Long story short: I’ve always been a rather timid and weak person when it comes to standing up for myself. I am finally gradually learning to be more assertive and make people respect my boundaries. I’ve noticed a few things, though:
Some people tell you to stand up for yourself and say “no,” yet ironically get indignant when you say “no” to them.
Some people think you can’t say “no” to them unless you have a ‘valid reason’ to say no. It’s like the burden is on *you *to convince them why you should *not *have to spend your time, etc. on their priority. “Why not?”/“Why can’t you?”
No specific advice for you. I do have a story though.
I fly with a guy occasionally who is basically a career first officer. In a previous company he got offered a command but had a heart attack during the training and shortly afterward the company went bust, so by the time his health was good he was out of a job anyway.
He told me a while back that one of the criticisms he’d received during a simulator session was that he “wasn’t assertive enough”. So he tried to work on this and be more assertive. Next time he’s in the sim he tries to be more assertive and is then criticised for having “poor CRM”. He felt like he couldn’t win.
The thing is, from my point of view, I can see that when he tries to be “assertive” it actually comes across as being aggressive. He’s not really stuck in a no win situation, he just hasn’t learned how to be assertive without ruffling feathers. To be fair this sort of thing can’t always be learned as it’s tied deeply to your personality.
Anyway, maybe you aren’t in the no win situation you think you are? Perhaps you need to learn how to say “no” in the right way. Or it could be you’re doing everything right, I don’t know.
Saying no is a skill every adult needs to learn, and it’s not taught. I have learned for one, to never ever give a reason, because they will find a way to shoot it down. Just “No, I’m afraid I can’t,” with a polite smile. If they walked all over yu before they will expect it will always be the same.
Also when people say “stand up for yourself” they mean “except to me.” Yeah, you have to get tough, or they will use you. Pick and choose the favors you actually want to do and don’t do the rest.
Your complaint makes no sense. You wouldn’t be standing up for yourself if it didn’t make people mad. What people mean when they say “Stand up for yourself” is, “I may get mad at you. Please deal with it like an adult human being instead of a mouse.”
That doesn’t make much sense. I’ve never got mad at someone for standing up for themselves and I don’t know of anyone being mad at me for standing up for myself. Standing up for yourself just means putting your needs before others when it is reasonable to do so, it doesn’t mean putting your needs before others in a way that pisses them off.
Edit: That’s not to say that if you piss someone off you’ve done something wrong, but it shouldn’t be inevitable.
We teach others how to treat us. If you’ve been passive in the past, people who know you are used to that, so they will be surprised by your change in behaviour. Obviously moving from passive to assertive behaviour means they can’t always get their way, and that takes a bit of adjusting for them. Here’s the hard part, you may find that people you thought were your friends weren’t really, they just used you because you were willing to be a doormat. They might not like the “new, assertive you”. And that’s OK because those are not the sorts of people you need in your life.
When you’ve been passive all your life, it’s hard to understand the difference between assertive and aggressive. To you, anything that wasn’t passive was perceived as aggressive. So whilst you think you are now being assertive, it’s quite possible that you are being aggressive (without meaning to). Take some time to observe people around you and learn to spot the difference between the assertive and the aggressive people. There is a wealth of resources and suggestions on the internet. If you like reading books, I’d suggest “Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No” by by Herbert Fensterheim & Jean Baer.
You may not think they (or you) got mad, but the kind of person who needs to be told regularly to stand up for themselves probably interprets any disagreement as “getting mad.” It’s not worth trying to redefine a person’s emotional terminology, when the point is that they need to accept a certain level of conflict and, well, stand up for themselves. And if the person they are dealing with really does get mad when the OP follows their advice to stand up for themselves, then pissing that person off may be inevitable. Either way, the OP needs to deal with it assertively, by, as you say, putting their own needs first (in a reasonable way), not worrying about whether or not other people are going to be upset by it.
My flying WAG is that there is a well-tried song and dance going on here.
It could be like this: Person A has confidence issues in part because they grew up around people who made him feel bad about himself. Maybe the people were alcoholics, had their own traumas, or maybe they were just jerks. Comments about “you should do things in ways you aren’t doing them now” were not offered as helpful advice for self-improvement, but to needle Person A on his deficiencies. In this scenario, there is nothing person A could do to fix an issue he was criticized about; the whole point of the criticism was simply to make him feel bad.
Later, person A becomes accustomed to that sort of thing being a “normal” social interaction and tends to fall in with people who also view that pattern as normal social interaction. So, the problem follows person A at work, private life, etc.
So, that’s my theory. But who knows, there could be a million reasons to explain a vague social problem presented without context.
There is also the very real matter of people who do view any disagreement or refusal as a challenge, or a chance to test you.
Now, the way you put it in this later post sounded better than the way you put it in the earlier one:
Since they DON’T have to get mad at you. Why should I be expected to be angered by disagreement? The person with that “man or mouse” attitude, HE would seem to me to have his own issues to deal with.
Upon which we teach them how dare they unless there’s an awesomely major justification… They also learn early how to throw things and how to punch, and we have to teach them when it is proper to do so and when it is not. That is the point, knowing when to say no/stand up for yourself, how to do it and over what, is a learned skill. As is knowing when you should let the other person’s sentiment just slide off your back and when to care.
