Assertiveness Training

Improving your self knowledge and your ability to communicate assertively can increase
your success level in the workplace as well as in life. Assertiveness is not a one-size-fits-
all approach to relating to others. It is a way of relating that respects both your and other
people’s needs, wants, and rights.

Assertiveness is important in all forms of communication: when you give or receive

compliments, make or respond to requests, or handle difficult circumstances or
relationships. Relating assertively does not guarantee that the other person will be equally
assertive in response, or that they will even respond positively; as a style of
communication, however, it is healthier for you and others and more likely to achieve
success than either aggressive or passive behavior.

Characteristics and Examples of Aggressive Behavior

 Threats and intimidation  Demanding
 Sarcasm  Blaming
 Manipulation  Hostility
 Name calling, belittling, or insulting  Violence

Characteristics and Examples of Passive Behavior

 Belittling yourself or your
achievements
 Not saying no (when you should)
 Not saying yes (when you want to)
 Over apologizing
 Letting others run your life
 Never sharing your ideas
 Putting up with threatening or
manipulative behaviors
 Withdrawal

Characteristics and Examples of Passive-Aggressive Behavior (combining

the worst of both above)
 Hidden hostility  Sabotaging someone behind the scene
 Agreeing to do something but not  Gossip and behind the back
doing it complaints

Characteristics and Examples of Assertive Behavior

 Accepting compliments comfortably  Being comfortable saying both yes or
 Using “I need, I want, I feel” no as appropriate
statements to express your needs,  Being courteous
wants, feelings, or concerns  Being honest and concise in
 Taking all parties’ interests into expressing feelings
account  Speaking clearly and maintaining eye
contact
Assertiveness Role Play Activity
Discuss the main differences between aggressive, submissive, and assertive
behavior, in light of our class discussions and your prior reading. Then, get into
groups of three (if a group of four is needed, ask the group to appoint two
observers and to rotate roles so that everyone plays all parts). Instructor leads
groups through each role play, one at a time.

After each situation, discuss the role play within your group, answering the
questions:

 How did the various parties feel about the conversation?

 Was the interaction assertive? If not, why not?
 How might the interaction have been more assertive, if at all?
 Report out on questions and interesting observations.

Situation One: Teammate B put extra effort into creating a great-looking

graph for your report.
Person A: Sincerely compliment B.
Person B: Respond Assertively
Person C: Observe

Situation Two: Your team has gone out to celebrate the successful completion
of your Team Literature Review. While eating, you notice that teammate C
has a piece of broccoli stuck between his/her teeth, which he/she seems
unaware of.
Person B: Respond assertively.
Person C: Handle the interaction with person B assertively.
Person A: Observe

Situation Three
Person C: It is normally your job to send an email to all of your team members
after class, summarizing team decisions and reminding the team of agreed upon
tasks. Today, however, you are scheduled to retake an algebra exam right after
class. Make an assertive request of teammate B to write and send this email to the
team on your behalf. (Note: This is the second time you’ve made such a request.)
Person A: Respond assertively.
Person B: Observe
Situation Four: It is the fourth week of your team project and teammate B has
been late to three prior class sessions, missing crucial instructional and
work time. Once again, he/she walks in 30 minutes late today.
Person A: Handle the situation assertively.
Person B: Respond assertively.
Person C. Observe

Play “Mystery Bag.”

Find five small objects to put in a bag (draw string bags work well since you can make the
opening fit just over your child’s arm so they cannot see inside). Have your child choose one
object, feel it in their hand without taking it out of the bag, and have a guess at what it is. Then
take it out to see what it is. Encourage them for guessing! Let your child find objects and have
you guess. Discuss how it takes courage to try something new and have a go at something. It’s
great if you can focus on having fun, and not let your nerves about the situation prevent you from
enjoying yourself.

Practice showing courage by standing up for yourself.

Use two dolls to role play when someone comes to take something out of your hand forcibly
(like a toy or drawing utensil). Practicing saying gracefully, “I am using this right now but when
I’m done I will give it to you.” Talk about how sharing doesn’t mean you have to give
everything away but that you can work with others to find a solution if you both want to use
something. Take turns being the “taker,” and think about different ways you can stand up for
yourself if you are faced with someone like this. Write the phrases down and/or draw pictures if
this would help your child.

