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1. Examine your own actions. How do you behave in situations requiring assertiveness? Do you think you tend to be passive, assertive, or aggressive in most of your communications?
2. Make a record of those situations in which you felt you could have behaved more effectively, either more assertively or less aggressively.
3. Select and focus on some specific instance when you felt you could have been more appropriately assertive. Visualise the specific details. What exactly was said? How did you feel?
4. Analyse how you reacted. Examine closely your verbal and nonverbal behavior:
   1. Eye contact - Did you look the person in the eye? Or, were your eyes downcast? Did you find yourself avoiding eye contact when you were uncomfortable?
   2. Body posture - Were you standing up straight or were you slouching? Were you leaning away from the person sheepishly? Were you holding your head up straight, as you looked the person in the eye?
   3. Gestures - Were your hand gestures fitting for the situation? Did you feel at ease? OR, were you tapping your feet or cracking your knuckles?
   4. Facial expressions - Did you have a serious expression on your face? Were you smiling or giggling uncomfortably, thereby giving the impression that you were not really serious?
   5. Voice tone, inflection, volume - Did you speak in a normal voice tone? Did you whisper timidly? Did you raise your voice to the point of stressful screeching? Did you sound as if you were whining?
   6. Timing - It is best to make an appropriately assertive response just after a remark is made or an incident happens. It’s also important to consider whether a particular situation requires assertiveness. AT times, it might be best to remain silent and just let go.
   7. Content - What you say in your assertive response is obviously important. DID you choose your words carefully? Did your response have the impact you wanted it to have? Why or why not?
5. Identify a role model and examine how he or she handled a situation requiring assertiveness. What exactly happened during the incident? What words did your model use that were particularly effective? What aspects of his or her non/verbal behavior helped to get points across?
6. Identify a range of other new assertive responses that could address the original problem situation you targeted. What other words could you have used? What nonverbal behavior's might have been more effective?
7. Picture yourself in the identified problematic situation. It often helps to close your eyes and concentrate. Step by step, imagine how you could handle the situation more assertively.
8. Practice the way you envisioned yourself being more assertive. On the one hand, you can target a real-life situation that remains unresolved. On the other hand, you can ask a friend, teacher or counselor to help you role-play the situation. Role playing provides effective mechanisms for practicing responses before you have to use them spontaneously in real life.
9. Once again, review your new assertive responses. Emphasis your strong points and try to remedy your flaws.
10. Continue practicing steps 7, 8 and 9 until your newly developed assertive approach feels comfortable and natural to you.
11. Try out your assertiveness in a real-life situation.
12. Continue to expand your assertive behavior repertoire until assertiveness becomes part of your personal interactive style. You can review the earlier steps and try them out with an increasingly wider rage of problematic situations.
13. Give yourself a pat on the back when you succeed in becoming more assertive. It’s not easy changing long-standing patterns of behavior. Focus on and revel in the good feelings you experience as a result of your successes.

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