by Dr. Jocelyn Markowicz, PhD, Psychologist in San Diego, CA

Girl Assertiveness Power: How to Teach Young Girls to Assert Their Power Like Amanda Gorman  

At the 2021 Presidential Inauguration, Amanda Gorman, a poet and activist, performed her poem “The Hill We Climb.” She shared these powerful words: “When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?” This line illuminated a shade that looms over our young girls, cloaking their voices within the darkness of unassertiveness. While Gorman’s performance spoke powerfully across a vast sea of change needed, her presence and assertiveness courageously inspired people all over the world to stand in the light of assertive power. How can we teach young girls to be more assertive despite their fear of being viewed as aggressive? 

Why Female Assertiveness Is Complicated

Research supports the benefits of individuals sharing their authentic thoughts and feelings in an assertive way (Eslami, Rabiei, Mohammad, Hamidizadeh, & Masoudi, 2016). Research also highlights the consequences women have faced when their assertiveness was incorrectly viewed as aggressiveness (Maloney & Moore, 2019). Considering the challenges faced when a woman embraces her assertive power, parents have seemingly been hesitant to encourage their daughters to be unabashedly assertive.

Why and How to Nurture Assertiveness in Girls

Why must there be a collective drive to teach young girls to be assertive? First, most people can admit that it is what they do not say that leads to increased anxiety, depression, and general dissatisfaction. While there can be consequences to being assertive or aggressive, people generally feel empowered after being brave enough to share their truth. How can you stay on the healthy side of authentic communication without crossing the line into perceived aggressiveness? How can you develop assertiveness in the face of real bias against assertive women? Young girls need help developing the power of their assertive voice and navigating the challenges that may result. Here are general behavioral TIPs to help.

Tone

To be an effective communicator, one must first have self-awareness. Is the young girl in your life someone who gets loud when she is excited about a topic of discussion? Is her voice is barely audible when she talks about something meaningful? Does it quaver when she discusses her honest feelings? If you are able to answer any of these questions, then you are somewhat aware of her natural way of communicating. Now, you must help her develop awareness of how changes in her tone may be affected by her feelings and may, in turn, affect her listener. 

When the brain experiences intense emotions, it does not process information as accurately as it does in a calmer state. The right tone matters, especially in moments of high emotional intensity. The right tone can deescalate a situation and allow the receiver of communication to process the information better and appraise the speaker more favorably (Helfrich & Weidenbecher, 2011). The wrong tone of voice can change the way the receiver codes the message as assertive or aggressive. An assertive tone can be passionate and intense with an air of calmness. An aggressive tone can also be passionate and intense, but typically has an air of uncertainty. An aggressive tone creates negative feelings in the receiver. A calm tone can create positive feelings, which means the message can be heard more clearly.

Information About the Message Receiver

 It is important to teach young girls how to know their audience. Help them think about who will be listening to what they have to say. Strong communicators can effectively speak to someone with a doctorate or someone who has a third-grade education. You can’t do that without awareness of the receiver’s capacity to receive and absorb the message. You may have something valuable to say, but if you deliver it in the wrong tone and with ineffective language, your message will not achieve the desired outcome. Knowing how to adjust based on your audience is a key skill for communicating effectively.

Our young girls need feedback. They need help understanding how their communication is received by their audience. Feedback can help them strengthen positive communication skills and weaken any negative communication delivery methods.

Posture 

Does the young girl in your life take up space when she is communicating, or does she get smaller? Does she make wild movements with her hands or hid them behind her back when she’s trying to assert herself? Behavioral positions cause natural reactions. Our brains decide if a person’s posturing is threatening or soothing. Thus, it is helpful to teach young girls to be aware of how their bodies respond when they are trying to communicate their authentic thoughts, and how their physical reactions might affect various audiences. A girl may have a lovely, impassioned message that could come across as aggressive to someone else based on their posture. While perceptions of posturing are fraught with bias, knowing how others might perceive her behavior can help young girls to develop flexibility and intention in their physical movements based on their audience.

Teaching the young girl in your life these behavioral TIPs is a start to helping her develop more lifelong assertiveness. It’s also important to expose her to assertive women.