Role play being friendly by meeting a new person.

Role play meeting a new friend by introducing your child to a puppet (hand puppets, stick
puppets, or craft dolls would work great). Let your child practice introducing his or herself and
ask the puppet if they would like to play. You may like to visit a playground after this activity,
with each person’s goal being to meet someone new.

Practice sharing about yourself.

Being assertive is also being confident about our own thoughts and feelings. Draw a self portrait
with your name, age, favorite foods, and what you like to do (everyone in the family can
participate!). We do not need to be shy about sharing things we like, and we should feel good
about who we are and what we think. As you share your pictures with each other, notice the
differences. Talk about how we all like different things, and that is okay. These differences
make everyone unique… and this way each person has their own special talents that can
contribute to a better world.

SOCIOMETRY: THE DYNAMICS OF RAPPORT

Adam Blatner, M.D.
Revised Slightly & Re-posted, July 6, 2009
Exploring
For more on sociometry, see on this website other papers such as (1)
Interpersonal Preference ; (2) Exploring Your Own
Connectedness through Sociometry ; (3) Tele: The Dynamics
of Rapport; (4) Further Notes on Sociometry ; (5) A
Bibliography of Writings on Sociometry ;
And since role theory is also related to all this, browse on the table of contents of
papers for various webpage articles about roles, role analysis, and so forth.

One of the more pervasive phenomena in the interpersonal and social domain is the rather obvious fact that
we find ourselves more attracted to some people than another, we feel more rapport with certain individuals
and a kind of negative rapport or repulsion with others. With many people we are more neutral, or mixed. Yet
this dynamic is often neither spoken about or, for many people, even thought about consciously. Exploring
the topic openly tends to evoke a bit of anxiety lest we hurt others’ feelings or ourselves feel rejected.

In the spirit of the continued movement towards becoming more explicitly conscious about phenomena that
had previously or generally remained tacit or unconscious, it is useful to begin to address a variety of topics–
sex, death, and other themes that generally tend to be emotionally loaded.

Sociometry in its narrower sense refers to the methods that are designed to assess the nature and relative
strength of these currents of attraction and repulsion among people. (The inventor of sociometry, Dr. J.L.
Moreno, called these invisible currents "tele"--and this dynamic is further described elsewhere on this
website on a webpage about Tele: The Dynamics of Interpersonal
Preference.) In the larger sense, the term refers to a general consideration of the informal social
psychology of relationships. While formal relationships are determined by tradition, organizational rules,
lines of authority, chains of command, organizational charts, and generally-agreed-on role definitions,
informal relationships tend to be established by factors that have more to do with personality, skill,
temperament, and a number of other factors, some of which are quite intangible. In part, that is what makes
this dynamic a little elusive–we cannot often give good reasons why we prefer one person over another when
they both have similar roles or status.

The study of sociometry offers a number of advantages:

– It brings into explicit awareness a number of themes that have been generally overlooked by most other
theories of psychology and sociology
– It opens our minds to phenomena that are emotionally sensitive, and thus offers some promise of
understanding–and sometimes meaningful insights– about the ways people interact
– It can help a group address themes that may be operating but their action has not been noted in the
sphere of explicit awareness
– Sociometry–and more, the reluctance to actively think about and explore these issues--can also help us
reflect on why there is such reluctance, in terms of individual and cultural dynamics

History

Sociometry as a method was developed by Jacob Levi Moreno, M.D. (1889-1974), a physician-turned
psychiatrist, raised in Vienna, who emigrated to the United States in 1925, and worked in upstate New York
in the 1930s. Moreno is best known as the inventor of the therapeutic role playing method called
psychodrama, but was also a brilliant innovator who helped pioneer group psychotherapy, social role theory,
improvisational theatre, and applications of role playing in business and education, as well as in other
settings. Moreno had been interested in the dynamics of relationships since his college years, and intuitively
recognized that people tend to be more spontaneous and happy when allowed to affiliated with others with
whom they had good rapport. Moreno called this invisible current of attraction or repulsion “tele”
(pronounced tay-lay), a term related to words like telephone or television. (For those who find that term
difficult to appreciate, I have found most people understand it just as easily when referred to as
“rapport.”) Tele, simply stated, is what is measured by sociometry. With whom might you prefer to share
some common experience–having lunch, going on a date, playing tennis, working on a study project, etc.
(Right off, you’ll notice that it’s possible to prefer one person for one kind of role or criterion, but another
person might be preferred for a different role! So the method exposes the complexity of the field–it’s not just
a matter of “who do you like?”)

