How to Avoid Being Submissive
Learn To Stand Up For Yourself At Work
Overcome Anxiety
Break old patterns of submission, gain confidence to assert yourself and speak out when needed.
Increase Self-Awareness
Develop self-awareness, understand behavior patterns, and boost confidence for more effective communication.
Video Feedback
Practice assertiveness in a supportive environment, receiving video feedback to enhance your communication skills.Refine your communication skills by learning to harness your emotional intelligence with one of the UK's most acclaimed management training courses.
Why Choose This Training?
More Than Just A Course Of Lectures
What gets in the way of developing and holding on to new communication skills are old habits of thinking and speaking. Even if the advice is very good the reason why it rarely sticks are the mental habits people inevitably revert to, especially under pressure.
Unlearning those old habits and internalising a more effective and lasting approach to communication needs more than a short course of lectures on how to do it.
What Makes This Training Stand Out?
What makes this training stand out is the exceptional support through one-to-one coaching sessions and continuous feedback. Changing behaviour is not an easy task as old habits are hard to break.
With a 40-year track record we can help you cultivate practical skills, and build your confidence to so you can successfully navigate real-world challenges, ensuring lasting behavioural improvements.
Testimonials
Join thousands of participants getting results
"What I love about this course is that I didn't just learn about the topic, this course is about ME. I'm confident I can reliably use my new skills, even when under pressure".
"A lesson for life! The power of effective communication is incredible when one masters the skills "listening with empathy" and "speaking assertively"
Clients We Have Worked With
Well-known companies who have used this course again and again, over many years
Course Summary
Training Objectives
This course is designed to help you become more assertive and self-confident in your communication, as well as providing strategies to help you stand up for yourself and be far less subservient. You will learn how to recognise, understand, and manage your own behaviour, and well as others, in order to avoid being manipulated or taken advantage of at work.
Develop Your Emotional Intelligence
You will learn a set of powerful emotional intelligence communication techniques so that you can manage difficult conversations, handle challenging situations, build relationships and set firm boundaries.
Transferable Skills
The goal of this training is to equip you with the tools they need to build strong, lasting relationships in your professional life, although because these skills are so transferable many clients report vast improvements in their personal relationships as well.
Develop Skills
This is a skills development rather than just a theoretical programme, so the emphasis throughout will be on you taking turn after turn, practising your skills, while receiving feedback and coaching about your effect on others.
Repeated Practice and Feedback
In your coaching sessions you will be helped to practise dealing with the kinds of situation you find challenging, again and again, until you are confident you can do it successfully.
Video Analysis
We'll combine practical, hands-on experience with video replay and analysis and discussion of the principles involved to help you gain both skills and understanding. Special attention is paid to your individual training needs, so you can practise your skills in real-life situations that you have to handle at work.
Sustained Change
That's why as well as your place in a small group, this training includes a generous amount of private and confidential one-to-one coaching sessions online, spread over several months, ensuring an exceptional level of support. This will ensure the changes you make are sustained over a longer period of time and any obstacles are overcome. Choose between online training available worldwide, or in-person face-to-face courses in the UK.
Course Dates and Price
For a list of upcoming course dates (for online coaching and face-to-face training), the locations of the next 3-day public courses in the UK and pricing Click here.
Free Initial Session
This initial coaching session serves as an introduction to the "Skills with People" course, allowing you to understand the course's relevance and effectiveness for your specific needs before committing to it.
Why is this course on how to avoid being submissive or subservient so effective?
Break free from submissive behaviour
For more than 40 years this assertiveness training course has been highly acclaimed by thousands of managers and professionals. Many have said it's one of the best "how to stand up for yourself" training courses they ever attended. Through this course, you'll learn how to stop being subservient, and how to find the best way to express your own personal power, and stand up for yourself at work without creating waves.
As a result of taking the course, you will become much more confident in applying your new skills both professionally and personally. The goal is for you to be able to be assertive without being seen as unreasonable or aggressive.
