interpersonal skills

Relationship circles – The most important diagram of your life
Research shows that if you had to choose one variable that influences the quality of your life the most, it would be relationships. It’s not money or fame or good looks, it’s relationships.

People who are deeply connected to their friends, family, co-workers and even the local community live longer, are healthier, happier, more fulfilled and live a better life in general. The good life.

And it’s not the number of friends on social networks or the marital status; it’s the quality of relationships that counts the most. You can be married but completely lonely, you can have many acquaintances but no deep connections.

Although please keep in mind that having quality relationships doesn’t mean a complete absence of fights and disagreements. A perfect relationship doesn’t exist.

The idea of a quality relationship is more in building strong codependent bonds, being on a shared life mission, following common values and goals, cultivating a sense of trust, knowing that you can count on others and that they can count on you.

It’s about doing things together that lead to joyful moments. It’s about being fully accepted the way you are with all your positives and negatives.

If we all intuitively know that relationships are that important, then why don’t we invest more effort into building quality bonds with other people? The answer is quite simple: because it’s hard.

It’s as hard as following a healthy diet or regularly saving money. Relationships do bring color to life, but they are also fluid, messy and complicated. They are hard.

It takes courage, dedication and consistency to build a quality relationship. There are no shortcuts or pauses. The moment you stop investing in a relationship, it starts to wither.

On top of that, you must first build a great capacity for love, meaning that you must first love yourself before you can build deep relationships.

The reasons why you must first love yourself are at least the following:
- The more you truly accept yourself, the more you can accept other people
- The more you love yourself, the more forgiving you can be towards other people
- The better you understand emotions, the more constructively you can express them
- The stronger you are emotionally, the easier you can deal with disappointments and people’s imperfections
A balance between quality and quantity

When it comes to the quantity of relationships, we know the approximate limit. Dunbar’s number states that we have a biological limit of maintaining around 150 social interactions at the same time.

Among these 150, all six fundamental types (six pillars) of relationships should be included:
- Primary family – mother, father, siblings
- Secondary family – spouse, kids
- Friends
- Superiors
- Coworkers
- Mentors
All the pillars are important in maximizing the value that comes from relationships. It’s hard to understand your roots if you don’t have a good relationship at least with some members of your primary family.

Choosing the right spouse is one of the most important decisions in your life. Kids are the most important legacy you leave behind, and friends are the people you want to share your interests with.

On the other hand, it’s hard to live a happy life if you hate your job and don’t enjoy the company of your coworkers. One very important indicator of how well you feel at your job is whether you have a few good friends there. And if you do some kind of meaningful work.

The math is pretty simple. You spend at least 1/3 of your life at work – work is basically your second home.

That’s why the following career directions are very important: don’t choose a job, but a boss. A boss from whom you can learn, whom you respect and who knows how to bring out the best in you.

Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. And finding a good mentor or a coach can fast‑track your progress in any area of life. All these directions tackle business relationships.

Now let’s jump from quantity to quality.

The road to quality lies in a proactive approach to relationships

As with everything in life, being proactive pays dividends. Relationships are no exception to that.

In general terms, being proactive means that you don’t just react to whatever is happening in your life, but you systematically, deliberately and assertively respond and find the most constructive way to meet your goals and needs.

Being reactive in relationships means that you don’t put any conscious effort into relationships or interactions. You put your relationships and communication on autopilot.

You let a “greater force” dictate who you meet, you let every relationship run its course, and when a disagreement occurs, you react in kind – you let your feelings dictate the outcome of a disagreement.

On the other hand, if you’re proactive in relationships, you consciously decide who new you want to meet, with whom you want to spend more time, into which relationships you will put more effort and so on.

In communication, you don’t only react (bluntly express your feelings), rather you express your feelings in a constructive manner, which can only be done when you’re feeling and thinking at the same time. In other words, you’re being proactive.

A very good start to relationship proactivity is to map all the people who are present in your life.

Source: Inclusion Europe

List all the 150 or so people that interact with on a regular basis and then arrange them in four categories; actually, in four different types of circles, based on how close they are to you:
- The circle of intimacy – These are the people you can’t imagine your life without. They know your private self quite well, you spend a lot of time interacting with them – you usually live with them and you trust them the most.
- The circle of friendship – These are the people who are also close to you, but there is less intimacy involved. They don’t physically live with you, share a bathroom with you or support you financially. But you do share your dreams, good news and troubles with them.
- The circle of participation – Most coworkers, local community, acquaintances and other people that you interact with on a frequent basis (but are not your friends) fall into this category. All the friends you start neglecting can be quickly outcast into this circle.
- The circle of exchange – The last circle contains people with whom you do transactions. They can be your doctors, a hairdresser, home cleaner, maybe even a customer, and so on.
You can use two different colors for business and personal relationships.

In the next step, draw an arrow to each person. Indicate if you want to move them more inwards (build a closer relationship) or if you want to create more distance, maybe even cutting them off (if a person is an energy vampire).

The intimate relationships circle – the most important people in your life

It’s a fun exercise to draw the four relationship circles (intimacy, friendship, participation, exchange) and map all the people in your life into circles. Adding arrows next to each person can give you a very good insight into where to invest more effort and where less.

But you can even take the exercise a step further, drawing a new diagram. In the second diagram, you can zoom into the intimate relationship circle and analyze which people are really the closest to you in your life.

It’s not an easy exercise to do, but it is a very valuable one. Take a piece of paper and draw a dot in the center. You can write “me” above the dot. As you have probably figured out, the dot represents you.

Then around the dot, start drawing circles. The circle closest to the dot is the person who is closest to you in your life. The second circle represents the second closest person, and so on.

You can write a name for each circle. There can’t be two people equally close to you and that can lead to a few hard choices to make.

Nevertheless, you can get a really good overview of the people who contribute to the quality of your life the most. Try to draw up to 7 – 10 circles, and you will have a very good overview of which relationships have the greatest influence on your life.

You can add another dimension to the diagram – do not make the space between the circles equally wide. Draw a circle further from the dot if there is a greater distance involved in a relationship. Look at the graph below, representing five people with different levels of closeness to a person:

After drawing the intimate circles, you can analyze at least three things:
- How close did you draw the first circle? Is it too close to the dot, too far away, or just the right distance, illustrating secure attachment?
- If you draw such a diagram every year, you can observe how much closer you get with some people and more distant with others. That’s pretty normal, since relationships are a very fluid thing.
- Most importantly, you can be very proactive about which relationships you wish to put more effort in and bring closer to your center. You can draw an arrow of how close you want to move a certain relationship.
Narrowing the relationship gap based on the relationship circles analysis

Now that you’ve mapped all the relationships, including arrows pointing to the people with whom you want to build a better connection, another question comes to mind – how can you narrow the relationship gap between you and the chosen people? There are many ways how you can undertake this challenge.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Build multidimensional relationships

We tend to do the same things and open the same topics with the same people. To build new relationship dimensions, you must do new things and open new conversation topics with the same people.

Bring new touching points into a relationship and the bond will become stronger. It’s called building multidimensional relationships.

2. Replace screen time with people time

The best move you can make to improve your relationships is to turn off the TV and your mobile phone. Dedicate your full attention to people in your presence.

Eliminate all the distractions and dedicate your full heart to the person who sits next to you.

3. Make online communication an add-on to real communication

Interestingly, if you have only an online relationship with somebody, the connection can never be as good as in real life. But if you have a real-life relationship, opening new communication channels can deepen your relationship.

So, first meet people in real life often enough, and then make the online communication an add-on to personal interaction.

4. Do things together with people

People who do things together, stay together. Invite people on adventures, have hobbies and goals in common, do sports with people, offer them support, make time together meaningful and active.

Only gossiping over a cup of coffee is far from enough to build a good relationship.

5. Learn to properly regulate your emotions

How well you regulate your emotions is the greatest predictor of keeping a quality relationship in the long term. Expressing emotions in an unhealthy way (or stifling them, for that matter) builds tension that can quickly escalate and permanently damage a relationship.

Thus, learning to express negative emotions in a healthy way is one of the best relationship skills one can possess.

Relationships are too important to leave to chance. For sure, there must be spontaneity involved, but only if you combine it with proactivity can you truly build meaningful and quality relationships.

Stop neglecting your friends. Find a way through family disputes. Reach out to people you haven’t spoken to in years. Put real effort into relationships. Aim for new relationship depths that will lead to the most memorable moments of your life. It’s the best investment you can make.

The key lessons on how to become a great leader of any organization

An organization is only as good as its leaders. It’s absolutely true that too much hierarchy can kill the company’s creativity and productivity, but so does an absence of great leadership.

Some companies, like Treehouse, experimented with a flat organization without any leadership at all, and soon found out that people felt adrift, like lonely islands without support, when they weren’t being led properly.

But becoming a good leader is not an easy job. Developing yourself into a great leader is one of the toughest challenges one can set for themselves. That’s why you can find thousands of books and research articles written on the topic.

Nevertheless, we still don’t have a simple and clear formula for becoming a good leader. I guess we could really say that leadership is like beauty: hard to define, but you know it when you see it.

No matter how much entertaining the comparison of leadership and beauty is, it would be foolish to stop at that. We definitely know several ways how one can become a better leader.

I cherry‑picked the best ones, describing the key personality and behavioral traits of great leaders.

You become a great leader by leading people

Let’s start with the most basic, fundamental mistake (new) leaders make. If you are a leader, your job is to lead people.

That means the majority of your time must be spent dealing with people. Many leaders never make the transition from doing their operational work to actually leading people.

Before taking a leadership position, most people excel at a specific job role. They are exceptional at marketing, sales, finance, product development or any other similar role. Because they excel at something, the natural course of things is to be constantly promoted until at some point they take the leadership position.

But succeeding as a leader doesn’t mean doing the same things you were doing before you became a leader. If the organization is small, you might not have the luxury of only leading people, but part of your daily schedule should definitely be dedicated only to leading people.

As a leader, you need to first set an inspiring vision and outstanding strategy for your team, and then you have to lead them. Yes, actually lead them.

You have to motivate people, empower them, hold them accountable for delivering and meeting certain standards, you need to coach them, see and develop their potential, and so on. It’s impossible to be a good leader if you don’t show care for the people you lead.

Here are some good questions to ask yourself:

Do you have a clear vision, strategy and operational plan for your team?
How much of your time do you dedicate to actually leading instead of doing operational work?
What’s your system of making sure people deliver results?
How much time do you spend motivating, empowering and coaching your teammates?

Become a great leader

Building relationships and delivering results

There’s an endless debate over whether a leader should be an autocratic or democratic one, more result- or relationship‑oriented. There’s a very straightforward answer to that, based on research.

A leader should be both. An outstanding leader knows how to build good relationships (democratic orientation), but also makes sure that results are delivered (autocratic orientation). It’s not one or the other, but one and the other.

That’s a hard transition for most leaders.

Leaders who are relationship‑oriented are terrified of setting clear goals, boundaries in relationships, giving honest feedback and holding people accountable for their work. They are terrified that people will stop liking them if they became more result‑driven.

On the other hand, people who are result‑oriented have a deep‑rooted fear of showing the human side of themselves. Showing vulnerability, trusting people, having a friendly talk … these are things that productivity‑oriented leaders equate with losing respect. But consequently, they never develop their true potential as leaders.

People will like you even more as a leader if you actually lead them to the results. People will respect you even more as a leader if you show that you care about them.

In both cases, you have to start developing “the other side” of every great leader. If you care more about relationships than goals, you have to make the first small step towards holding people accountable for results.

Homework

A very good first step is to make a list of small behaviors that bother you with people that you lead (spending time on social media, taking too many smoke breaks etc.) and communicating with them clearly that they’re crossing the boundaries. Relationship‑oriented leaders find that terrifying, but once they set boundaries for the first time, it feels very freeing.

It’s not much different with result‑oriented leaders. Noticing that one of the team members has a bad day and asking them what is going on by showing genuine interest for their moodiness might be a great way for people to start feeling more welcome and appreciated.

Nobody wants to feel only as a workhorse at a job. If you are a completely result‑oriented person, you might soon find that people will respect you even more if you show your human side.

