Assertive communication

Hi Nicholeen,

I’m feeling inspired and started my Benjamin Franklin style journal you reference in the course this week, and the first thing I’m working on is my communication. I realize that in order to communicate the way I want, there needs to be a change deeper inside to be able to consistently emanate the love I want to communicate.

So I’m working on that. Along those lines though, I’m wondering how you handle when an adult is trying to get your buy in, or order you around with a situation and they are not calm. I want to just say “I can tell there is something you are wanting to tell me, but we can’t talk until you are calm.” But I just don’t see that going over very well with most people, although it works great with my children. Calmness seems to be a lost art and many people don’t know they are not calm – myself included before I really started working on it. I want to be assertive but that is also a new thing for me, so even though this is probably very basic I’d love ideas of how I could keep myself assertive and calm and productive when other adults are not.

I did read the example in Roles and that was great. Right now I just want to ignore people if they are not calm because of I ask them to be calm they rebuttle that they are fine and I don’t want to argue, it seems pointless – but ignoring is also a problem too, so I feel a little stuck.

Thank you in advance. I appreciate your willingness to answer these questions so much!