Our lives revolve around expressing ourselves in order to achieve our goals and protect ourselves from being exploited. Despite this, many people say that they have had to learn to become more assertive. In this article, we’re examining how you can use an assertiveness test to change your life.
What Is An Assertiveness Test ?
When it comes to assertiveness, most of us will fall into one of three camps; aggressive, passive or passive-agressive and understanding which of these you belong to is the first step in making some changes to your life.
An assertiveness test doesn’t need to be complicated! It can be a simple three minute online evaluation during which you answer questions based on real-life workplace scenarios. From your responses, the test will assess your behaviour and produce a report to give you a greater understanding of your self-assertion.
The Changes It Will Make
There’s much more to assertiveness than getting your own way and, in this article, we’ll look deeper into the ways in which taking a test can change your life for the better:
Communication
Assertiveness is all tied up with how well we communicate our ideas and objectives to others, as failing to do so with authority can leave us vulnerable to being misunderstood or taken advantage of. An assertiveness test will help you to identify the level of assertiveness and therefore take measures to improve it. For example; If the result of the test places you into the aggressive category, you may want to think about the way you communicate – ie. perhaps forcing your ideas on others rather than examining other ideas. Similarly, if your result is passive, you can take steps to improve how you communicate.
Relationships
Communication and relationships do, of course, go hand in hand however aggressive or passive behaviour can often make relationships unbalanced. An example of this might be a passive personality who consistently feels unheard and taken advantage of by a more aggressive colleague. An assertiveness test which identifies you as passive will help you to reflect on your lack of assertiveness and to fix this through, perhaps, role play with a colleague or friend.
Change
As Heraclitus said, “The Only Constant in Life Is Change.” This applies to both our personal and professional lives, and our level of assertiveness can impact on how we cope with this. A passive personality might, for example, find themselves “just going with the flow” during a period of change resulting in resentment or personal cost. Identifying your level of our assertiveness with our test will arm you with the understanding required to make some changes of your own in order to better stand up for yourself and your interests.
Stress
For most of us, stress is, to an extent, an unpleasant but necessary part of life – however, our command of assertiveness can increase stress for each type of personality:
Passive – Those who struggle to assert themselves will often find themselves becoming part of a plan which they don’t want and doesn’t serve their interests. This can quickly lead to resentment and frustration which translates into increased stress.
Passive aggressive – This type of personality will often end up creating increased stress for themselves due to their habit of avoiding direct confrontation while subtly resisting the demands of others.
Aggressive – You might think that the aggressive personality would be immune to stress but, in many cases, the opposite is true. By constantly pushing forward their own agenda, the aggressive personality can constantly be in danger of taking the blame if things go wrong. Needless to say, this can result in some sleepless nights.
Making The Change
Whatever your assertiveness personality, making a change involves the same steps and processes and we’ll take a look at some of these here:
Reflection – Once you have the result of your free assertiveness test, it’s time to take a step back and examine your behaviour toward others. By doing this you can identify the types of situations that are impacted by your behaviour and also the triggers that precede it.
Assessment – Following your period of reflection, you can start to think about what you can do to improve your level of assertiveness; whether that’s learning to listen more to others or standing up for yourself more.
Practice – Many people find it helpful to ask a colleague or friend to take part in role playing exercises with them so that they can put their new knowledge into action. It can also be useful to video these sessions so that you can refer back to them when needed.
Extra help – If you feel that your assertiveness still needs a boost, a course is a great way to work on this important part of your personality. Our courses are affordable and are 100% online meaning that you can work on this vital self-improvement in your own time and in the comfort of your own home.
Investing In Change
Changing any part of your personality is something which takes time and more than a little bit of effort so don’t expect this to happen overnight. Instead, invest time and energy into making constant improvements to your assertiveness and you will slowly but surely achieve the level of authority that will change your life for the better.