When looking for balance between being relationship- and result‑oriented, the book The first 90 days by Michael D. Watkins offers a very good guideline.

As a leader, you will build your credibility if you are:

Demanding but can be satisfied
Approachable but not familiar
Determined but reasonable
Focused but flexible
Executive but don’t cause too big shocks
Prepared to make difficult decisions that are also considerate

One more good notion is to be more democratic when you’re setting the strategy and gathering ideas, and more autocratic in the execution phase.

The major leadership credibility killers

People love to be led by great leaders, but they can also quickly identify poor leaders and leaders who are only enjoying formal power without having any clue of what real leadership is.

With poor leaders in position, organizational problems tend to multiply. Team members become more and more unsatisfied, politics kicks in, people stop performing, and relationships starts to crack.

Without a great leader, the organizational environment starts to become toxic (unless people are extremely mature). Poor leadership is a negative spiral, very uncomfortable for all the people involved.

Here’s why: individual behavior is always a function of personality traits and environmental culture. The worse the culture, the worse the behavior of people. The worse the behavior of people, the worse the culture, and so on. And bad leaders are in the middle of all this.

Organizational culture eats every plan or strategy for breakfast. Leaders shape organizational culture by what they allow and what they don’t allow.

With bad leadership and consequently poor organizational culture, problems start to pile up. And bad leaders have the tendency to start running away. Obviously avoiding problems like the plague is one of the major leadership credibility killers. But there are several others.

The major leadership credibility killers:

Trying to do everything by yourself as a leader and micro‑managing people
Not making any difficult decisions at all
Keeping people in wrong positions and not firing the rotten apples
Not admitting your own and the team’s weaknesses and finding consulting help
Not developing and empowering people, and not breeding new young leaders in team
Not leading people situationally, based on their competences, attitude and tasks (as a leader you can use directing, coaching, supporting and delegating accordingly)

There is more interesting thing that I noticed.

Many people who become leaders start exploiting their position by, for example, starting their own distracting pet projects, wasting time on unnecessary meetings, spending time on coffee breaks, and doing everything except the thing they should be doing – strategizing and leading people.

4F response – the ultimate challenge leaders have to overcome

If you want to become a great leader, you must first know how to lead yourself. A big portion of leading yourself represents managing your emotions. And managing emotions is hard for leaders.

Here’s why: as a leader, you constantly have to deal with problems, issues and people. The people are usually an especially big challenge, since they’re not robots with performance specifications who blindly follow orders, but rather have very different capacities, attitudes, opinions, respect for authority, and so on.

In other words, being a leader means you’re in a constant state of crisis, dealing with numerous challenges and issues. That’s emotionally hard. Every crisis, problem, threat or misbehavior can throw you into the 4F mode – fight, flight, freeze, fawn.

And evolutionarily speaking, we can all quickly get thrown into one of the 4F states. Consequently, many leaders start living in one of the 4F modes. Their leadership style becomes one of 4F toxic emotional states. You’ve probably seen them many times:

Fight mode – the aggressive, authoritative leader, feared by people
Flight mode – the anxious leader, constantly creating crisis and drowning in work
Freeze mode – the leader who buries their head in the sand, and is completely passive and numb
Fawn mode – the leader who plays politics, tries to please everyone, but pleases no one

We know from movies that every leader in any of the 4F states, gets thrown out of the game sooner or later.

The anxious leader always loses first, because when you lose your head, you lose any leadership or even following capability. The fight mode leader is usually the wicked character that everybody wants to defeat, or goes with his head through the wall until he gets killed. People who freeze become a burden for everybody else. And politics and pleasing others works only for so long.

The solution lies in turning 4F states into an advantage as a leader. It takes an extraordinary emotional and mind management to achieve that, but when you do, you can really become an extraordinary leader, since not many leaders are in that club.

You can achieve that by developing emotional resilience, managing your own sensibility, and learning techniques to get yourself out of the 4F mode as quickly as possible, if there’s no survival danger present.

When you manage to achieve that, you can turn the 4F response into your advantage as a leader. Below is a table showing the direction in which one must develop the 4F biological responses to become an exceptionally great leader:

Fight	Flight	Freeze	Fawn
Assertiveness	Disengagement	Acute awareness	Love & Service
Boundaries	Healthy retreat	Mindfulness	Compromise
Courage	Industriousness	Poised Readiness	Listening
Moxie	Know-how	Peace	Fairness
Leadership	Perseverance	Presence	Peacemaking

Develop yourself as a leader or let other people lead

Carrying a leadership badge or possessing an executive title absolutely sounds nice. It can be a great career achievement – unless it’s only on paper. Nobody wants that, because leaders with only formal power do devastating damage to the organization and all the people involved.

You don’t become a great leader by being promoted and earning the title. You become a great leader when you decide deep down that you truly want to become a great leader and you’re determined to develop your leadership potential no matter what.

Earning a leadership status just because you excelled as an expert in a certain role for so long is far from making you deserving of being called a great leader.

Thus, the first important question to ask yourself is if you truly, deeply want to be or become a leader. If the answer is yes, make sure you start to strategically develop your leadership capacities and that you actually lead people.

On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with staying an expert in your field, taking a consulting role or finding another way to advance your career. Many times, an even more important skill than leading people is having the capacity to be led.

Lead, follow or get out of the way.

Let’s end by talking about Google’s extensive research study on what makes great leaders. The leaders who know how to deliver outstanding results and lead teams where people feel appreciated, feel much happier and retain better.

Like we said, it’s a healthy mixture of being result- and relationship‑driven, and making sure you’re not leading out of any of the 4F states.

Google Manager Behavior

Here are eight traits you should develop to become a great leader, according to Google:

Be a good coach
Empower your team and don’t micromanage
Express interest in your team members’ success and well-being
Be productive and result-oriented
Be a good communicator and listen to your team
Help your employees with career development
Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
Have technical skills so you can advise the team

The only way to develop as a leader is to constantly improve. Improving yourself means finding better ways to achieve results and changing your attitudes and behaviors.

As a final note, that means great leaders must have a great capacity for self-reflection and constantly find new better ways to communicate and behave towards the people they lead. So as a leader, start by asking yourself what you will stop doing and what you will start doing to lead your people better.

How to become more assertive with a few simple exercises

People who are naturally assertive had their needs properly met when they were young. Thus, they developed a sense of trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, clear identity and great capacity for love. All that gives them the inner strength to go after their goals.

Without a healthy upbringing environment that’s responsive to one’s needs, without strong role models and loving relationships in youth, it’s almost impossible to develop into a healthy assertive person.

Unassertiveness is based on feelings of mistrust, shame, guilt, doubt, inferiority and identity confusion, or because your id (aggressiveness) or superego (passiveness) are too strong, as we have learned in the first part of the article.

But even if you aren’t naturally assertive, you have the power to change that. And now, in the second part of the article, we’ll look at exactly how to do that.

How to become more assertive

The general overview of how to become more assertive

If you want to be healthy assertive, you need a new mental and emotional framework that leads to rational behavior and assertive agency. To achieve that, you ought to:

Have optimistic expectations that the environment will respond positively to your needs, under three conditions:
1. There is no need escalation (greed, gluttony etc.), inflation (neediness, lack of focus etc.) or perversion (weird fetishes etc.). Environment usually reacts negatively to these things.
2. You clearly communicate your needs, since other people can’t read your mind.
3. You know there will always be some some haters and blockers who will work against you. It’s part of the reality and how life is designed.
Not emotionally overreact in case of rejection or conflict. Rejection is unpleasant for everyone, but it shouldn’t catch you in a mental cage with emotional flashbacks. Many times people react positively to our desires and wishes, but rejections are also a normal part of life.
Easily find alternative ways of satisfying your needs when you can’t directly satisfy them – either by adjusting your strategy or through sublimation of needs. That’s something we’ll learn in this article.

If you want to achieve such a psychological state, you must practice the courage to take initiative, develop a strong sense of trust in yourself and the environment, acquire a set of competences to match your desires and goals, and possess an abundance mindset to stay flexible about how you’ll satisfy your needs.

Let’s look at a few steps (assertiveness exercises) for achieving all that.

Wish list

Step 1: Develop awareness of your emotions and desires

First of all, if you want to be assertive, you must be as aware as possible of your needs and have a clear picture of your desires. If you weren’t raised in an environment where your major needs were met in a healthy and respectful manner, you probably have a tendency to repress your needs.

Repression ensures that wishes incompatible with reality, your superego or any other impulses, remain unconscious or disguised. For example, you start believing you don’t need to be close to other people, that family members can’t hurt you if they’re mean to you, that serious relationships or kids are not something for you or that material life is unimportant. We all have the same needs and they can either be fulfilled or repressed.

There are several things you can do to become clearly aware of your wishes and desires:

Go through all the needs listed in theories of human needs. As we said, universal needs are those we all have, you can’t escape from them, even if you’re in monk mode. Specifically list all the goals and desires you have based on different categories of needs. Make yourself a wish list and constantly add new things as you identify them.
Pay special attention to those universal needs that you think are not important to you. Examples are: I don’t care about money, it’s not important to me if people forget about my birthday, I didn’t want that promotion anyway etc. Many times, you use self-deception to make things that you want but don’t have less desirable (called “sour grapes” in psychology) and things that you do have but are not that important to you more desirable (“sweet lemons”). Start exploring why denial is present.
Prepare a vision list of everything you want to experience in life. Try to list every detail that you would like to have, do or create. Dream of having no financial boundaries. Pay special attention to the needs where there is inflation, escalation or perversion present.
Connect your severe negative emotions (anger, anxiety, depression, envy etc.) to the fear of your specific needs not being met. Try to take the analysis a step further and figure out which of your needs weren’t meet when you were a child and are now causing you emotional knots.

Without knowing your needs, you have zero chances of living a fulfilling, joyful, happy and satisfactory life. So first identify your needs.

Assetivness transfer

Step 2: Identify areas where you are healthy assertive and where you are not

Being healthy assertive is not an all-or-nothing personality characteristic. Usually there are some life situations where you are very assertive, and others where you’re not. For example, you might be very assertive intellectually, but a complete coward when it comes to talking to the opposite sex.

In other words, take a list of the universal human needs and categorize them:

Needs that you have no problem meeting in a healthy and respectful manner
Needs with which you are under-assertive or over-assertive
- You get aggressive in case of a conflict
- You distract yourself with something else
- You run away and isolate yourself
- You automatically submit to others
Needs that you’re confused about, you have no clear emotional or behavioral pattern
Needs that you most probably repress (you can’t know that, but make a few assumptions about what kind of needs are being repressed based the universal human needs lists)

There are also a few very common life situations where people lack assertiveness. As we said, that originates from shame, guilt, mistrust and feelings of low self-worth. Below is the table detailing where people usually have problems with healthy assertiveness.

	Under-assertiveness	Over-assertiveness
Physical space	Not taking up physical space with your body Always withdrawing from other people Letting people ahead of you in lines Being afraid of protecting yourself	Bumping into other people Cutting other people in lines and on the road Physically threatening to other people
Establishing new personal or business relationships	Being afraid of introducing yourself to new people Being afraid of joining new social groups and meetups Never making a cold call Never writing cold e-mails for a new partnership Weak handshake	Introducing yourself to everyone Being at all social events Bragging when you meet somebody new Too strong handshake
Intimate and sexual activities	Having no physical contact with people (except handshakes) Staying in a friendzone forever Never escalating to the first hug, first kiss and first sex Not expressing what you like in bed	Hugging and kissing everyone Having only sexual relationships with the opposite sex Minding only your own sexual desires and needs
Setting boundaries	Never saying no Not telling your partner what you like or don’t like in relationships Letting people talk bad about you	Creating distance with constant criticizing Threatening with no Controlling other people
Public appearance	Being afraid of public speaking Never asking a question in groups Being ashamed of dancing Hating your birthday party	Wanting to be in the center of attention all the time Being loud and noisy just to get attention
Authorities (formal and informal)	Never having a different opinion than the boss Being afraid of public authorities	Always having a different opinion than the boss, no matter what s/he does Working against the boss, as a matter of principle
Money matters, sales and negotiations	Never asking for a raise Invoicing less than you deserve Never taking back the change Being afraid of selling and marketing yourself Never negotiating	Buying attention with money Wanting to earn more than others no matter what Always selling and marketing your skills Always negotiating
Creativity	Never sharing your ideas Not doing anything creative Never trying anything new	Seeing your ideas as the best Doing everything for that “like” on social networks Always going for new things
	You, you, you	Me, me, me

Find one or two situations where you are healthy assertive (not passive or aggressive) and all the situations where you’re not healthy assertive.

