yourself in authority interactions: Between employee and supervisor. In a job or graduate school interview. Choosing between job offers. Speaking to an audience or presenting a report. Between parents and children. Between teachers and students. With teen-agers | |
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| Everyday equal relationships--working out compromises or just saying "No" | |
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| Using assertive skills to cope with people who are equal to you, but not as close as some: Lending out your car. Imposing neighbors. Friends who want a business loan. Interfering parents. Dates and lovers who manipulate you | |
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| Really close equal relationships--sex and assertion | |
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| Asserting your sexual wants and your other wants: the wants are different, the assertive behavior is the same | |
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| Fear and Anger: the emotional bases of sexual difficulties | |
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| The Anxiety Model, the Anger Model, and the Mixed Model: treatment modes for sexual problems | |
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| Learned sexual problems and how they can be treated with relearning | |
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| How being nonassertively passive or manipulative can contribute to sexual difficulties | |
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| How being assertive can help with changing your sexual lifestyle: Hidden anxiety agendas about change. Compromises on different sexual wants. Assertively prompting your partner to learn new ways with you to overcome a routine sex life or a routine lifestyle | |
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| Anxiety, passivity, and lack of sexual foreplay. Decrease in sexual frequency: a sign of withdrawal of close contact with a mate, in and out of bed | |
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| In Summary | |
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| Do you want to assert yourself or do you want to control other people? | |
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| What happens to society if a lot of us become more assertive and less manipulable? | |
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| Suggested Technical Readings | |
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| Glossary of Systematic Assertive Skills | |