A Relatively New Field

I think of sociometry as a relatively new field, and all of what we have learned so far is perhaps but a small
fraction of what there is yet to learn. I think of sociometry as being roughly analogous to the understanding
of electricity back around 1850–we had learned a good deal in the previous century, but there was yet much
more to discover. I note this in order to support an attitude of humility and an interest in continued
exploration and refinement.

I also note the relative newness of the field because there is a tendency to attribute great insight to the
founder, J. L. Moreno, and some of the early pioneers. The problem with a new field is that there may indeed
be some very good ideas, but also these may be generously mixed with ideas that have not yet been refined,
tested, probed for further variations, and their underlying dynamics further explored. More particularly,
Moreno’s writings should not be taken as sacred; he himself warned against the tendency to rely on that
which has been created. (Moreno called the category of that which has already been created “the cultural
conserve,” and noted that while this category of phenomena is the necessary springboard for most further
developments in creativity, criticism in the service of such further creative development is a necessary
principle.) For this reason, further on I question a number of Moreno’s concepts in order to provoke further
dialog about the best way to understand the field.

The Sociology of Sociometry

Moreno developed sociometry in the early 1930s and wrote a major book on the subject, titled “Who Shall
Survive?” The title indicated his belief that our survival as a species required a maturation and application of
insights in the social sciences that would then catch up to the advances being made in the hard sciences. In
other words, what good is it to develop sophisticated technologies capable of making ever-more-destructive
weapons when we don’t have in place a widespread cultural matrix of social methods for more peacefully
working out conflicts?

In 1937, Moreno began publishing a professional journal titled “Sociometry,” and many of the papers on the
subject by his students appeared in this and related journals. In 1956, there was sufficient interest among
sociologists so that Moreno donated the journal to the American Sociological Association, who then
published it for a few decades.

For the most part, sociometry has been preserved and promoted within the psychodrama community. It
seems to have been given renewed energy beginning in the later 1970s, and a knowledge of its methods and
principles became one of the requirements for certification as a psychodramatist in the United States in the
early 1980s.

In Australia and New Zealand, sociometry, role theory, and related approaches have been applied in
consultations to businesses and organizations as a major tool in organizational development. Some of their
refinements continue to be absorbed by psychodramatists and sociometrists internationally.

Alas, in the academic fields of sociology and social psychology, increasingly since around 1970, sociometry
is generally ignored, often not even mentioned in major textbooks.

Further Issues in Sociometry

Rapport is that feeling of connectedness that one feels with other people. Sometimes it happens relatively
rapidly, and other times it grows slowly. We should recognize also a variety of categories of negative rapport,
which may also be mild: Sometimes there’s a real edge of negativity, and at other times, simply a sense that
the other is just “not my kind of person.” Thus, rapport may operate on a spectrum from strongly negative to
strongly positive.

One of the reasons this dynamic is being noted here is that there are a number of little-known associated
dynamics that are worth knowing about, and also many as-yet unknowns that we are still exploring. Another
reason is that the whole topic for many people is somewhat uncomfortable, because it deals with old
complexes of sometimes surprisingly strong feelings about not being “liked” or not feeling it is all right to
not particularly like another person. Nevertheless, these dynamics are present and have a significant impact
in most relationships and group settings. Thus, in the belief that the most constructive behaviors are pursued
with clear awareness, it is worth including in our considerations those processes that are most relevant.

A Role-Based Dynamic

People play many roles, and thinking about the various roles we play offers the best way to understand the
dynamics of rapport. In general, for example, we prefer people who share certain similar or “symmetrical”
key preferences or styles. On the other hand, good relations often have a few or a moderate number of
“complementary” preferences or styles, which adds a bit of intriguing difference, appealing to curiosity and
the enjoyment of a bit of the exotic.