In the next step, what you can do is to practice transferring your healthy assertiveness from one area to other areas where you have problems being assertive. You can model your assertiveness best in order to use it in all the life situations that require assertiveness. The best way to achieve that is with practice.

Step 3: Face your fears and practice being assertive with moderate self-exposure

The best way to become more assertive is to practice assertiveness. In situations where you are a wussy, it’s time to stand up, and in situations where you’re an asshole, it’s time to cool down.

In a way, you must start performing experiments and see how your environment reacts when you’re being healthy assertive – considering your own needs and the needs of other people.

As you will see, a few things are very likely to happen:

With new people, you will get a positive response more often than you think. If you don’t leave a big tip or if you ask a question or state your opinion, people won’t immediately dislike you. Your questions will be nicely answered and your food will still be served in a restaurant. Nothing terrible happens if you communicate your needs in a healthy way (as it might have in your upbringing environment).
From time to time you will get the cold shoulder or a negative response. But you will quickly see that rejections are not as painful as you imagine them to be in your head. With a fast “no”, you can move on and find people who better resonate with your true self. Rejection is also a form of an emotional flashback. You must become aware that you are not a helpless little child anymore, and that you are not in the same situation as you were when young. You have options now. With every emotional flashback you can also easier explore your past.
By practicing assertiveness, you’ll feel better in your skin. You’ll start to feel your personal power, you won’t feel guilt or shame when going after your needs, and your negative feelings will start to fade away.
In your existing relationships, some people will respect you much more if you become more assertive and consequently healthy relationships will become even stronger. People you have toxic relationship with might get confused and angry. But you don’t want to have toxic relationships in your life anyway.

When you’re practicing assertiveness, start small. As an experiment, do a small assertive action that’s currently not something you would naturally do. A great example is advice for guys to become more assertive in dating. The most common advice is to start small with self-exposure.

Practical examples

Example of practicing assertiveness in case of dating for men:

Ask a girl you like what time it is
Ask ten girls what time it is
Ask a girl for directions and her opinion on what to do in town
Ask ten girls the same thing
Ask one girl for an e-mail, and then ten girls

Exposure therapy is a very popular cognitive-behavioral treatment for anxiety disorders. As part of the therapy, you’re slowly confronting the things that get you anxious. As you begin to face your fears, your anxiety naturally decreases during exposure.

Below are a few ideas how you can practice exposure to develop assertiveness:

Join a meetup and introduce yourself to a few people
Say your first no; do it by e-mail if it’s easier the first time
Ask for a raise when you complete a demanding project
Don’t run away from conflict, but try to manage it
Find one thing you like about your boss and compliment it (if you dislike your boss)
Smile the next time somebody cuts you off

A very important part of this step is to work on your communication skills. How you communicate your needs does matter a lot.

If you don’t communicate them, people won’t know. Many times, we assume that other people know our needs, that they can read our minds. Well, people don’t. You can often be misunderstood as well. Good communication skills come with healthy assertiveness and vice versa.

Assertivness killers

Step 4: Pay attention to guilt and shame

As we said, under-assertiveness is often based on guilt and shame, and over-assertiveness is based on need inflation and escalation. Guilt and shame are especially sneaky emotions. The purpose of guilt is to meet your moral standard. You feel guilty when you assume you’ve done something wrong.

But false guilt, with an overly strong superego, is always looking for people to please and rules to keep. Shame is even worse. Feelings of shame are based on the belief that you’re bad, flawed and not lovable.

With strong feelings of shame, it often even comes to emotional substitution, and you prefer to feel anger with other people rather than shame with yourself. If you are a very angry person, you probably have strong issues with shame.

When practicing self-exposure before doing an assertive act, you will probably feel fear and doubt. But fears are the compass for where you need to grow in life, and doubt kills more dreams than failure or rejection ever will.

Comfort learning panic zones With fear and doubt, you are constantly caught in an emotional cage. That’s not life but slavery. So expose yourself to the point where fear and doubt are still manageable. You must get yourself out of the comfort zone into the learning zone, not the panic zone.

And after doing an assertive act, you will probably feel shame or guilt. You will feel like that because you assume it’s not okay to have your needs fulfilled. Deep down you think you don’t deserve it. That will happen, especially if you’re rejected.

There are two things you can do. First, with every small exposure, you will feel less fear, doubt, shame or guilt. You will realize that it feels good to meet your needs and that it’s perfectly okay to do so. Thus, be patient and persistent and give yourself a tap on your back every time you expose yourself and show your vulnerability.

Even more importantly, feeling shame or guilt is an excellent opportunity for self-reflection and healthy self-talk. It’s an opportunity to untie some of your emotional knots from the past. If you find that the feelings of shame, guilt or fear are too strong, you might even decide to enter a professional therapy.

Anyway, there are several things you want to achieve with self-reflection:

Reinforce the healthy belief that you have needs like everyone else and that it’s your basic right to meet them in a healthy and respectful manner.
Dig deep why you really feel guilt or shame; what kind of errors were made in your upbringing that put a tough emotional burden on your assertiveness.
It’s a great chance to talk back to your inner critic and practice self-mothering; in other words, you consciously decide to take good care of yourself and your needs.
Acknowledge guilt or shame, make room for it, write down why it’s so tough, talk to other people and then let it go.

But if feelings of shame, guilt (or even greed) are too strong, absolutely get professional help. There’s nothing wrong with that, all you want to do is to free yourself of the emotional cage.

Exercise for assertivness

Step 5: Work on your body language and do sports

Your assertiveness is expressed not only with words, but even more so with your body language. That means that by improving your body language, you can also improve your assertiveness.

As you probably know, your inner state and body language are closely connected. Next to that, your body language carries more than half of the influence of how you’ll be perceived (50 % what you say, 50 % your body language and tone of voice).

Here is what healthy assertive body language looks like – you:

Feel comfortable taking space with your body
Keep a nice posture in a confident pose
Speak slowly with a relaxed and clear voice
Go for direct eye contact and smile
Listen and seek other opinions
Express your thoughts and emotions
Have physical contact with other people (when appropriate)
And when things get tough, breathe and calm yourself, other people and the atmosphere down

You can always practice body language in the mirror or with your close friends. Rehearse and do role‑playing. Model people you admire. Read articles on body language. Improving your body language will have a great positive impact on your assertiveness.

Besides paying attention to my body language, exercising has really helped me to become more assertive. I would say sport is the number one thing that helped me with assertiveness and finding the right balance between passivity and aggression.

In sports, if you’re too aggressive towards your body, you get injured. And performing any sport, gets you out of a passive mode by default. So if you want to become more assertive, put on your trainers and get your ass to the gym.

Exercising has also many other benefits. It’s the best way to stay healthy and prevent cognitive decline. Besides exercising, don’t also forget about a healthy diet and food supplements such as ActivatedYou, to achieve maximum overall wellness.

Relationships with friends

Step 6: Develop your social skills

There is a basic, primal trust in yourself and life on the emotional level that you can only develop in your youth or over time with hard work on yourself in the adult age; and then we also have the trust that comes from mastering a specific skill.

When it comes to assertiveness, social skills are the ones you need. The basic rule is that any skill can be developed. Logically, you can become more assertive by developing your social skills. It’s that simple.

Read 10 different dating books, if you’re afraid of speaking to the opposite sex
Join a public speaking course, if you’re terrified of public appearances
Practice negotiating with a friend, if you’re afraid of heated discussions
Study how to manage difficult people, if you have a difficult boss that makes you scared

Leveling up your social game will greatly help you in becoming more assertive. Just because you’re not a born people person, it doesn’t mean you can’t become one.

World of abundance

Step 7: The abundance mindset

The abundance mindset can also help you a lot with healthy assertiveness. Today we live in the best times ever, where your needs can be met in thousands of different ways.

You can connect with so many people, choose so many different hobbies, there are so many ways of making money, and so on. Thus, most of the time there is no need for you to be in a huge conflict after all.

The abundance mindset is defined by:

Seeing all the possibilities the world has to offer in order to create, connect, grow and enjoy,
knowing that you deserve love and prosperity, and
realizing that if you’d experience only plentitude in life, it would be boring as hell and you wouldn’t appreciate anything you have at all.

With such a mindset, you can always find a way to satisfy your needs, as long as you’re flexible enough. The opposite of the abundance mindset are the scarcity mindset and oneitis. The scarcity mindset means being focused only on what you can’t have, and not considering all the things you can have.

Very similarly, oneitis means having an obsessive attraction towards only one person or thing, while completely excluding any other potential alternatives. That most often leads towards a big conflict, even though there might be no need for it.

Here are the proofs of abundance:

There are around 7,000,000,000 people in the world, all of them your potential lovers, spouses, friends, social groups to join etc.
There is more than 4,000,000,000,000 USD in circulation (M0). Let’s not even mention all the virtual money and other material assets (land, gold etc.).
There are around 1,000,000,000 webpages and more than 130,000,000 books you can learn from – and more than a million books and new webpages are published every day.
Only in the UK, they throw away 7 million tons of food and drink every year. That was the first data I found online, I’m not singling out the UK for any specific reason.
There are more than 190 million registered companies you can work for in the world, 45,000 of them listed on the stock exchange.
There are more than 190 countries you can travel to and around 2,000,000 cities worldwide.
There are more than 200 different types of hobbies, more than 1000 different sports, more than 70 religions and belief systems, more than 30 different types of art, and so on.

I think you can absolutely find a way to satisfy your needs in a healthy and respectful manner, but only if you decide to practice assertiveness and stay a little bit flexible. The other option that we’ll talk about is the sublimation of your needs. They’re both healthy possibilities when you can’t directly satisfy your needs.

Successful conflict resolution

Step 8: Make the 4F response work in your favor

By becoming healthy assertive, you want to achieve that the 4F response to danger and conflict is working in your favor, not against you. When you manage to achieve that, the flight response ensures that you set boundaries and self-protection. The freeze response enables you to give up and quit struggling when there is no progress or when resistance is futile.

Flight instincts lead to you disengaging and safely retreating when confronting life-threatening danger. And the fawn response enables you to actively listen, help others in trouble and make healthy compromises, while still minding your own rights, needs and beliefs.

Here is the table showing how a healthy person uses the 4F response (and the list of unhealthy responses):

Fight	Flight	Freeze	Fawn
Assertiveness	Disengagement	Acute awareness	Love & Service
Boundaries	Healthy retreat	Mindfulness	Compromise
Courage	Industriousness	Poised Readiness	Listening
Moxie	Know-how	Peace	Fairness
Leadership	Perseverance	Presence	Peacemaking

Source: Complex PTSD, page 106

One of the best things you can do is to print out all these healthy behaviors and practice them. Make them your virtues. When you come into conflict, use one of the healthy responses from the table. Pay attention to your emotions and learn to express them in a healthy way.

Sense of humor

Step 9: Practice mature defense mechanisms

In the end, there is no way that all of your needs can be met. There will always be some (primal) needs that can’t be satisfied due to reasonable superego restrictions or limitations of the real world. In such cases, there are several mature defense mechanisms at your disposal.

The two most common ones are:

Sublimation of needs: With sublimation, unacceptable impulses or idealizations are unconsciously transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior. Your wishes are challenged rather than dammed or diverted. For example, you express your aggressiveness in sports and games, and your feelings are acknowledged, modified and directed towards goals. Sports, art, learning, there are many ways how needs can be sublimed.
Humor: Humor enables you to share emotion without discomfort, to regress without embarrassment, to play games with freedom, to laugh with impunity and to relax in total pleasure. Humor is a great way to deal with needs that can’t be satisfied.