Stock up on Books

Make sure to surround the young girl in your life with examples of women who have accomplished many things. I would invite you to devote a shelf in the home to fill with books about a variety of girls and women who have assertively accomplished their goals. Keep filling shelves up with wonderful stories of how important girls and women are in the world. Self-confidence inspires assertiveness. Also, be sure to include books by child and adult female authors who were assertive enough to write and publish their ideas. Here are some book recommendations:

• The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman
• The Book of Gutsy Women by Chelsea Clinton and Hillary Clinton
• Start Now! You Can Make a Difference by Chelsea Clinton
• She Persisted Around the World: 13 Women Who Changed History by Chelsea Clinton
• Dear Girl by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Paris Rosenthal
• Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Rebel Girls, Francesca Cavallo and Elena Favilli
• The Bee Psychologist: I Wish My Mom Had Five Heads! by Liz Middle and Jocelyn Markowicz, Ph.D.
• Like a Girl by Lori Degman and Mara Penny
• A Good Kind of Trouble by Lisa Moore Ramee
• Ambitious Girl by Meena Harris

Target Conditions That Negatively Impact Assertiveness

As you are teaching the young girl in your life to practice assertive communication and filling up her mind with wonderful examples of assertiveness, you must also actively work to target conditions that may negatively impact her assertive communication progress. In order for her to experience the true power of her assertiveness, she’ll need your help to reduce anticipatory anxiety or behavioral-skill deficits associated with her unassertiveness (Speed, Goldstein, & Golfried, 2017). Untreated anxiety and depression are but two conditions that can impact a young girl’s confidence to assertively communicate her thoughts. 

Therapy is a great resource she may utilize to discuss challenges to her assertiveness and practice specific skills. Assertiveness training, which can be conducted in therapy, decreases anxiety, stress, and depression (Eslami, Rabiei, Mohammad, Hamidizadeh, & Masoudi, 2016). According to Eslami et al. (2016), unassertive behaviors are obstacles that strongly correlated with fears, worries, social anxieties, and various internal aggressions. An assertive person can create closer relationships with others, express a wide range of emotions without feeling guilty, stressful, or anxious or violating the rights of others. Young girls can develop into assertive women who change the world. As Amanda Gorman stated at the inauguration, ‘If only we’re brave enough to be it.’ We owe it to the young girls in our lives to help them to Be the It called an assertive communicator.

If the young girl in your life might benefit from therapy, start looking at options with our child therapist search. If you’re reading this and thinking you might need to work on yourself before you’ll really be ready to nurture assertiveness in someone else, begin your search for a therapist near you in our directory.

References

Read the full text of Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem ‘The Hill We Climb’. (2021, January 20). Retrieved April 22, 2021, from https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/20/amanda-gormans-inaugural-poem-the-hill-we-climb-full-text.html

Eslami, A.A., Rabiei,L, Mohammad, S.A., Hamidizadeh, S., and Masoudi, R. (2016). The Effectiveness of Assertiveness Training on the Levels of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression of High School Students. Iranian Red Crescent Medical Journal. Jan; 18(1): e21096.

Helfrich, Hede & Weidenbecher, Philipp. (2011). Impact of Voice Pitch on Text Memory. Swiss Journal of Psychology. 70. 85-93. 10.1024/1421-0185/a000042.

Maloney, M. E., & Moore, P. (2019). From aggressive to assertive. International journal of women’s dermatology, 6(1), 46–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijwd.2019.09.006

Speed, B. C., Goldstein, B. L., & Goldfried, M. R. (2017). Assertiveness training: A forgotten evidence-based treatment. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice. https://doi.org/10.1111/cpsp.12216

Did you know that the trait known as self-esteem or self-worth can greatly impact your mood? It can also affect your behavior and decisions. Self-worth is linked to higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress. Meanwhile, someone with low self-esteem may experience shame, social isolation, and self-criticism.

These quotes and sayings about self-worth are for you. You can download them to keep as a personal reminder to value yourself. Or you can share them on social media as a reminder to your loved ones!

Self-worth can encourage habits that increase mental well-being. When the self is valued, we may be more likely to take good care of ourselves. One sign of high self-esteem is the ability to show yourself compassion. And when you can have compassion for yourself, you may be more likely to extend it to others. This can create a positive feedback loop that makes it easier for you to be kind to yourself and others! [fat_widget_right]

You may need a self-worth boost if you say negative things about yourself that you would never say to someone else. This habit, called negative self-talk, can increase negative emotions like worry, sadness, and powerlessness. Many people go through periods of low self-worth after a stressful or traumatic life event. If you are going through divorce, job loss, legal trouble, or something else, it is important to be kind to yourself and remember how valuable you are.

If you feel like low self-esteem is getting you down, talking to a therapist or counselor may help. Therapy can help you address what may be causing your feelings of low self-worth. It can also teach you strategies for boosting your self-confidence.

