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ASSERTIVE MOTIVATOR - SKILL 3 OF 4

3. Negative Assertion. The same point can be made about the third assertiveness technique: Negative Assertion. You use this technique in situations where you have "gone ahead" and later discovered you'd been wrong; perhaps you've reinforced someone at the wrong time or in the wrong way, or made some error of judgment in your department. It happens to the best of us. Negative Assertion can help you absorb the mistakes.

The trick in using this skill, as in using Fogging, is in maintaining an even, unemotional style while you are acknowledging something uncomfortable about yourself: It's really a matter of being able to isolate yourself from your actions or, as Catholic theologians have always pointed out, in separating the sinner from the sin.  When you negatively assert that you have done something wrong, you are not saying, "I'm a miserable wretch and I ought to be drawn and quartered immediately." You're saying simply, "I made an error, I'm sorry, and I'll try not to do that again."

The difficulty in using this skill is that people are not accustomed to admitting responsibility for actions without feeling guilty about the mistake. Negative Assertion is a way for managers - who often feel they have to be right all the time - to acknowledge their own fallibility.

I can explain how Negative Assertion works by using an example from one of my company's recent seminars. It was a "communication improvement" seminar for managers in a steel-pressing plant, and one of the seminar participants was the assistant plant manager. One Friday afternoon, preoccupied with a rush order, he neglected to check a pressure gauge on a piece of machinery. As a result the machine malfunctioned, and was out of operation for two hours on Saturday morning.  It was not a dangerous or serious mistake, but it did cost the company some time, and when the manager came in on Monday, he was called on the carpet by his boss.

There were a number of traditional ways in which he could have reacted. He could have practiced the crablike art of trouble-avoidance by simply disclaiming responsibility - by shifting the blame to someone else or to the machine itself.  Psychologists call this approach to criticism "denial." It's used all the time, of course, even though the results of using it are universally bad.

Faced with his error, the assistant manager could also have responded with the fight or flight syndrome, either passively accepting blame and begging for forgiveness (flight) or standing up to his boss by dismissing the criticism as irrelevant (fight).

The manager in our seminar, since he had been trained in Assertiveness, did none of these things. He simply acknowledged his error, apologized for the oversight, and went back to doing his Job. He didn't try to shift accountability somewhere else, or plead the unexpected rush order as an excuse, or whine about how overworked he was, or offer to commit hara-kiri. As a result, he told us, "My boss shrugged the whole thing off. Said
I should be more careful in the future, and I agreed with him, and that was that. I know from past experience what his reaction would have been if I had weasled around it. He would have been on my case for a month."

So the real lesson of Negative Assertion, like that of Fogging, is that resistance to external attacks can sometimes merely intensify those attacks, while absorbing the punches and going on often seems to be the best way to come out a winner.

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