Other mature defense mechanisms that you can resort to are:

Acceptance
Altruism
Anticipation
Courage
Emotional self-regulation
Emotional self-sufficiency
Forgiveness
Gratitude
Humility
Modeling
Mercy
Mindfulness
Moderation
Patience
Respect
Tolerance

Explore how to use them.

The final thought on healthy assertiveness

A healthy assertive person is a person who likes themselves as they are, has a strong sense of self and their autonomy, has no problems with their needs being met, knows how to express feelings, knows where they’re going in life and what they want, is not afraid of conflict, knows how to set boundaries, takes initiative and contributes creative ideas.

That’s the sort of person you want to be; otherwise life will slip through your hands. Don’t keep yourself locked in a cage.

If you don’t raise your hand and ask a question, you’ll never know
If you don’t ask her (him) out, the answer is already no
If you don’t ask for a raise or promotion, you most probably won’t get it
If you buy love with money, people will never really love you
If you never say no, people will have zero respect for you

There’s a little vulgar, but very illustrative quote (for men) that shows why you must be assertive in life: He who hesitates, masturbates. If you don’t act, nothing will happen. That’s for sure.

You just have to realize that in the long run, the pain of doing nothing is much greater than the pain of being rejected from time to time. You want to have zero regrets on your deathbed.

Here is a short summary how to become more assertive:

Pay constant attention to your needs, wishes and desires. Be gentle and attentive towards yourself.
Identify areas where you are healthy assertive and where you are not, and practice skill and mindset transfer.
Face your fears and practice being assertive with moderate self-exposure. At every opportunity practice assertiveness by being in the learning zone.
Lean to manage your fear, doubt, shame and guilt. Acknowledge them, make room for them, use them as a trigger for self-reflection and even more to reinforce healthy, assertive beliefs.
Work on your body language.
Start doing any type of exercise or sport immediately.
Develop your social and communication skills.
Walk proudly around the World with the abundance mindset and stay flexible how your needs can be met.
When you come into conflict, use one of the 4F healthy responses.
Sublime your needs – use humor or employ other mature defense mechanisms.

By developing healthy assertiveness, you’ll feel more confident, your relationships will improve, negative feelings will go away and you’ll feel much better and happier in general. You know that it’s better to live a single day as a lion than years as a sheep.

Most people die when they’re around 20 years old but are buried 50 years later; because they get caught in an emotional cage possessing no healthy assertiveness. Don’t be one of them, find the right balance between passivity and aggression. Now you have enough knowledge to become assertive in a healthy way. Apply it!

What is assertiveness and why you are not assertive enough

Looking from a psychological perspective at life, we can say that the point of existing is to satisfy your needs. In your lifetime, there’s a constant flow of new needs, and your mission is to make yourself happy by satisfying them. It’s that simple.

Nevertheless, your needs must be met in a healthy and socially acceptable manner and in an absence of any internal conflicts, which can often be challenging. That’s where healthy assertiveness comes into play.

Unfortunately, healthy assertiveness is not as common as one would think. It actually takes quite a strong and emotionally sharp character to be assertive in a healthy way. You must trust in yourself and in the highly probable positive response that the environment will have to your needs; and in case if that doesn’t happen you must not overreact to a rejection.

You must also be bold enough to act and go after your goals and desires, but on the other hand you must respect relationship boundaries and social norms that limit your immediate need fulfillment. There are many different forces to be considered and brought in line.

It takes especially vigorous upbringing with the healthiest possible home environment and strong parental role models to develop into an assertive person. If you weren’t raised as a healthy assertive person, your needs are still there, but the path to their fulfillment might be questionable in many situations.

Two very common examples of unhealthy ways of need satisfaction are to either suppress the needs (passivity) or satisfy them in an intrusive, social unacceptable way (aggression). Both ways backfire sooner or later and lead to more frustrations rather than enjoyment of life.

Needs
Self-restrictions	Healthy assertiveness	Social restrictions
Finding a healthy way to satisfy your needs without unnecessary self-restrictions and by respecting social boundaries.

In this article, we’ll go through a few psychological theories, exercises and practical tips that will help you become more healthy assertive and proactive. It’s quite a long article, but after reading it, I promise you’ll have a really good understanding of what assertiveness really means, why you might lack it and how to develop it as quickly as possible.

The main topics we’ll cover are:

The universal human needs you can’t escape from
The personality fundamentals for human assertiveness
The potential conflicts when it comes to satisfying your needs
Healthy and unhealthy ways of need satisfaction
Practical tips for becoming more assertive (Part 2)

What is assertiveness

The list of universal human needs

The first important lesson when it comes to human assertiveness is that we all have several universal human needs, impossible to escape from. These needs turn into desires, wishes and goals, and are somehow either fulfilled, sublimated or repressed with defense mechanisms. Thus, it makes sense to have a really good overview of all the universal human needs.

We know several main theories of human needs. They talk more or less about the same needs, but differentiate more on complexity, the assumptions of how the needs are interconnected (hierarchy, system) and how they change with age or other factors.

There are four main theories of human needs that are good to know in order to understand what kind of needs exist in the heart of every human being. The following are the four main theories (among them only the first two are from scientific literature):

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
Fundamental human needs theory
Anthony Robbins’ Six Main Human needs
Child’s developmental needs

Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs

The most known framework for human needs is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The biggest criticism of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs is the hierarchy itself. Critics argue that there might not be such a hierarchy at all or that it can change under certain circumstances or even that it’s greatly influenced by age.

But the point of this section of the article is to identify as many universal needs as possible, and Maslow’s pyramid gives us a great overview.

Maslows Hierarchy of Needs

BASIC NEEDS

Physiological needs: At the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, there is the will to survive. For that you need shelter, food, water, and rest. Among the most basic needs, there is also the will to reproduce and spread your DNA – have sex, in other words.
Safety needs: This is then followed by the needs of basic security and acquiring resources. They enable you to make the step from surviving to thriving. Besides breathing and reproducing, you can also enjoy the material and social life.

PSYCHOLOGICAL NEEDS

Belonging and love: We are social beings, so the next group of needs is about love, friendship and social connections that enrich your life.
Self-esteem needs: Besides belonging and love, we all need some form of recognition, respect from others, and a list of achievements. That’s the second category of psychological needs.

SELF-FULFILLMENT NEEDS

Self-actualization: On the top of the pyramid is self-actualization, which accounts for achieving one’s full potential with creative and higher endeavors.

In Maslow’s hierarchy, there are six different categories of universal human needs. These are all the needs you must and have every right to fulfill.

Fundamental human needs theory

Let’s move to the second theory. Manfred Max-Neef developed the theory of fundamental human needs and human-scale development. All the identified and presented needs are universal, which means they were present in all human cultures throughout history.

The only thing that changed with time is how they manifest themselves through different kind of desires, and consequently strategies for how these needs are fulfilled vary between cultures.

In Max-Neef’s theory there is no hierarchy of needs, yet they are put in an interrelated and interactive system with trade-offs and complementary fulfilments.

Need	Being (Qualities)	Having (Things)	Doing (Actions)	Interacting (Settings)
Subsistence	Physical and mental health	Food Shelter Work	Feed Clothe Rest Work	Living Environment Social setting
Protection	Care Adaptability Autonomy	Social security Health systems Work	Co-operate Plan Take care of Help	Social Environment Dwelling
Affection	Respect Sense of humor Generosity Sensuality	Friendships Family Relationships with nature	Share Take care of Make love Express emotions	Privacy Intimate spaces of togetherness
Understanding	Critical capacity Curiosity Intuition	Literature Teachers Policies Educational	Analyze Study Meditate Investigate	Schools Families Universities Communities
Participation	Receptiveness Dedication Sense of humor	Responsibilities Duties Work Rights	Cooperate Dissent Express opinions	Associations Parties Churches Neighborhoods
Leisure	Imagination Tranquility Spontaneity	Games Parties Peace of mind	Daydream Remember Relax Have fun	Landscapes Intimate spaces Places to be alone
Creation	Imagination Boldness Inventiveness Curiosity	Abilities Skills Work Techniques	Invent Build Design Work Compose Interpret	Spaces for expression Workshops Audiences
Identity	Sense of belonging Self-esteem Consistency	Language Religions Work Customs Values Norms	Get to know oneself Grow Commit oneself	Places one belongs to Everyday settings
Freedom	Autonomy Passion Self-esteem Open-mindedness	Equal rights	Dissent Choose Run risks Develop Awareness	Anywhere

In the table, the being column is about attributes – individual or collective. The having column describes institutions, norms, mechanisms, laws and tools. And the doing column represents actions. The last, interacting column is about the time and space in which needs can be met.

Anthony Robbins’ Six Main Human needs

Anthony Robbins simplified the list of all the needs into six core ones. This can help us focus human needs into nicely presented groups we all long to fulfill:

Certainty: The need for safety, security, comfort, order, consistency, control
Variety: The need for uncertainty, diversity, challenge, change, surprise, adventure
Significance: The need for meaning, validation, feeling needed, honored, wanted, special
Love and connection: The need for connection, communication, intimacy, and shared love with others
Growth: The need for physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual development
Contribution: The need to give, care, protect beyond ourselves, to serve others and do good

Child’s developmental needs

Pete Walker wrote the book Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving in which he nicely describes the perfect environment for growing up. It’s not a scientifically confirmed theory, but a very nice overview of what kind of nurturance a healthy environment should provide for a child.

As we will see later, proper nurturance plays a great role in developing healthy assertiveness. That’s why understanding needs from the child’s perspective is even more important. Here are the child’s main needs and what kind of nurturance is needed to fulfil them:

Physical needs and nurturance – Offering the child affection and protection, healthy diet and sleep schedule, teaching grooming, discipline and responsibility. Helping a child develop hobbies, interest and personal style. Teaching them how to balance rest, play and work.
Emotional needs and nurturance – Huge amount of love, warmth, compassion and tenderness. Paying attention to the child’s emotions and welcoming their full emotional expression. Teaching them how to express negative feelings in a healthy way. Offering emotional protection. Also humor.
Verbal needs and nurturance – Having intellectual conversations with a child, giving positive feedback, praise, mentoring and encouragement. Also providing teaching lessons, reading them stories and answering all their thousands of questions.
Spiritual needs and nurturance – Showing the child that life is a gift, frequent exposure to nature, nurturing the child’s creative self-expression, offering spiritual guidance to help the child deal with painful aspects of life, developing strong self-worth, and we can also add help in developing basic goodness and a loving nature to the list.

Physical nurturance	Emotional nurturance
Affection and protection Healthy diet and sleep schedule Grooming Discipline and responsibility Hobbies, interests and personal style Balancing rest, play and work	Environmental stability Being emotionally invested in a child Paying attention to child’s needs Offering emotional protection Love, warmth, compassion, tenderness Welcoming full emotional expression Expressing negative emotions Humor
Verbal nurturance	Spiritual nurturance
Intellectual conversations Reading stories Positive feedback and praise (5 : 1) Mentoring and encouragement Teaching life lessons Answering questions	Life is a gift Frequent exposure to nature Nurturing child’s creative self-expression Guidance to deal with painful life aspects Developing strong self-worth Basic goodness and loving nature

In summary, a child must know that somebody is emotionally invested in him/her. There must be a stable and predictive environment that encourages the development of physical, emotional, verbal and spiritual aspects of a child’s personality.

A healthy environment leads to several underlying personality characteristics that are a prerequisite for healthy assertiveness:

Optimistic expectations that the environment will respond positively to your needs
Being emotionally stable so that you don’t overreact in case of a rejection or a conflict
Easily finding alternative ways to satisfy needs when you can’t satisfy them directly (with sublimation, finding a new “win-win” situation etc.)

