How to Manage Assertive Anger in the Workplace

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Brenda F. Dixon, a licensed clinical social worker here in Nashville, Tennessee and we're here with Expert Village today. Assertiveness is a wonderful place to be. It's healthy, it's appropriate, it defuses anger, it's so worthy to be around assertiveness. I'm going to tell you what it looks like. Assertiveness is a direct way of speaking to people. Let's say that you're in a situation where someone is angry with you. You can talk directly to that person in a direct way and it'll totally dissipate it. This how you do it; you do it really calmly, you say I can see that what has just happened has made you angry. So you really understand what's going on. Or you can take another approach to it and of course we're talking in general terms and I'm only allowed to give like minutes of this. So to go deeper there's much much more to it and as you watch of all the segments, you get a better grasp of what's going on but right now you can say things like because you did blank, I felt blank, I felt frustrated, I felt angry. See the talking directly gets the angry feeling out of you and that helps you to be able to explain what's going on in the situation. So what I'm doing is I'm telling you about the person that is angry at you, and how to talk directly or when you've got the anger starting in you and how to talk and get it out of you. We got two ways going here. But they both work the same way. When you begin to express anger in a appropriate way, you become assertive. When you talk directly to someone in a calm, strong, firm manner and you're not effected by it, you're not manipulated by it, you know what happens? It dissipates. You can actually learn to defuse your anger or someone else's anger just by the way you talk and that's exciting news. By just the way you talk, you can defuse a person's anger or your own anger."