Benefits of this training course in how to avoid being submissive
Here's a list showing how we could help you leave the course with the ability to be much more assertive, without being seen as unreasonable or aggressive.
What You'll Learn |
Benefit of this Course |
|
Recognise Signs of Submissiveness |
Tackling behaviours such as not speaking up, not voicing opinions, and lacking initiative. |
|
Emotional Intelligence |
Receive training in assertive communication and empathy. |
|
Speak Up in Meetings |
Gain confidence to voice your opinions, even if they are unpopular. |
|
Take Initiative |
Learn how to be proactive and how to impress with when you demonstrate reliability and enthusiasm. |
|
Set Boundaries |
Become more assertive about your needs and expectations, ensuring respect. |
|
Practice Self-Awareness |
Focus on your personal feelings and learn to speak about them appropriately to motive others. |
|
Practical Tips and Techniques |
Receive immediate tips and using video analysis for improvement. |
|
Follow-Up Coaching |
Ongoing one-to-one coaching and support for assertiveness training (long after the group sessions have ended). |
Recognise Signs of Being Submissive
Learn to identify behaviours such as not speaking up in meetings, not voicing your opinions, and not taking enough initiative on projects.
Emotional Intelligence Communication Skills
With our emotional intelligence training you'll gain the ability to speak assertively without being misinterpreted as aggressive, so you can stand up for yourself and your ideas.
Another important skills you'll learn is how to reassure the other person by being able to tune in on their wavelength with empathy training.
Speak Up in Meetings with Confidence
Learn to voice your opinions with confidence, even what you are saying isn't popular. Learn how to say it in a way that doesn't encourage them to shoot the messenger. You'll learn how to stop being subservient.
Take Initiative
Discover how to take the initiative more often and demonstrate to your colleagues that you are a reliable, enthusiastic self-starter.
Set Boundaries
Learn to be more assertive about your needs and expectations, ensuring your colleagues respect you.
Practice Self-Awareness
By focussing on your own feelings you'll become more self-aware. You'll then be able to practice speaking about it appropriately, so you can prioritise your mental health.
Practical Tips and Techniques
Receive immediate, practical tips to improve your ability to avoid being submissive. With the help of a video camera you'll see for yourself how you come across. You'll have the opportunity to make immediate improvements and be motivated by the progress you'll see in yourself.
Follow-Up Coaching and Ongoing Support
You'll receive a generous amount of ongoing support with one-to-one coaching to help you develop and enhance your skills with assertiveness training. As a matter of fact, your coaching won't end until you're completely confident you know what you're doing (at no extra charge).
Training for managers under pressure. Are you a manager, leader or a professional hoping for more confidence to be assertive?
Is this training course right for you?
Discover how speaking assertively and with integrity can earn you more respect
Are you sick and tired of biting your lip to stop you speaking your mind? Proven training that gives managers, leaders and professionals the exact steps you need to be taken more seriously at work.
- Stop being submissive
Learn how to make your views known in a positive way so others will take you more seriously. - Be more assertive WITHOUT being aggressive
Get cooperation more quickly so you'll be more successful. - No longer say 'Yes' when you want to say 'No'
Speak with integrity. It takes courage as well as skill, but as you build more trust you'll feel better. - If you're a woman working in a male dominated environment find a better way to influence others than by talking like an aggressive man.
People will be less put off, and you won't have to pretend to be someone you're not. - Have more confidence to speak up at meetings.
Find your honest voice and let others know what you really think and feel. You'll be more trusted and respected. - Stop suppressing your feelings and views about what's going on at work out of fear that nobody will listen to you, or that no one will take any notice of you.
As you make a bigger contribution your views will begin to win the respect you deserve. - Stand up to difficult people without antagonising them.
As you become more skilled at creating cooperation out of conflict you'll earn more respect, and you're more likely to make them change their mind. - Disagree in a way that's honest but won't get you a reputation for being difficult and negative.