I tried to word my post carefully, but maybe not carefully enough. I said “adult human” instead of “man” because “adult” implies calmness and rationality, where “man” (in “act like a man”) often conveys emotionally unhealthy and sexist connotations.
I don’t know what the person Velocity is dealing with is like. Maybe they are being perfectly calm while disagreeing, and Velocity is misinterpreting their emotions. Maybe they are disagreeing in a calm but emotionally heightened manner, and Velocity refers to any heightened emotion in a confrontation as “getting mad.” Maybe the person has an anger problem and is threatening to kill Velocity if Velocity doesn’t agree that The Godfather, Part II is a superior film to The Godfather. It doesn’t really matter, because Velocity experiences it as “getting mad” (whatever that means to them), and the person getting mad has, him or herself, stated that Velocity needs to “stand up for” themselves. That means (to the extent that it is advice worth listening to at all, and Velocity seems to think so) that Velocity needs to deal with the matter maturely and directy, without avoiding the issue, cringing, or needlessly acquiescing against their own interests. EVEN IF the result is the other person getting mad.
My statement that “You wouldn’t be standing up for yourself if it didn’t make people mad” was not literally true, I admit. It was rhetorical. It would be more accurate (though probably still not technically true) if I replaced “make people mad” with “involve disagreement or conflict,” but it would lose its rhetorical force, which involved adopting the language of the OP and re-framing it to make the implicit point that disagreement and conflict (even if it is perceived as or actually leads to someone getting mad) isn’t always to be avoided, and can in fact be a positive result if it is dealt with constructively.
This:
is also a good point. Maybe they want to see if Velocity will actually follow their advice, even in the face of opposition. If so, it’s kind of a dick move, but not necessarily conscious and deliberate.
This is also a good point, and one reason I made “getting mad” sound more inevitable than it is. If you’re new at standing up for yourself, you probably aren’t very good at it, and won’t always strike the right tone. It takes practice. And until you do it enough that you start to learn the difference between aggression and assertiveness, it probably is inevitable that at you’ll make some people mad. (In fact, I’d say it’s inevitable that you’ll make some people mad in life no matter what you do.) You have to have other goals in interactions besides not making people mad, and learn to deal with their anger when you do.
It sounds to me like you’re incorrectly interpreting these reactions as “being mad” or “a burden of proof” when what you’re actually hearing is "stage 2 of negotiations ".
Imagine that you’re haggling over the price of something. This is kind of how your OP would read:
You: How much is this?
Vendor: It’s $100
You: That’s too much. Bye.
Vendor: Wait, stand up for yourself. Make me an offer!
You: $20
Vendor: I can’t go that low. My five kids will go hungry!
You: But you just said to make an offer, why are you mad?
Vendor: Surely you can afford more than $20. Why can’t you come up more?
You: Why do I have to convince you of my price?
He’s not mad, he’s just expecting you to continue the negotiation. He’s not even really questioning the validity of your reasoning. It’s just something you say to indicate that we want to continue the negotiation. It’s like saying “How you doing?” or “What’s up?” when you pass someone on the street. The literal meaning of the words is different than the intended and (usually) understood stand-in for “Hello.”
Standing up for yourself is not just about a binary Yes/No, it’s also about setting the proper “price” for what people want. This is true even if there are no dollar values attached. You’re exchanging favors of non-monetary value. You even see it in language when we talk about a “big favor” or a “little favor” or in the difference between “I will” and “I promise I will”.
Of course, you don’t have to compromise. There are times to stick with No, but the linguistic structure is giving you an opportunity to negotiate.
That said, people are weird. So some of them may really get mad, but I’d be surprised if it’s as common as the OP makes it sound.
My sister had real trouble asserting herself. For that and other reasons, she started seeing a psychiatrist. It did her a lot of good, but I must admit it took getting used to. She really changed for the better, but our relationship had changed. It was all for the good, but it took adjustment.
Standing up for yourself is not just about saying, “No”. It is about being able to argue effectively for your position (whatever it is) in a manner that is respectful while not feeling guilty about it. It is a difficult skill to learn. It took me a long time to learn assertiveness, and sometimes I still have difficulty.
When came out to my parents about my atheism, I knew they would yell and try to argue that I was wrong. I was dealing with the fact that they were my parents… people who have always been my “authoritarian” figures, and they acted like it too. Until recently, throughout my adult life they treated me like I was 15. I knew it would be difficult for me to be assertive with them on this subject. When the time came to tell them, they yelled, pleaded, and tried to convince me otherwise, but I stood my ground with them, telling them that this was not a subject for negotiation. I respectfully told them that this was where I was at in my life. I held my ground with them. In the end they ended up respecting me for being honest.
There have been a couple other incidences where I’ve had to be assertive with my parents. Every time is was difficult for me, but it made things better for all of us. Today they try not to treat me like a 15 year old. It is extraordinarily difficult for them, but they are trying.
I was raised to be very respectful of authority, so it requires extra effort to disagree with someone who is “the boss” for me. I still get watery guts and sometimes have the shakes after having a strong disagreement with someone in an authority position, even if I know I’m right and it’s a discussion that needs to be had.
I’ll still have those arguments but it requires extra effort to start and extra effort not to show how much I’m freaking out on the inside.