Reference:

Baumeister, R. F., Campbell, J. D., Krueger, J. I., & Vohs, K. D. (2003, May 1). Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, or healthier lifestyles? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 1(4), 1-44. doi: 10.1111/1529-1006.01431

Some sayings might be well-intended, but that doesn’t make them true, let alone easy to hear. Case in point: “You can’t find love until you learn to love yourself.”

The people who come to me for help tend to hate that thought. “If I knew how to love myself more,” they say, “I would have started long ago. In fact, I wouldn’t even be in therapy if I had that figured out.”

Improving self-esteem seems to some to be an impossible task. But each time, as we explore it together, similar themes come to the foreground. After years of figuring it out with people from all sorts of backgrounds and at all levels of self-confidence, I’ve come up with a few main components of esteem work.

Here are the key factors, in my experience:

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1. Accept That You Are Flawed

The first step toward liking yourself is accepting all parts of yourself. Most people are at least slightly perfectionistic, with an unrealistic expectation that there’s someone out there who can be right or good all the time. (Not only is this impossible, it would make you insufferable.) Self-esteem, on the other hand, is based on unconditional love, which means you expect and allow yourself to mess up sometimes and are gentle with yourself when you do.

This is very different from excusing bad behavior or never asking yourself to grow and change. Instead, it’s about having compassion and kindness toward yourself when you fail, with the knowledge that if you want to change, using a gentle desire to do better is far more productive than viciously beating yourself up.

2. Be Curious About Yourself

You can’t love what you don’t know, so an important step to increasing self-confidence is to learn who you truly are. Often, by early adulthood, people have created a blanket definition of themselves based on their experiences and what others have told them. “I’m shy” or “I have an anger issue” become messages they’ve accepted and no longer question. Even if you’re shy or angry, though, this is only one small part of you.

When choosing a therapist, it might be helpful to ask how they approach self-esteem work and if they have a blueprint for increasing self-love.

Another way of not seeing or knowing your full self is when you pick and choose what you let others see. By showing only the parts of yourself that you think look best to others, you hide other pieces which are equally important and valid.

When you take time to examine who you are and who you want to be, you get more clarity about all of you—not just the elements that others have liked or disliked. You can gain insight into how you see yourself: your goals and ambitions, your flaws and failures, where you would like to grow. When you have all the pieces straight, you can start to accept them and integrate them into a real, full picture of yourself.

3. Practice Compassion

It’s a thin line between having compassion for yourself and having it for others. Working on both pieces at the same time is helpful. Often if a person in therapy finds it too tough to start with being kind to themselves, we pivot to working on being kinder to others.

One interesting way to gauge if you’re compassionate to others is to ask if you feel like others are judging you. Although it sounds conflicting, a worry that you are being judged is often an indication you have been taught to judge others. Maybe you came from a household where people’s clothes or weight or religiosity was criticized, and you find yourself as an adult having the same strict rules of behavior for others. It might be hard, then, not to imagine that people are doing the same thing to you. If you were disparaged by family or peers, you might have learned to carry this voice of disapproval inside of you. You might have even come to believe people were disliking you when, in reality, you were disliking yourself.

Having compassion for others is good practice for being kinder to ourselves. Think about letting others off the hook for bad behavior or not living up to your standards. Then try to move that same kind of understanding and gentleness back to yourself so you can realize everyone messes up sometimes. You may be surprised how your perspective shifts from one of distrust to one of tolerance.

Conclusion

Any of these three components of building self-esteem can be worked on by yourself or with the help of a professional. When choosing a therapist, it might be helpful to ask how they approach self-esteem work and if they have a blueprint for increasing self-love. Even if you need not love yourself to find love, it’s worth learning how to do so anyway. It feels good to be the best version of yourself possible.

“We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.” —Ken Levine

Many parents of young children and teens think the fewer choices they give their children, the better. They feel they should decide what’s best for their kids and not confuse them with too many options. I took a different approach when my children were growing up: I would routinely let them choose between different foods, activities, and chores. Through experience, they learned some of their choices would turn out well, others not as well. Today, as adults, they are both quite capable of making choices and dealing with the consequences.

Understanding at the outset that not every choice will yield the desired outcome can help inform one’s expectations, including the possibility of these less desirable outcomes. Skillfully managing any unintended consequences is part of the process of decision-making.

How Do We Learn to Make Good Decisions?