A role is any complex of attitude and behavior that can be portrayed dramatically, played. Roles can operate
at many levels–the way we eat and sleep, many aspects of the way we think, how we relate to others, operate
in small and larger groups (family, church, work contexts), subcultures and cultures.

Interpersonal Preference

Another aspect of rapport is that it is an extension of individual tastes. Taste can arise from a variety of
individual elements, including ability or experience level, language, ethnicity and cultural background,
historical background or age / generation style, temperament and various interests.

We can’t fully or rationally explain most of our tastes, why we prefer this or that ethnic or specialty food
over another type; or one artist more than another. Some people relate to certain historical periods, cultures,
and life-styles, and again cannot be explained through any amount of analysis. What’s important is to learn to
get in touch with authentic preferences.

Note also that there inauthentic preferences, learning to think one likes this or that quality because it is
fashionable, because one associates certain tastes with the values and norms of a desired peer group. Part of
late adolescence involves re-evaluating one’s tastes, discovering personal preferences that feel more “true”
than living with a sense of mere conformity.

There may be several layers involved in this process: Pre-teens begin to break away from parents and
experiment with dramatic alternatives to parental values, thus reinforcing the need to feel that they are more
independent. The process may repeat itself in the later teens or college years, and again several times during
young, middle, and later adulthood. Each experiment clarifies tastes. (Sometimes authentic tastes are
satisfied and open to new interests: “Been there, done that” moves into “What might be fun next?”

For example, in my case, as a young teen, I wanted to be more popular, and there were books about
popularity. They seemed to be a mixture of grooming, simple fashion, basic rules of courtesy (that seem
quaint many years later), and so forth. I didn’t feel I made much progress, though. There were many reasons
for this, but the main one, in retrospect, was a misunderstanding of what popularity was all about: It wasn’t
an either-or, popular or not popular situation. It all seems obvious now, but there were scores of different
groups that one could become more or less associated with. A few people seemed to be everywhere, with the
sports stars, in student government, and so forth. These folks were exceptions, though. Most people were
mild or moderately popular within smaller or larger sub-groups.

It would have been helpful to recognize that one only needed a modest circle of acquaintances and friends,
and that larger circles required unusual levels of involvement.

Practical Social Network Development

One of the most important dynamics in social psychology is the operation of the interpersonal flow of
rapport, a mutual sense of connectedness. It’s universal, and a generally somewhat overlooked process, in
part because, even more than sex (at least nowadays), people are quite emotionally sensitive about this topic.
Yet it’s everywhere and in many cases rapport is a far more important factor than any official designation.

From childhood, we are encouraged to treat people “equally,” which blurs a distinction between general
fairness and the distribution of the sense of rapport that operates in psychology, just as there is a natural
variation in temperament, tastes, background, ability, and other variables. The fact is that we naturally tend to
prefer some folks over others, and there are some with whom we tend to clash, though neither party has
“done anything wrong.” They’re just not “our type of people,” though they may have a lively social network
with whom they’re more naturally compatible.

The most obvious expression of this blindness to the factor of rapport is the way teachers and administrators
lump people together according to arbitrary criteria, the order of height, first letter of the last name, order of
people arriving, etc. Such an approach assumes that we’re all equal cogs in an industrial assembly line,
replaceable. It’s our job to “work out” frictions, and, like the illusion that you can do anything if you try hard
enough, a variation is that all conflicts can be resolved with good will and skill. The corollary is that conflicts
resistant to solution are due to a lack of good will, effort, or skill– the latter evoking shame for being
“clueless” or “dumb” or not clever enough.

Only a few people have had the courage to challenge the above pervasive, subtly oppressive attitudes, and
say that what seems to be common sense is in fact not so. There is an alternative, of course: Let people work
in teams in which the people have for the most part chosen each other! Let people room in bunkhouses and
pal around as their natural inclinations lead them!