If we summarize all the theories, we can list 15 main needs that all us humans share:

Personal autonomy, individual style and following your own goals and desires.
Access to clean water, healthy food, nature and a stable home that serves as a shelter.
Regular sex and producing offspring.
Structured daily life that provides basic discipline, and getting enough sleep.
Protecting yourself and living in a safe, secure and non-abusive environment, fair treatment.
Warm and loving personal relationships, several close friends and social connections
Being able to express negative emotions in a healthy way and providing self-nurturing when life gets tough or you fail. You have the need to not be too tough on yourself.
Being part of social groups that you find important and valuable, and consequently being respected and respecting others. Especially important is the need for praise.
Owning things and acquiring enough assets for a secure and comfortable life; being paid fairly.
Doing work you’re good at, providing value and achieving things important to you.
Finding balance between work and play, having fun and enjoying life.
Regular intellectual stimulation, getting an education, expressing your thoughts and opinions, acquiring knowledge and sharing it, and developing new skills.
Being curious, experiencing new things, growing personally and going on adventures.
Freedom of belief, religion and spirituality.
Undertaking creative endeavors, building things, contributing to the society and leaving a legacy.

These are the needs we all have. Most of these needs can be only satisfied in interaction with other people. But many times these needs get suppressed or expressed in an unhealthy way.

If you say money is not important to you, that’s a sign of an emotional knot. If you feel alienated from all social groups, there’s big repression. If you don’t want to have offspring, there is probably some kind of emotional pain.

You get the point. But why?

Greed

Escalation of needs and seven deadly sins

If your needs are not met for a longer period of time, especially when you’re a child, the phenomenon of need inflation happens. In practical terms, there’s nothing that can quench your thirst.

Deep down, your inner child (emotional self) longs to be cared for, has a constant fear of abandonment and his needs not being met. And that’s when needs turn from something that can bring pleasure in life into a painful burden. That can happen in four major ways:

Need inflation: You have an uncontrollable number of wishes and desires, and that leads to lashing out or even confusion, competing commitments and a lack of focus.
Need escalation: You want too much of one single thing as a surrogate for what you lacked in your youth or later in life (money, good, knowledge etc.).
Need perversion: Needs get expressed through weird wishes and desires (weird fetishes, abuse etc.).
Need suppression: It’s too painful to even admit to yourself that you have certain needs and desires.

There are several very standard ways of need inflation or escalation, interestingly all of them part of the seven deadly sins:

Lust – intense or unbridled sexual desire
Gluttony – overindulgence and overconsumption of anything to the point of waste
Greed – intense and selfish desire especially for wealth or power (or today even knowledge)
Pride – excessive view of one’s self with no regard for others (greed for status)
Envy – resentful covetousness towards someone else’s traits or possessions

The first lesson was that we all have universal needs. The second lesson is that if you aren’t properly nurtured as a child or if your needs are not met for a longer period of time, they inflate or escalate or get perverted or suppressed. At least until you become aware of them, and then satisfy or sublime them.

But the main point is, that in need escalation state it’s almost impossible to be assertive, because you’re driven by fierce emotions, not logic. You can be passive or aggressive, but certainly not assertive.

Conflict

Conflicts when it comes to satisfying your needs

Together with needs comes one more thing all human beings have in common – conflicts. The reason for that is, because most of the human needs can only be satisfied in interaction with other people and with not having any redundant internal brakes.

A conflict arises when the fulfillment of needs is blocked or threatened somehow – internally (only in your head), externally (in interaction with other people) or even both.

That can happen in many different ways. You can go to war with yourself with self-sabotage, doubts, false guilt, rigid morals etc. Other people can block or obstruct your agency. It can be socially unacceptable for your need to be satisfied. And in the end, there are many other outside forces that can prevent you from going after your desires. Conflicts are simply part of everyday life.

In general, we know eight different types of conflict and they all somehow interfere with satisfaction of human needs (with examples):

Man against self – having competing needs that can’t be satisfied at the same time or, as we’ll see, unbalanced id and superego
Man against man – competing with others for the same reward
Man against society – the desire to fulfill a need in a way that’s not socially acceptable
Man against nature – natural disasters that endanger safety, diseases and similar
Man against god/faith – when god doesn’t grant your prayers or diminishes hope
Man against supernatural – dealing with life dimensions that can’t be explained
Man against markets – financial or career losses because of market crashes
Man against robots (with the rise of AI) – potential threat to our existence

Every conflict can be resolved in four different ways, and that gives us the first definition of what assertiveness is:

Conflict
I win – You win	I lose – You lose
Assertive	Passive aggressive
I win – You lose	I lose – You win
Aggressive	Passive

In a way, being assertive means finding a win-win situation in a conflict that enables you to fulfill your needs, while minding other people and their needs. But that’s not the whole picture.

The most interesting and complex type of conflict is the conflict within yourself. So let’s say a word or two about when and how you can turn into your own worst enemy when it comes to need satisfaction.

Balancing id, superego and the outside world

Freud, the most known name of psychoanalysis, defined three parts of a personality – id, ego and superego. The id is the source of your bodily needs, wants, desires, and primal impulses. It’s driven especially by your sexual and aggressive drive. You can imagine id as a child who wants to immediately satisfy all needs, no matter the consequences.

The child (or id) is a hedonistic little fellow who wants to enjoy life, not minding other people and society. The id wants instant gratification and doesn’t have a moral compass. Id has zero issues with satisfying the primal urges in an uncivilized manner using aggression, force and violence. All that leads to hurting other people and the society as a whole.

Safety is a very important need, and that’s why humankind strives to avoid war and violence. As we have seen throughout history, violence only creates more violence, and that brings a vicious circle of pain and destruction.

That’s why several psychological and social mechanisms evolved or were invented over time with the goal of balancing these primal human urges. The goal of these mechanisms is to make the society more civilized and everyday life more human, far removed from the cruelty of the jungle.

Id - Ego - Superego

One psychological phenomenon that evolved in this matter is called superego. The superego reflects internalized cultural values and rules. It’s the moral compass that consists of ego ideals, spiritual goals and, more importantly, it has the power to prohibit the fulfillment of drives, feelings and actions.

The main weapons of the superego are guilt, anxiety, inferiority and other forms of inner criticism. A too strong superego is a consequence of too rigorous upbringing.

While the job of the id is to push us towards instant gratification of needs, the job of the super-ego is to make sure that it’s done in a socially acceptable way. The ego strives towards the self-ideal and social ideals without taking reality into account.

The poor ego, which we so often like to blame, has to balance the id, the super-ego as a supervisor, and reality.

To make things even more complex, the society has developed several other mechanisms to curb the aggressive impulses that are hurtful to the society. Examples of cultivation mechanisms are:

Law, police and codes of ethics
Trade – it’s cheaper to trade than to wage war
Religion and spirituality
Technology that provides surveillance, transparency etc.
Culture, role models and similar

Ego traps

We love to blame the ego for many things. But the table above shows very nicely what a hard job the ego has. It must balance all one’s needs while being constantly supervised by the superego, mind a bunch of social restrictions, and face the limitations and hardships of reality (natural disasters, market crashes etc.). Not to mention that there’s competition out there for the same resources.

The superego is involved in the experience of guilt, perfectionism, indecision, preoccupation with what is the right or wrong thing to do, and hence plays an important role in the aetiology of some forms of depression, obsessional disorders and sexual problems. (Source: Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory and Practice)

As we’ll see later, properly balancing all these forces is the foundation for healthy assertiveness. The solution is that the ego has to be strong enough to balance the id and superego. That’s how internal conflicts are avoided. But when the ego is not strong enough, the internal forces lean towards one direction or the other. That’s when problems with healthy assertiveness start.

Too strong Id	Too strong super-ego
Turning against the society	Turning against yourself
Defense Mechanisms

Too strong id or superego result in two potential unhealthy ways of need satisfaction. One is turning against yourself (with impossible standards and self-restrictions) and the other is turning against the society (with hurting others). And when the ego can’t find the right balance or a healthy way to satisfy a need, it turns to mechanisms of defense and toxic ways of need satisfaction.

False guilt is always looking for people to please and rules to be kept.

But balancing id and superego is only one part of the problem. The second part of the problem are psychological conflicts that naturally occur in different stages of development. If these conflicts are not successfully resolved, there is no healthy foundation for the assertive agency. To understand that, we have to turn to Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development Theory.

The developmental crisis and fundamentals for human assertiveness

There are eight stages of psychosocial development and a successful completion of each stage results in an emotionally healthy person who knows how to be assertive. Unfortunately, if you don’t successfully complete one stage, your ability to overcome the following stages is reduced and the emotional maturity you need for healthy assertiveness suffers even more.

The good news is that you can later resolve the stages that you didn’t successfully complete while growing up, as long as you decide to put in the effort. The eight stages of psychosocial development are:

Stage	Age	Conflict / Crisis	Resolution / Virtue
1	Infant – 18 months	Basic trust vs. Mistrust	Hope
2	18 months – 3 years	Autonomy vs. Shame	Will
3	3 – 5 years	Initiative vs. Guilt and Doubt	Purpose
4	5 – 13 years	Industry vs. Inferiority	Competence
5	13 – 21 years	Identity vs. Confusion	Fidelity
6	21 – 39 years	Intimacy vs. Isolation	Love
7	40 – 65 years	Generativity vs. Stagnation	Care
8	65 and older	Integrity vs. Despair	Wisdom

If you look at the table above, you can quickly see what kind of developmental conflicts need to be resolved for you to turn into a healthy assertive person. You need to trust people around you (your environment) that your needs will be considered and fulfilled, and that people will respond positively to your expressed desires.

You must see yourself as an autonomous person who deserves to have their needs satisfied and to go after personal goals. Then you must take proper initiative and develop the competences to the point where they match personally set challenges. In the end, you must also develop a clear identity of who you are, what your higher self-actualization needs are and how you’ll satisfy them.

On the other hand, if you don’t trust yourself and other people, if you’re burdened by shame, guilt and doubt, it’s very hard to go after your needs and goals. Either you find a way to not act, or you resort to unhealthy behavior in hopes of protecting your emotional self.

A failure of parental empathy, leading to disruption of a coherent sense of self and the emergence of ‘disintegration products’ in later life such as aggression, or attempts at self-soothing through addiction, compulsive sexuality and even self-injury. Source: Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory and Practice

Based on that, we can draw a very simple conclusion:

Assertiveness: Is based on feelings of trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, clear identity and great capacity for love.
Non-assertiveness: Is based on mistrust, shame, guilt, doubt, inferiority, confusion, isolation
External conflicts: You must find a way to win-win situations
Internal conflicts: You must properly balance ego and superego

Now we know all the developmental factors that are the core source of nonassertive agency:

Need inflation, escalation, perversion or supression because of neglect of child’s needs
Unbalanced ego, with too strong/weak id or superego – too rigorous or loose upbringing
Unsuccessfully resolved developmental crisis

Any of these situations leads to overly strong defense mechanisms (which are a too complicated subject for an already long article) and the four very nonassertive ways of need satisfaction.

Agressive and Passive Behaviour

The four toxic, nonassertive ways to need satisfaction in relationships

There are four very general ways how you can act unassertively especially in interaction with others and consequently go against yourself, the society or most often both. The four ways are based on the 4F primal response mechanism.

The fight/flight/freeze/fawn (4F) response is a normal human reaction to any danger (and conflict is danger). They are the tools you have at your disposal when you encounter a threat and need to protect yourself.

Since you can easily get yourself into an (internal or external) conflict when it comes to satisfying your needs, you can just as easily resort to one of these unhealthy responses.

We’re talking about an automatic response to a conflict, not something you consciously choose. The table below shows all the different toxic and nonassertive behaviors based on the 4F response.

Fight	Flight	Freeze	Fawn / Needy
Narcissistic	Obsessive-Compulsive	Dissociative	Codependent
Explosive	Panicky	Contracting	Obsequious
Controlling / Enslaving	Rushing or worrying	Hiding	Servitude
Entitlement	Drive-ness	Isolation	Loss of self
Type-A	Adrenaline junky	Couch potato	People-pleaser
Bully	Busyholic	Space case	Doormat
Autocrat	Micromanager	Hermit	Slave
Demanding perfection	Perfectionist	Achievement-phobic	Social perfectionist
Sociopath	Mood disorder-Bipolar	Schizophrenic	D.V. Victim
Conduct disorder	ADHD	ADD	Parentified child

Source: Pete Walker (2013), Complex PTSD, page 107

All the nonassertive acts originate either from mistrust, lack of autonomy, shame, guilt, doubt, inferiority, identity confusion, isolation (as we’ll see) or need inflation and escalation.

