My top 25 points:

1. The parent child dynamic often doesn’t change. The parent is supposed to relax the rules and allow freedom as the child grows but that doesn’t always happen.

2. Lack of assertiveness is often due to people trying to make you feel guilty.

3. The insecure person copes best in very structured situations where there are very few unknowns to deal with.

4. Compromises don’t have to be fair to be useful. All they have to do is work. Where did you ever read that life is fair??

5. Problems in equal relationships happen when one or both parties enter the relationship with pre conceived notions of how friends, spouses etc. should behave.

6. For many of us the prospect of having to be one’s own judge can be frightening. We have to rely on our own judgement because only we have responsibility for ourselves.

7. Morals are arbitrary rules people adopt to judge their own and other peoples’ behaviors.

8. If you’re your own ultimate judge, you don’t need to explain your behavior to others for them to decide whether it’s right or wrong.

9. You have the right to change your mind.

10. You’ve the right to make mistakes and be responsible for them.

11. If you’re learning to be assertive, never say sorry. You can add manners once you’ve learnt to be assertive.

12. You’ve the right to say “I don’t know”

13. People get so dammed frightened when someone threatens not to like them or doesn’t like them. You’ll never be loved if you can’t risk being disliked.

14. You’ve the right to say “I don’t care”

15. The “I want” category is straight forward. The “I have tos” are compromises. Many people confuse the “I have tos” with “I should”. You must decide if the “I wants” are worth the “I have tos”.

16. Whenever you hear yourself or someone else say ‘should’, extend your anti-manipulative antennae up as far as possible and listen carefully. In all likelihood, some message that says, “You are not your own judge.” will follow.

17. Our sense of self-respect has priority over everything else. Hence if you keep your self-respect through exercising your assertive skills like “broken record”, you will feel good even if you don’t achieve your goal immediately.

18. Assertive behavior is more than demanding your rights. Being assertive is communicating to another person what you are, what you want and what you expect of life.

19. One of the most important aspects of being verbally assertive is to be persistent and to keep saying what you want over and over again without getting angry, irritated, or loud.

20. One skill that must be mastered in order to communicate effectively is SELF DISCLOSURE. Assertively disclosing information about yourself allows the social communication to flow both ways.

21. When conflict arises, working out a solution can be complicated if you assume an arbitrary set of rules e.g. wives should defer to husbands.

22. Learn to be assertive to people you’re not that close to (e.g. colleagues) before you practice assertiveness on people closer to you.

23. In all my therapy sessions & assertive classes, more than half the learners have failed to establish an equality relationship between themselves & their parents. They live away from mom and dad yet their parents still keep that mantle of ultimate authority over their children.

24. If someone criticizes you about something unserious, what should you do? Agree with them as much as possible — “fogging” — by saying something like “you might be right”. Do not deny, get defensive, or turn the criticism around onto them. Unserious because if you actually made a mistake, you should own it

25. The right to be the final judge of yourself is the prime assertive right which allows no one to manipulate you. It is the assertive right from which your other assertive rights are derived. Your other assertive rights are only more specific everyday applications of this prime right.

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