As people's respect for your views grows you'll be taken more seriously and become more influential. - There are times when you need to take a stand, but don't know what to say and how to say it gracefully. You're nervous it might damage your reputation if you're clumsy.
If you can find the right words it'll impress people, and it will give your confidence a great boost.
What you'll take away from this course
Might your need to learn how to avoid being submissive be met by this London UK management training & leadership development course called Skills with People?
- You'll be able to stand up to for yourself and disagree successfully without being aggressive. You'll find this especially useful if your job includes project management of any kind.
- Earn respect by being confident at speaking your mind.
- You'll be more assertive, which is a way of making people take you seriously without being either aggressive or submissive, and without jeopardising your relationships.
- You'll no longer feel obliged to say 'yes' when you'd like to be able to say 'no'.
- You'll have the confidence to speak your mind in meetings.
- You'll be able to disagree without starting a fight or getting into conflict.
- Being assertive calls for courage as well as skill. We'll help you find the honest words you can use, and that will help you find the courage. We'll show you what to say, and help you practice saying it over and over until you become really good at it.
A practical guide - how to avoid being submissive
How emotional intelligence can help you avoid being submissive
On the "Skills with People" training course we'll provide you with a set of emotional intelligence, and help you practice them over and over until you become confident and fluent using them. You'll be able to avoid being submissive when you've learned how to give honest voice to your own feelings, even if this isn't what you're in the habit of doing. On the course you'll get plenty of practice and coaching at saying things like:-
- “I feel bad about not supporting you, and I mean you no disrespect, but I'm not at all comfortable with what you're asking me to. I believe it risks damaging our relationship with this customer”.
Usually if you stand up to people in a frank and assertive but not disrespectful way they'll take you seriously. But let's suppose they don't. Suppose they say:-
- “I don't care how you feel – you're going to do what I want anyway”.
Once again we encourage you to trust you feelings and put them frankly into words:-
- “Now I'm even more worried because you don't seem to be taking the risk to the business seriously”.
Of course this approach doesn't work every time, but nine times out of ten it brings them to their senses.
Points to notice about this way of avoiding being submissive
The key to it lies in being able to put your feelings into words. The words we'll teach you to use will be very precise and honest. They'll include three elements:-
- First, describe simply and accurately what feeling you are experiencing (e.g., "I feel bad", "I'm not at all comfortable").
- Second, say precisely what the feeling is about (e.g., "about not supporting you", "about what you're asking me to do").
- Third, give the reason why you feel like this, in other words, what really matters to you (e.g., "because I believe it'll damage our relationship with the customer", "because I can see we're taking a big risk if I do this").
Feelings are facts, and you're the world's top authority on the subject of how you feel. No one can contradict you. So one of the results and benefits of speaking in this way is that it makes argument extremely unlikely. You can speak like this with honest conviction and people will take you seriously.
As you practise this approach to avoiding being submissive and to standing firm on your beliefs and convictions, your confidence and assertiveness will increase.
What's difficult about this way of avoiding being submissive?
The big difficulty most people encounter in being assertive and avoiding being submissive is that they're not used to putting their feelings into words. It's not that you can't do it, but that you've been brought up or conditioned to avoid doing it. You may have an unconscious fear of doing it. You may have carried with you all your life some wrong assumptions about the best way to handle feelings, for example, that expressing feelings is a sign of weakness, or that people will take advantage of you if you do. If so, the Skills with People course will develop your emotional intelligence, and help you lay aside old mental habits that are getting in the way.
What you'll discover on the course is that far from being a sign of weakness, your feelings are the source of your personal power, authority and integrity, that you are perfectly able to express them, and that when you do people will take you seriously. Once you've mastered this idea there'll be no more need to be submissive when what someone else wants you to do goes against what matters to you.
For more information on this website relevant to avoiding being submissive you might also find our pages on managing conflict and negotiating relevant and helpful.