The doormat and the bully agree on one thing: only one of you gets to matter.
A colleague asks you to cover their weekend on-call shift. It is the third time this quarter, and you had plans. You can say yes and cancel the plans. You can say “Are you serious? Do your own job.” Or you can say “No, I can’t this weekend. I’ve covered the last two, so I need you to find someone else.”
Most people picture these as points on a line, with assertive as the sensible middle. Robert Bolton’s People Skills shows why that picture is wrong. The first two answers are the same move. Each settles the situation by deciding that only one person’s needs count. Submission says “you matter, I don’t.” Aggression says “I matter, you don’t.” Both are easier than the third answer because they only require tracking one person.
What the yes costs
The yes looks like generosity, but it works as a purchase: the weekend buys the colleague’s approval, or at least spares you their displeasure. Bolton describes where the habit leads:
The submissive person forfeits herself, crowding herself into what she thinks is another person’s picture of what is lovable. She has very little real self left to love with or to be loved. — Robert Bolton, People Skills
The cost doesn’t stay with you, either. By the third covered shift you tense up whenever the colleague’s name appears in a chat, and the irritation has nowhere to go because you agreed to everything. Suppressing it makes things worse, because Affection is automatically repressed with the repression of anger. You cannot switch off one feeling selectively. Kill the anger and the warmth toward the colleague goes with it, so the yes that was meant to protect the relationship hollows it out. It also makes your yes worthless as information: once you can’t say no, nobody can tell when your agreement is real. Boundaries are what give a yes its meaning.
The bully’s mirror
“Do your own job” feels like the cure for all that. It isn’t, because aggression is submission’s mirror rather than its opposite. The submissive person loves people but uses them as approval dispensers; the aggressive person skips the love and uses them directly. Bolton again:
Each of us was created to love people and use things. In aggressors, there is a strong tendency to love things and use people.
The snap may save your weekend, but it turns a colleague into a subordinate who complies and resents it. Aggressive people end in a double bind: they cannot respect anyone they dominate, yet they fear an equal relationship. Someone still gets erased; it is just the other person now.
Not a script
The third answer can be learned as a formula, and that is the usual mistake about assertiveness. A better definition: assertiveness is a way of being in the world that confirms your own individual worth and dignity while simultaneously confirming and maintaining the worth of others. Spoken from fear, the same words come out pleading or clipped, and the colleague hears which. They work only when you believe both halves: your weekend matters, and the colleague is not your enemy for asking.
Even then the colleague may be annoyed. Assertiveness respects them without promising their approval, which is exactly what the yes was trying to buy. So the real test is not whether you can say the third answer, but whether you can say it while still wanting them to like you, and let them be annoyed anyway.
References:
- Robert Bolton, People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts