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Matthew Reiskytl

Dr. Liu

COMM221 – Interpersonal Communication

08 March 2019

Verbal Communication Plan

Assertiveness is the ability to pursue one’s own best interests without denying a partner’s

rights. However, not too far from healthy assertiveness is the expressing of one’s interests while

denying the rights of others by blaming, judging, and evaluating other people, or aggressiveness.

This is a skill I need to improve on. I am generally bad at standing up for myself at all, but often

when I do decide to stand up for myself, I cross the line from assertive to aggressive very quickly

and easily.

To start off my verbal communication plan, I am going to make an effort to assert myself

when I feel like I have been wronged. My entire life, I have been a conflict avoider at pretty

much all costs. This was not healthy, because then I would hold onto grudges and eventually it

would all come out at once in an outburst. More recently, I have been working on not avoiding

conflict, but dealing with it. This verbal plan will help me to do that. When someone mistreats

me or hurts me, I plan on confronting that person.

Secondly, and arguably more importantly, when I do assert myself in this way, I need to

stay on my own turf and not cross over into denying the other person’s rights by judging or

blaming them. In order to do this, I plan on using the books method of asserting myself, through

describing, disclosing, identifying effects, waiting, and listening. Because of my attachment to

conflict avoidance, it is hard for me, when asserting myself to just stop at some point and listen

to what the other person has to say. I plan on working on this, by simply limiting myself to only
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a few sentences to describe how I am feeling, and then just stopping and giving the other person

the floor to take in what I said and speak back.

Overall, I need to work on assertiveness, but mostly learning the line between

assertiveness and aggressiveness. In order to do this, I must practice it by actually asserting

myself and must stop avoiding conflict as I have in the past. And while doing so, I need to be

mindful of the other person’s feelings and not be too self-centered not to stop and listen, giving

them the opportunity to assert themselves as well.