Of course, several objections immediately arise: Won’t this reinforce the development of cliques and
separatism, rather than integration? And won’t some folks be left out and their feelings hurt? This last is the
crux of the matter: Avoid hurting people’s feelings, and avoid having one’s own feelings getting hurt.

The paradox is that like sex, the problems of which tend to magnify with ignorance and avoidance, the
problems of relationship are also worsened by avoidance. We need to look at the whole deal on relationships
and being hurt, and become a little desensitized to this complex problem. Freedom requires an infrastructure
that supports responsibility, not only at the political level, but even in the family, in clubs, churches, with
friends, and in various informal networks.

That infrastructure involves a combination of a certain amount of self-awareness, communications skills, and
problem-solving skills, and I confess that these skills are insufficiently developed in the vast majority of
people today. So this paper aims at looking more frankly at the problems of rapport in relationship.

Developmental Dynamics

Let’s start off by noting that in older children, teenagers and adults, liking and being liked rests on not just a
simple either-or dimension, but varies according to the roles being played. One can like another kid as a
friend, but not as one with whom wants to be romantic or sexual. A teammate chosen to work on a science
project may be someone other than the teammate for playing baseball, and just because a kid plays first base
well, that doesn’t mean you want to go camping with her.

Yet at first, younger children don’t make this distinction, and their feelings are quite sensitive about the
awareness that at times, two other people seem to prefer being together more than either one with the child
who thus feels vulnerable. All this begins at the age when children who play with one other kid at a time
begin to relate to two kids at a time. It also partakes of the awareness of having to share the attention of a
parent with a sibling–that is, around three or four years of age.

Freud attributed the patterns of jealousy to sexual fantasies, but he was only partly correct. Occasionally,
patterns of early sexual stimulation, possessiveness of one parent, harshness of another parent, set up
mixtures of complexes–the Oedipal complex being the most prominent in psychoanalytic thought. (In all
likelihood, Freud himself developed such a complex because of the mixture of factors in his own life; he was
mistaken in projecting the whole package onto others as “normal.”) What is inevitable, though, is that kids
who begin to play in groups of three or four will notice the flow of shifting alliances!

Sometimes A and B will play more intensely and C will be left out, but later on it may be B and C who seem
closer, and then A feels left out. For the one feeling left out, jealousy, shame, hurt, bewilderment, betrayal–a
variety of feelings are evoked.

Over the next few years, children are learning a variety of ways of being socialized, and one of the
components of this process involve the courtesies of minimizing the frictions of obvious rejection and
preference. We all seem to covertly avoid being too obvious about whom we prefer and whom we don’t–or
even those we consciously reject. We don’t want to be hurt, so we don’t hurt others.
 Now, in healthy development, it becomes more clear that being not preferred need not precipitate a
catastrophe of humiliation. One has enough residual esteem–not just self-esteem, but also a sense that there
are indeed other groups out there with whom one can be more naturally congenial, feel esteemed
interpersonally. However, most people have only marginally healthy development. That seemingly high-
functioning people can be marginally healthy in some roles is again best illustrated by the way people
functioned sexually a century ago, when sexuality was still dominated by Victorian attitudes and otherwise
well-educated people were woefully ignorant in the bedroom.

So, nowadays, it is not common for a person to feel “hurt,” “rejected,” when relationships don’t click very
well. These feelings tend to be psychologically infected by false but pervasive attitudes: If one is rejected,
– the other person must be somehow not friendly, mean, and it’s worth coming up with some judgmental
conclusions about that person
– the other person is given the benefit of the doubt, especially if s/he has higher status, in which case, being
rejected “proves” that one is lacking in some way. It used to be status, and these frictions were ameliorated
by “knowing your place,” but by the mid-20th century, rejections were often attributed to matters of
“personality.” That is, one tended to psychologically evaluate and devalue based on ambiguous generalities.
It is important to note that whether one could actually will oneself to be different was unclear–there was that
other pervasive attitude that one could do or be anything with sufficient effort.

So in middle school, what happened to kids who were significantly more intelligent or intellectual than other
kids?
...
(Further comments to be added.) For more about sociometry, see other papers on this website, such as
Further Comments on Sociometry .

http://www.blatner.com/adam/pdntbk/sociomnotes.htm