The false underlying belief (or more exactly emotional hope) is that any such behavior, which you don’t even see as toxic, will provide you an emotional safety net. You assume that you can’t be hurt if you act in a nonassertive way.

Examples of false underlying beliefs or bogus emotional hope:

Control over people – and with control comes false emotional safety
Perfectionism – in hopes that you will be more lovable
Distraction – with the goal of running away from your real needs and feelings
Create distance in a relationship – and thus avoid being hurt
Codependency – to create a false feeling of safety by serving others

In reality, you achieve the opposite effect from what you hope will happen. In false hope of protecting yourself, you simultaneously repress your real needs. With the fight response in any conflict, you push people far away from you, usually with anger and controlling demands.

The flight response leads to distance in relationships, usually achieved by being busy. You try to become perfect, while running away from relationships and your own needs. The freeze response creates false safety with isolation and platonic online relationships. And the fawn response creates a fake feeling of security by over-focusing on other people’s needs, or even merging your own needs with those of other people.

These are all nonassertive behaviors. The ego wants to protect you, and has to make a compromise in which your other universal and basic needs are not met.

Defense mechanisms

In the end, I also want to mention defense mechanisms, which play a huge role in needs satisfaction. The point of defense mechanisms is to minimize conflicts, reduce tension, regulate self-esteem and avoid danger, anxiety and displeasure.

These defense mechanisms work on the unconscious level and play an important role in character formation. Psychoanalysis knows three types of defense mechanisms:

Primitive: Autistic fantasy, devaluation, idealization, passive-aggressive behavior, projection, projective identification and splitting.
Neurotic: Condensation, denial, displacement, dissociation, externalization, identification of the aggressor, intellectualization, isolation, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, reversal, somatization and undoing.
Mature: Humor and sublimation.

A summary – what is assertiveness?

In summary, assertiveness means being self-assured in everyday life, without behaving aggressive or passive, with the goal to meet all of your needs in a healthy manner.

That can be achieved only if the following conditions are met:

You are consciously aware of the majority of needs you have. It’s quite a long list of needs that we all humans share.
If you were not properly nurtured as a child, there is a great chance that your needs somehow inflated, escalated, get perverted or repressed. They most often inflate as greed, gluttony, or any other deadly sin. But they are only poor surrogates for love, affection and closeness. You can’t be healthy assertive in such a state.
The needs are best met in interaction with other people. But many times, that’s not possible, which leads to a conflict. A healthy assertive person looks for a win-win situation in a conflict.
There are four types of un-assertive behavior in interaction with other people, based on the 4F response mechanism to danger (or a conflict). You either become aggressive (fight), passive (freeze), you run away from a conflict (flight) or submit to other people (fawn).
The needs are also best met in an absence of any internal conflicts. That’s not possible if id or superego are too strong. False guilt, based on too strong superego, is always looking for people to please and rules to be kept.
Assertiveness is based on feelings of trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, clear identity and great capacity for love. Non-assertiveness is based on mistrust, shame, guilt, doubt, inferiority, confusion, isolation.

Now I hope you understand very clearly what assertiveness really is. Thus, let’s move to the second part, how to become more assertive (the article will be published in a few days).

Learn how to model successful people to accelerate your own success
I was a fashion model for Calvin Klein for more than 10 years. In those 10 years, the most important things about modeling that I learned was … Stop there, I’m just kidding.

I don’t have the looks to be a model and I certainly have zero advice or experience on how to become a successful fashion model. Today, we’re going to talk about a different kind of modeling.

Modeling is one of neuro-linguistic programming techniques designed to recreate excellence that only the best people reach. With modeling, you want to duplicate extraordinary results of high achievers by mirroring their conscious and unconscious behavior.

The main principle and idea behind modeling is that if you overtake the behaviors, strategies, beliefs, language (words, phrases, questions), emotional states and other traits of successful people, you will also become more successful.

By having access to someone who achieved exactly what you want to achieve, you could simply ask him or her: “Teach me how to do that!”.

The second best thing you can do, if somebody isn’t prepared to coach you in person, is to study them through all the public materials available. The latter is not as effective as full in-person access to the exemplar (the person you want to model), but indirect modeling can still prove to be valuable.

If we take a step back and go to the definition, a model is a simplified description of a complex entity or process – in our case, a model is a simplified version of the whole system and process that lead the person (exemplar) to the desired outcome.

A psychological model carefully describes a method, form, ways of doing, customs and styles. It kind of gives you a step-by-step formula to replicate the success as much as possible.

Nevertheless, every psychological model is still a very simplified version of a real-life success scenario, with many limitations. In modeling, we tend to focus only on the main variables that lead to success. We try to slice the success into small chunks, identify the biggest contributors to the success, and build them into a replicable model.

In the end, modeling is successful when you manage to achieve more or less the same behavioral outcome as the person you are modeling. You achieve that by mirroring the main “psychological personality chunks” or contributors to the success.

In this article, you will learn all these things, like:
- The mindset you need to successfully apply modeling
- The detailed process of how to use modeling in everyday life
- The limitations of modeling
- The questions that can help you build a successful psychological model
- The most practical approach to modeling
- Practical examples of how to use modeling in your personal life
By the way, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) modeling is a very complex and detailed subject, way beyond the scope of this article. If you are interested in NLP modeling in particular, I suggest you read the book Modeling with NLP written by Robert Dilts.

I will rather describe a simplified version of modeling that you can quickly and practically use in everyday life. I will also give many examples on how I use modeling to achieve my goals faster.

I own me, and therefore, I can engineer me. – Virginia Satir

Modeling others comes naturally to human beings

A child doesn’t pay as much attention to what their parents say or command as s/he does to what they do. A very big part of a child’s personality development is modeling their role models – they want to be like them; in the early age, that means especially their parents and other caretakers.

That’s why we say that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

A little bit out of the context, but an extremely useful exercise when it comes to choosing a spouse to start a family with is the following: ask yourself if you want your child to be the same as your spouse (especially the child of the same gender)?

If the answer is yes, you clearly respect the personality traits your spouse possesses. If the answer is no or you don’t have a clear opinion, you should probably reconsider if you are with the right person.

You might tell a child to clean their room a thousand times, but if your room is messy, there’s a high probability that the child’s room will also be messy.

Now let’s get back to modeling. With age, the interest to model other successful people and have role models declines in most people, as does the interest to learn new things.

There are many reasons for that, from ego defense to a lack of curiosity, fixed mindset, intellectual sublimity, general laziness, and so on. Much like people stop reading books, exploring the world and acquiring new competences, so they stop mirroring their role models.

But here’s the trick. Even if you stop looking up to your role models, you’re still influenced by the people who surround you. That’s why you can hear over and over again that you are the average of the 5 people you spend most time with.

Whether you want to or not, you are overtaking the mindset, behavior, values, beliefs and actions of people you spend the most time with. You are unconsciously modeling them, because no matter age you never stop modeling others. Slowly, you overtake other’s people attitudes and behaviors.

You maybe didn’t have a choice about who to model when you were a child. But you can absolutely choose who your role models and people who surround you will be in your adult age.

People who surround you are the people that you will sooner or later consciously or subconsciously model. Thus, make sure you use your modeling capabilities to your advantage. Carefully choose with whom you spend time with.

Try to be positive among 10 grumblers. It’s impossible, and sooner or later you also start to whine, bitch and complain.

Practical use of modeling in everyday life

If you’re going to model anyway, make sure you are modeling the right kind of people. Below are a few very practical ideas for how to use modeling to your advantage, from the simplest forms of modeling to the most complex ones:
1. Read biographies of successful people to get inspired when you feel down.
2. Never put your ego in front of learning something new, there is always something to learn or model from other people. Find that one thing in which the person is better than you are.
3. Spend time with people who have personality traits and skills you want to develop. Make sure you are never the smartest person in the room. You will slowly assimilate their characteristics. And you will learn the most when you spend time with smart people.
4. Study people you admire. Read their biographies, interviews and other articles. Read and watch everything that exists about them. Ask yourself: what would [an extremely successful person] do in the same situation as you are facing?
5. Find a person who has achieved exactly the same thing as you want to achieve. Ask them to coach you and based on regular interactions, build yourself a model of how you can apply their behavior in your life to become more successful. That is real modeling.
6. Model your previous successful self. There are times when you’re feeling up and there are times when you’re feeling desperate. Just thinking about your thoughts, beliefs, actions and decisions when you were feeling assertive and ambitious can motivate you to take action.
I use all six ways of modeling in my personal life. Besides reading books and regularly experimenting with new things in my life, modeling is one of the fastest ways how I learn about life and develop new skills. Let me give you a few examples:

Practical examples
1. I regularly read biographies and watch documentaries about successful people I admire. From Siddhartha Gautama, Alexander the Great, Marcus Aurelius to Sigmund Freud, Richard Branson, Elon Musk and others. It always greatly motivates and inspires me.
2. Whoever I meet, I usually ask them many different questions to understand them and learn from them. I really get interested in a person’s life – how they think, experience reality, where they blossom and what are their struggles. And people love to talk about these things.
3. I always surrounded myself with people who are more successful than I am. With investors, scholars, entrepreneurs, scientists, and so on. There are so many clubs, meetups, communities, associations and co-working places you can join and meet people smarter than you.
4. At the moment, I am studying the most successful personal development bloggers that I like the most – Tim Urban, Tim Ferris, Tai Lopez, Ramit Sethi, Mark Manson, James Clear, James Altucher, Steve Pavlina, Barrie Davenport, Derek Sivers, Cal Newport and Steve Scott. I read their blogs and books, watch or listen to interviews with them, and want to learn everything about their strategy, mindset, skills and daily habits. I already see some patterns in their success (every one of them innovated a distribution channel, they all have a few simple ideas that they repeat over and over again, and so on).
5. I always learned the most with a personal coach, either a hired one or people who were willing to be my mentor because we worked together. I learned the most and the fastest when I spent several hours over the course of a year with people who mastered the skills or possessed the knowledge that I wanted to learn. From selling skills to athletic moves, in-person coaching or real modeling is how I learned the most.
6. Last but not least, when I’m feeling down or my spirits are dampened for whatever reason, I vividly visualize a particular situation in my past when I was highly motivated, determined, had a clear goal that I assertively pursued and felt mentally strong. I transfer the past positive feelings and thoughts into the moment when I’m feeling down and it always helps motivate my spirit.
No matter how smart we are, on the basic level we are still monkeys. Monkey see, monkey do. Thus, make sure you choose your role models and people you spend time with very carefully.

You are modeling people around you, whether you want to or not, even in your adult years. Make sure modeling is working to your advantage and accelerates your personal growth.

Your role models play a huge role in how you pick your vocation and make other important decisions in life. If someone looks like you, has had a similar upbringing, belongs to the same religion order, has attended a similar school, and is making a good living, it naturally has a huge impact when you’re trying to decide your calling in life. [Thus, ask yourself:] Where will your life lead you if you follow the path laid out by your parents, peers and other role models? – Mohnish Pabrai, Dhnadho Investor

Limitations of modeling and why modeling is not copy-pasting

You can absolutely progress faster in life with the use of modeling, but there are still big limitations. First of all, the less frequently you personally interact with an exemplar, the harder it is to build a model that you can replicate in your own life.

You would get the best modeling results if you were able to do a “shadow experience” with an exemplar. That means you would spend hours observing them in action every day.

In-person modeling is most effective because it gives you the opportunity to model the same way you did as a child. By observing, you get a chance to mirror and match the behavior of the other person – their conscious and unconscious parts.

You don’t try to merely understand and rationalize what the exemplar is doing, you employ your unconscious resources to exactly mimic the behavioral patterns.
Here is the hierarchy of the information quality you can gather when it comes to modeling:

Consistent live observation or shadow experience

Watching video or audio material

Interviews in person

Role-playing

Questionnaires

Reading biographies, articles and written interviews
Secondly, no success can be completely replicated. You have your own set of talents, your environment is different and there are always “blind spots” – things that contributed to the success that neither the exemplar nor the modeler know about.

