Your Perfect Right [Paperback]

This is a highly motivating guide for learning how to act in your own best interests without behaving in an obnoxious Me First manner. Designed as a step-by-step AT (Assertiveness Training) program, the activities and exercises encourage proactive behavior that invites mutual openness. Benefits include getting over your anxiety in dealing with others, boosting your self-confidence, coping with anger and fear, improving decision-making skills, and reducing stress. Because the authors take a holistic-eclectic approach, blending psychological techniques with physical, spiritual, and environmental factors, they suggest you might even be able to relieve certain physical complaints that may be related to underdeveloped assertive talents.

Even the most socially timid reader will find Alberti and Emmons' focus on gradual, realistic progress an energizing method. Start with the Assertiveness Inventory, then follow the guidelines for determining how components like eye contact, body posture, gestures, facial expression, voice tone, inflection, and the thinking process itself fit into your assertiveness quotient. You'll learn to judge what really happened, how much it matters to you, what your priorities and options are, what the consequences might be, and -- most importantly -- whether assertion will make a difference. The book's appendices offer helpful Assertiveness Practice Situations and a list of references and recommendations for further reading.

Since assertiveness is an acquired skill and not an inborn trait, this can be tricky territory. It's easier (and sometimes safer) to respond politely or nonassertively -- even when that means stressing yourself out over an upsetting situation. The other extreme is to confuse assertiveness with aggressiveness. This book is not about bullying or manipulating people to get your way. It's about choosing how to respond, exercising personal rights without denying the rights of others, with the win-win result of making all your relationships more equal.

Additionally, this book could be heavier on the content. It uses too many references, making it seem, at times, like little more than a reader's digest of everyone else's books on the subject.

In conclusion, assertiveness is independent of political or moral viewpoints, yet this book implies that by taking an alternate viewpoint to those presented in this book would be wrong. Isn't that a subtle form of the manipulation that is discouraged in this book?

This book would be better with less politics and more original content.

With that said, this book does a wonderful job defining assertive behavior and when to use it. In this complex world, it's difficult to define appropriate assertiveness, but this book does shed some interesting light on the subject.

I have learned a lot from it, and I would definitely recommend it. I believe it deserves 5 stars.