If success were that easily replicated, everybody would be successful. That means you have to always account for an individual’s specifics in every model and must keep realistic expectations about the extent to which the success can be modeled. Real modeling takes a lot of hard work.

Last but not least, modeling does not equal copy-pasting other people’s personalities. You don’t want to lose yourself by trying to be someone else.

That might not be a problem when you try to model skills and habits, but it can present a huge challenge when it comes to beliefs, values and personality traits. You can’t just change your personality like underwear.

But there are two core things you can do that will protect your true self:
1. You can find a healthy intersection between you and the exemplar you’re modeling. If there are parts of the exemplar’s character that don’t fit your ideal self, there is no point in modeling them.
2. You can only temporarily take over different beliefs, values and personality traits to find a balance that works better for you. For example, if you are always giving yourself away to other people and consequently they take advantage of you, you might temporarily model someone who gives nothing, and then in the following step find the right balance between giving and taking.
Your current self Your ideal self

Modeling >>

You must use common sense when it comes to modeling. It’s not a miraculous solution, it has many limitations, but it can absolutely help you progress faster in life towards your ideal-self. Now let’s move to a more practical level of how to use modeling in everyday life.

Different stages of modeling successful people

These are four very simple and logical steps when it comes to modeling:
1. Choosing a person to model – In the first step, you must find a person worth modeling. It must be someone you respect, who already possesses a skill or personality trait that you want to acquire. The best scenario is if you have access to spend a lot of time with the person. You can also choose several people to model (that’s often an even better approach).
2. Observing and mirroring – When you have your model chosen, the analytical part comes into play. It is a combination of mirroring exactly what a person does (unconscious mirroring) and employing questions that can accelerate learning (logical modeling). You want to understand in detail what the person regularly does, how they do it and why they do it.
3. Finding similarities and differences – By mirroring, spending time with people and asking questions, you want to find which behavioral differences are present. You want to list all the small personality chunks (traits, behaviors etc.) and understand how they contribute to success.
4. Designing a model – In the last step, you try to build a model that can be replicated. The model is like a manual that can be presented to other people so they can improve their skills. It describes all the important pieces together with the sequence, system and process.
Things you must pay attention to when modeling other people

In a way, we could call modeling reverse-engineering psychology. The idea is to find as many factors as possible that lead to a specific successful outcome in someone’s life, and rank their influence. From the macro perspective, you are interested in three different types of information when you are modeling:
1. External behavior – habits, responses, words, phrases, skills, competence etc.
2. Internal states and processes – values, beliefs, emotions etc.
3. Environment – social circles, trends, support etc.
Here’s the big catch. When you are listing elements, you must pay attention to those that the person you’re modeling is aware of as well as those they aren’t aware of. Many times, people have no clue why they are really successful. They just are.

It’s because they possess a competence or a personality trait they aren’t even aware of. It’s called an unconscious skill and competence.

Very similarly, we know universal success principles and situation-specific success contributors. Many people are successful merely because they were lucky. There was no skill involved. You probably wouldn’t try modeling a lottery winner.

Thus, you must make sure you’re not fooled by random success factors, like being born in the right family, being in the right industry by accident, or being one of the first employees in a high-growth company.

These factors don’t mean that there is nothing to model per se, you just have to make sure there are really strong personality traits or skills present that contributed to the success and outcome that you’re trying to model.

If we go back to the three macro factors – external behavior, internal states and processes, and environment – you are interested in questions that help identify cause (activity) and effect (outcome):
What exactly do they do? – A precise description of an activity that leads to the desired result.

How do they do it? – Detailed description of how they perform an activity.

When and where do they do it? – What triggers the behavior and how often.

Why do they do it? – What is the motivation behind their actions.

What kind of support do they have? – How the environment influences their actions and outcomes.
Personality chunks and dimensions

We can parse the question further into different personality dimensions. Only understanding all these dimensions (“personality chunks”) really well gives you all the necessity input to build yourselves a viable model:
1. Purpose and intention – That’s the big question why, consisting of motives, desires and wants.
2. Identity – How the person sees themselves.
3. Outcomes – What are their ideas about goals, what exactly do they tend to achieve.
4. Strategies – What does the person do to achieve a particular outcome, what procedure and methods do they follow.
5. Beliefs – The main ideas about life that they agree with and validate. Beliefs are philosophies and attitudes that lead to a specific heuristic and cognitive strategy.
6. Values – All the ideas that are important to the person, things they like or tend to avoid; values expose how they decide to invest their resources, and they’re tied to emotional aspects of life.
7. Representations, submodalities and meta-programs – How the elements of the environment are identified, interpreted and reacted to.
8. Understandings – All the mental support of the inner world (subjective interpretations of reality). Personal interpretations of how the world works, supporting individual beliefs, values and representations. Understandings are realizations about what kind of actions will lead to a specific outcome.
9. Heuristic – How evaluations and judgements are made in problem solving.
10. Attention – What the person focuses their limited mental resources on and what do they think most of the time.
11. Cognitive strategy – Proactive response to the environment based on representations; mental syntax and sequence involved in performing a specific action or behavior.
12. Behaviors and habits – Behaviors that are repeatedly performed, usually based on triggers.
13. Emotional states – What is the dominant emotional state when the person performs specific activity or behavior.
14. Conscious and unconscious knowledge and skills – What kind of competences are present that enable successful execution of an activity. They can be simple or complex behavioral, cognitive or linguistic skills.
15. Physical (somatic) skills and physiology – Particularly body (or motor) skills and what kind of a connection between the mind and the body (posture, muscle tones, balance etc.) is present when the activity is executed.
16. Language, communication style and non-linguistic symbols – What are the dominant words, phrases and questions used and other non-verbal cues.
17. Peer group and environment – What kind of people surround the exemplar most frequently, what kind of support do they have, what are the industry trends and other environmental variables.
18. How exactly everything ties together – Prioritizing elements that contribute to the success.
Perspectives and questions that can help you accelerate the modeling process

Before we go to specific questions, there is one more useful trick that can help you build the model you want to replicate. In the process of modeling, you can play with four different perspectives:
- 1^st person perspective – Analyzing how you’re currently performing an action, how it’s different from the exemplar and experimenting on your own with the exemplar’s behavior.
- 2^nd person perspective – Empathically putting yourself in the exemplar’s shoes and trying to understand completely why they do things as they do, together with mimicking their thoughts, feelings, actions and other personality characteristics.
- 3^rd person perspective – Observing at a distance as an uninvolved witness how the modeled person is behaving and what are their actions. Acting like a scientist that tries to analyze a specific person and situation.
- 4^th person perspective – Trying to understand a situation from the perspective of the whole system, from the environment to the individuals involved.
It’s extremely important that you first mirror the person’s behavior and only then try to logically parse and understand it. That will give you the greatest insight and benchmark with your current situation. Then you can start logically building the model while playing with different perspectives.

Questions to ask successful people worth modeling

You can accelerate your learning and model building with the right questions. Below are examples of the questions to use when you’re modeling successful people – some questions are meant for asking the exemplar directly, others you can answer by yourself with observation:

Purpose, identity, beliefs and values
- How do you see yourself? What do you believe about yourself when you perform a specific action?
- What is driving you to do this, what is your mission, vision or why do you do it?
- What do you believe about yourself, the world and your life circumstances?
- What are your beliefs that support your doing when it comes to that particular goal you’re trying to achieve?
- How do you express your beliefs on a daily level – through thoughts, words, actions etc.?
- What kind of expectations do you have towards yourself and others?
- What kind of standards do you follow? Which standards must be met no matter what?
- What rules do you tend to live by and why are these rules important to you?
- How would you describe the hierarchy of your values? How do you satisfy these values?
- How do you make decisions when you have to choose between two things in your schedule?
- How do you respond when things don’t go as you planned?
- What kind of gains you tend to enjoy with achieving the goal and what kind of pain are you trying to avoid?
- What do you focus on for most of your day?
- How do you make decisions and what criteria do you use when making decisions?
Habits and patterns
- What patterns do you easily recognize and why are these patterns important to you?
- What are the dominant thoughts you repeatedly have? What do you think about most of the time?
- What kind of emotions do you experience on a daily basis? Why are these emotions important to you?
- What do you do when things go wrong or when you experience severe negative emotions?
- Which are your dominant personality traits and what strengths do you have?
- What kind of habits do you follow on a daily basis? What kind of activities do you not do at all?
Competences – skills and knowledge
- What kind of skills have you mastered and how are these skills helping you in life?
- What skill helped you the most in achieving that particular outcome?
- How and when did you acquire this skill or knowledge?
- How often do you practice this particular skill? What is your learning style?
- If you were going to teach me to do it, how should I approach it? What would you ask me to do?
- What do you pay most attention to when you’re performing that specific skill?
- How do you know you’re really good at these things?
- How do you feel when you perform that specific action? What kind of an emotional and physical state are you in?
- What kind of a situation happened in your life that led to you being good at this particular skill?
Environment
- In which places do you spend the most of your time? With which people?
- Can you describe the main characteristics of your environment – industry, market trends, target markets, people that surround you etc.? Did you consciously choose them?
- What kind of an infostructure do you have – what do you read, watch, which apps do you use?
- How do you acquire the knowledge and information that you need in order to be successful?
- Which are the main social groups in your opinion, where and how do you network?
- Do you have any role models that you tend to model?
Language and non-verbal behavior
- What were the main words used in the conversation with the exemplar?
- What is their dominant body language, what part of their physiology stands out?
- How do they use body language when interacting with other people?
- How do they tend to speak to themselves and others? Which words do they mainly use?
Trust me, if you have answers to these 40+ questions, you understand the person extremely well and you have all the input needed to build a model to replicate their success. These questions are also very useful when it comes to practicing empathy or developing new perspectives. Last but not least, these questions can also help you better understand yourself.

Flexibility comes from having multiple choices; wisdom comes from having multiple perspectives. – Robert Dilts

The final stage of modeling – implementation of the model in your own life

We have come to the final stage of modeling. Implementing everything that you’ve learned about the chosen model in your own life.

The very good news is that you have the ability to think about your thinking. You can perform self-reflection and find the differences between your strategies, behaviors and thoughts and those of the people who are more successful, those you want to model.

Before implementing anything, you must first analyze all the gathered data:
1. How exactly did you feel when you mirrored the model – what felt right and what felt wrong?
2. Which things did you notice when you spent time with your exemplar?
3. List of all “personality chunks” you gathered through observations and asking questions
4. List of all other insights you have gathered by analyzing interviews, videos etc.
5. Analysis of all other data that you managed to gather (interviewing other people etc.)
Based on the data, you should build a model – a prioritized “personality chunk” list that explains all the main external behaviors, internal processes and environmental variables that led to a specific outcome.

In the next step, you can analyze how the model differentiates from your particular situation as well as which differences are aligned with your ideal self and which aren’t. That should help you make a solid decision about which behavior you will continue to mirror, and which “personality chunks” are not part of your authentic self.

NLP offers many tools that can help you permanently implement the “personality chunks” that you intend to keep in your life and that represent a way of personal improvement – from anchoring and mental rehearsal to game playing and visualization.

But more about that in one of the next articles. Until then, find a person worth modeling and parse their personality down to the smallest chunk. Play with mirroring their activity and ask them thousands of questions that will help you better understand their motives, behaviors, languages and other personality traits. It’s a very fun exercise to do.

Your current self	Your ideal self
Modeling >>

A simple trick to express negative emotions in a mature way

I strongly believe that everybody needs a coach or a mentor as leverage to faster personal development and progress in different areas of life. Currently I am working hard with a fitness trainer to improve my posture, strengthen my core muscles and improve my general fitness.

Before that, I had a coach for more than a year that helped me identify my main cognitive distortions and destructive relationship patterns. He was of tremendous help to me, a wise and calm man who could always show you a new, more positive perspective on life and where to make a move forward.

The first time I met him, it was immediately obvious that he had gone through a lot in life, but somehow found his inner peace. In the span of the coaching, we had many heated discussions, but he always stayed calm and positive. I was the one who was mad that he didn’t always agree with me or who became more aggressive in communication.

But then one time, the discussion got really heated. I could see that he almost lost his temper. He took a deep breath and respectfully asked me if we can end the session and continue next time.

I agreed, of course, half-surprised about what happened and half-satisfied because I felt like I won the power struggle by realizing that he is also only human.

I couldn’t wait for the next session to see how things would evolve. We started with small talk. Then he apologized for last time, and suggested we continue the discussion on the same topic if I wanted. But honestly I was more curious about what really happened and so I directly asked him.

What he said changed my perspective on relationships forever. He explained to me that he had had a bad day. And then he shared something eye-opening:

You know, I can’t guarantee you that I won’t get angry, sad or envious or feel any other negative emotions in our relationship and interaction. But what I can 100 % guarantee you is that my negative feelings won’t do any damage to you or to our relationship.

Stop and think for a moment how powerful that is. The goal in relationships isn’t to completely eliminate negative feelings, since they are a completely normal human thing. That goal is to make sure negative feelings don’t do any damage to a relationship. That’s the trick.

Express negative emotions

It’s normal to feel negative emotions, the problem is when they cause damage

Every single person on the planet has to deal with negative emotions. Your goal is neither to suppress them nor to completely wipe them out.

Your ultimate goal is to learn to properly manage your emotions and make sure they aren’t doing the damage – that means (1) becoming aware of the negative emotions before reacting, (2) controlling your reactions and then (3) expressing them in the healthiest way possible.

But here’s the trick. Even though everyone must deal with negative emotions, some people (including me) have a much tougher job managing them. The greater emotional challenge is experienced or seen in one (or several) of the following ways:

You get upset by the smallest things other people don’t even notice and you have no idea why
Your emotional reaction spikes out of any reasonable proportion, even if you don’t want it to
The emotional explosion just happens, it’s like somebody else is controlling you at the moment
You aren’t even aware that you are hurting the other person while expressing your emotions
You don’t really care if other people are hurting because of your words and actions
You learned to suppress your emotions until they pile up and explode
You have no idea what to do with all the negative energy that takes control of you
You easily feel threatened or humiliated in relationships

These are all the symptoms that show a big gap between the intensity of negative emotions and a complex set of skills that you need for managing such strong emotions. Nevertheless, if we go further, a lack of emotional control gets expressed in four general ways, based on one of the 4F responses to danger:

Fight	Flight	Freeze	Fawn
Explosiveness	Worrying	Isolation	Martyrdom
Aggressiveness	Being busy	Running away	Slavery
Bullying	Obsessiveness	Ignorance	Pleasing others
Teasing	Criticism	Silence	Clingy
Control	Suspicion	Poor listening	Helpless
Gossiping, lying, manipulating, cheating, betraying, hypocrisy etc.

Now we know how the experience looks like and how negative emotions are expressed. Another thing that we are interested in is the cause. The emotional abuse itself is the cause behind the uncontrollable and disproportional response or, in other words, being emotionally abusive towards others.

You act abusive towards others because you were abused in one way or another in the past.

You have a corrupt blueprint for emotional attachment in relationships that you inherited and learned. Instead of a healthy secure attachment style, you follow an abusive attachment style.

It can be an ambivalent (fight, flight) or avoidant (freeze, fawn) attachment style or even a disorganized attachment style which is the combination of both.

It’s a vicious cycle of abuse that goes like this:

You were abused in one way or another when growing up (or even later in life)
You became abusive towards yourself
Simultaneously, you also learned that being abusive is the safest way to deal with other people in relationships
Other people are abusive back in return (usually just in a different way)
You are even more abusive to others and yourself

It’s a never-ending cycle that can be triggered hundreds of times a day. A situation that happens in the present reminds you of an abusive situation that you experienced in the past (or even a series of them). Naturally you want to protect yourself.

You don’t know how to protect yourself in a healthy way, and thus you resort to an unhealthy 4F abusive response. It’s called an emotional flashback. In everyday life, you encounter small and big triggers that constantly kick you out of the center.

Uday Hussein was one of the cruelest men who ever lived on this planet. He was abusive in the most disgusting ways possible. His psychological issues were far beyond the simple advice that an article like this can offer.

But he was born to Saddam Hussein, how unluckier can you get in life? Think about that (not as an excuse, but as a never-ending vicious circle). He was born and died in the vicious cycle of abuse.

Now, this is a very extreme case. But the point I am trying to make is that you were put in a vicious cycle of abuse (even if you are only verbally abusive or passive-aggressive in relationships) and that’s a very unlucky situation. Luckily, the things that you have learned, you can also unlearn.

With hard work, you can step out of the vicious cycle and guarantee a better life to yourself and other people around you.

Feeling negative emotions

Stepping out of the vicious cycle of abuse

Stepping out of the vicious cycle of abuse is not an easy job. If you have serious and severe problems, I suggest that you work things out with a professional therapist. In this blog post, I will only share a few pieces of advice that helped me become less controlling and verbally aggressive.

As we discussed, there are three stages of processing feelings – awareness, control, expression. These are the three building blocks you can work on to develop emotional intelligence and consequently stop being so abusive in relationships. So let’s look at these three stages and what you can do about them to better control your emotions.

It all starts with emotional awareness

It all starts with awareness. Awareness means being consciously aware of what kind of mental and emotional processes are going on in you.

It’s the capacity that enables you to say to yourself “Oh, I’m becoming angry, sad, depressed etc.” and “These are all the negative thoughts and emotions that this situation is triggering …” before you react to the situation in any way.

There are two benefits to emotional and mental awareness:

It’s a kind of alert that enables you to prepare and mobilize rational intervention as part of emotional control.
It prevents you from suppressing emotions, which could later backfire.

Let’s first focus on suppression. Before I started practicing emotional awareness, I would have said even to the best psychologist in the whole world that he is crazy if he told me that things like somebody being late, not replying to my email or looking at the phone several times when talking to me etc. upset me.

On a conscious level, I was pretty sure that I don’t care, especially not about such small irrelevant “normal” behaviors. But that’s because I suppressed negative emotions. For me, they didn’t exist when these things happened. But they still got me angry on the unconscious level.

They piled up and consequently I could be moody later that day, or lose temper the next time somebody did something I didn’t like. On the unconscious level, things were piling up, while on the conscious level, an anger burst seemed to come out of nowhere, time and time again.

Three stages of emotional control

A unique perspective that will help you be more aware of your negative emotions

So I developed a new perspective on my emoting process that helps me have much greater emotional awareness. My old perspective was that small things simply can’t get me out of the center, since I’m a sharp strong man.

Now in my new perspective, I assume that every small discomfort in a relationship causes some negative emotional process in me, and then I try to identify it. That will help you raise mental and emotional awareness.

When you intentionally stop for a moment and listen to yourself, you become aware. And then there are only two possible outcomes: Oh, there’s nothing, I’m calm and happy. OR. Well, maybe it does irritate me …

If I can 100 % confirm that it doesn’t bother me, life goes on. If I detect negative internal impulses, I gently express the negative feelings while the monster (negative feeling) is still small.

And the second benefit of awareness is an increased buffer before you react to a situation. Awareness gives you an opportunity to be more proactive, to mobilize all your rational resources to make sure negative emotions are not being expressed in a toxic way.

You can’t have control when you only react to a situation. You can only have control when you are aware of what is about to come.

Negative emotions

You are in control, not your emotions

The control part of managing emotions leads us back to the wisdom that my mentor said. You can’t guarantee people that you won’t feel negative emotions and that things won’t upset you, but you absolutely can guarantee that you will not do any damage.

Awareness gives you a great head start in this scenario. When you become aware that things are going in the wrong direction, you can:

Take the conversation in a new more positive direction
You can express your frustrations before the negativity escalates
You can take a timeout to calm down
You can explain your perspective
You can try to identify why you are experiencing an emotional flashback etc.

There is usually an established process or pattern that leads to the point where you lose control. After that, you have zero chance of managing your emotions with pure willpower. When things explode, it’s too late for control.

When you are one step ahead of your emotions, you can express them in a healthy way.

But before that there are only two options. Either you control the process and the situation or the process and situation control and lead you towards the explosion.

So take control of the process. When you start to sense negative emotions and see that things are escalating fast in the wrong direction, say to yourself:

My job is to prevent hurting the other person and the relationship while dealing with my negative emotions. What is the best way to make sure my negative emotions don’t escalate?

Then you must find a way to be one step ahead of your emotions. And when you are one step ahead of your emotions, you can express them in a healthy way.

Finally, express your negative emotions in a healthy way

Staying quiet about the things that upset you is not a healthy way to express emotions. That’s not what we are trying to achieve. Everything that you suppress escalates and backfires.

Much like you don’t want to over-aggressively express your emotions, so you don’t want to suppress them either. Thus you have to find ways how to express your emotions in a healthy way.

You have to experiment a little bit (use the search mode) and discover how you can express negative emotions in a healthier way. Here are a few suggestions:

Take a timeout, calm down and then reopen the discussion again
Explain to the other person why a certain behavior upsets you so much
Write down in a self-reflective journal why things are so hard
You are often only one exercise session away from a good mood, so visit a gym
You can also simply go for a walk or change your environment in any way
Take some time alone and scream in the pillow or just lay down and cry
Do emotional accounting or cognitive reframing
Get a massage, read jokes or watch a comedy
Take 10 deep breaths and then respond

Usually, improving your communication skills and having courage to open up greatly helps with expressing your negative emotions. The important thing is that you reopen the conversation with the person after things calm down, and that you sort things out.

The right solution might be explaining your point of view or how you are experiencing the situation, maybe asserting healthier boundaries or deciding on more productive relationship patterns. The key is to express your frustrations without hurting the relationship.

Take the time out

If you take a timeout, don’t let your mind take you to dark places

The most common way to deal with negative feelings while not hurting the relationship is to take a timeout. The timeout doesn’t mean holding a grudge, punishing each other with silence or creating distance and enforcing isolation.

Timeout is an agreement to take some time for things to calm down and then reopen the discussion with more positive energies.

You agree upfront when to continue the discussion. That means both parties have to confirm and agree that they want to solve the problem and constructively continue the relationship when things calm down.

Timeout is a great tool for regaining control over your negative emotions, but there is one problematic thing that I’ve noticed over and over again – it adds a feeling of abandonment to the situation and accelerates cognitive distortions.

Your mind can always hurt you much worse than your strongest enemy. In the timeout period, there are two options your mind and thoughts can take.

One is towards self-reflection, understanding why your feelings are so strong and finding a creative solution to the problem, making sure that the negative energy doesn’t escalate and the toxic relationship pattern don’t repeat.
The other path is the dark one. Your negative emotions can escalate, your negative thoughts can pile up, you can find many new arguments why you are justifiably upset, and you might come back with even more negative energies, deeply caught in one of the 4F responses.

So when taking a timeout, you must make sure you don’t let your mind wander in the negative direction. There are many ways to properly manage your mind. The main point is that on the emotional level, you mustn’t confuse a timeout with additional abandonment.

Feeling calm

The permanent solution to stop being emotionally abusive and express negative emotions in a mature way

The biggest problem with all the approaches we talked about that deal with negative emotions is that they are never-ending work.

Many small things constantly upset you in relationships, you have to pay attention to every detail and small process that erupts in you, and then manage your responses properly. It’s exhausting and it takes tons of willpower and discipline.

The other, much more rewarding path and permanent solution is to develop a greater capacity for love, better self-esteem and self-confidence, and a healthier attachment style in relationships. Unfortunately, that’s not possible without a long period of therapy, which can which can be a rather big investment.

But in the end, it is absolutely an investment that pays off great dividends in the form of a more quality life and healthier relationships.

Thus, my final recommendation would be: if you have too many issues with expressing your emotions and you act abusively in relationships, get professional help. Going to therapy is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of a really strong character.

interpersonal skills

Relationship circles – The most important diagram of your life

A balance between quality and quantity

The road to quality lies in a proactive approach to relationships

The intimate relationships circle – the most important people in your life

Narrowing the relationship gap based on the relationship circles analysis

1. Build multidimensional relationships

2. Replace screen time with people time

3. Make online communication an add-on to real communication

4. Do things together with people

5. Learn to properly regulate your emotions