Making a good decision requires us to know ourselves. We need to know the things we can live with, the things we cannot compromise on, and the things we can tolerate or get used to. [fat_widget_right]

Sometimes facts can help us make decisions, and exploring the data available to us may be the easiest place to start. Who hasn’t made a list of pros and cons when trying to decide something? Of course, as appealing as such a list might seem, I find that it almost never leads to a good choice because the weight of each item on both sides depends on both obvious and subtle outcomes that might or might not happen and are ultimately almost impossible to compare. Still, it can be a helpful exercise, as it lays out some points to consider.

Data and facts may be helpful in some cases, but all the data in the world can’t compete with the unconscious drives and preferences that often determine how happy we will be with any given choice. We might prefer to focus on factual information when it comes to choosing which mutual fund to invest in, for example, but perhaps not when it comes to choosing a mate, career, place to live, or even what to have for dinner.

If these drives are unconscious, we might wonder what hope we have of unearthing them, but I say we have plenty of hope. We can look at past decisions and their consequences to see how making those choices felt and how they’ve sat with us over time. We might enlist the help of someone who knows us well—a close friend, relative, or therapist—to tease out some personal themes or preferences we might have overlooked.

Keep in mind: If you ask a number of people for help and they all say something similar, you can be pretty sure there’s some useful information there. Conversely, if they all say something different, you may want to consider their counsel carefully before taking any one person’s advice.

It’s often not enough to just rely on intellect. Our hearts and guts have their own ways of knowing things, and they deserve some say in the process, too. Trusting our intuition, or gut, even when all the information tries to lure us to the other side is an acquired skill that can take decades to assimilate. Learn to be patient with yourself as you navigate life from one choice to the next and gain a deeper confidence in your gut feelings.

Another helpful strategy in the process of decision-making is looking back on the past. Which actions brought us joy? Which left us sad, lonely, or unfulfilled? As we look back, we may notice some themes emerging. This is where keeping a journal, especially a joy journal, can be very helpful. We can look back and notice which things consistently brought us joy. There will be patterns. Perhaps the best times were with family, or alone, or playing tennis. By determining those things that historically gave us the most pleasure, we may be able to better assess what might also lead to our happiness in the future. Resist the urge to make a decision based on what looks good, right, sensible, or mature. When it comes to the biggest decisions in life—education, a partner, where to live, finances, health, family, and so on, the trick is not trying to make the right decision. There is no right decision. 

One of my favorite decision-making techniques is to ask myself, If I do or don’t do X, Y, or Z, how might I feel five, 10, or 20 years from now? Once again, the answer may come as a gut feeling, not a list of all the great reasons in favor of one particular choice. Trusting your gut takes guts. It means you trust that ineffable combo platter of heart, head, and experiences often coded in bodily feelings. This is not nearly as strange as it sounds. Candace Pert, author of Molecules of Emotion, found receptor sites on every cell of the body for information from the limbic system in the brain (where your emotions are generated).

It is helpful to remember we have all sorts of different parts. One part may want one thing, another part may want another, and so on. Giving voice to these different parts, especially if they are polarized and have opposite desires, can be incredibly helpful as we attempt to make decisions. You can learn about parts work, or Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems theory, through YouTube videos or books, such as Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems Therapy or Jay Earley’s Self-Therapy.

It is also possible to explore one’s less conscious parts though journaling, dream analysis, art therapy, or Emotional Freedom Technique (also called tapping). [amazon_affiliate]

Any Decision Can Be the Right Decision

Resist the urge to make a decision based on what looks good, right, sensible, or mature. When it comes to the biggest decisions in life—education, a partner, where to live, finances, health, family, and so on, the trick is not trying to make the right decision. There is no right decision. Just make a decision. Indecision can feel like a numbing limbo that we can’t escape. Once we make a decision, we at least have something to work with. Perhaps we will be happy with our decision, but we might also feel neutral, or even displeased. If the latter, well, at least we have created a great learning experience for ourselves.

Sometimes, we might feel as if we are letting possibilities marinate, when actually we are procrastinating with decision-making. It can be hard to discern the difference. We are the only ones who can say for certain whether we are indecisive because we are avoiding the decision or procrastinating or because we simply want to weigh the options more carefully. Take your time—if you’re still assessing. If you’re avoiding a decision because you’re afraid of making a mistake and if that’s been a theme for you in the past, you may want to talk to a therapist.

The good news is this: Every decision, no matter the outcome, will have some benefit, even if it’s only that we learn to avoid a similar choice in the future. The habit of making decisions builds resilience. Avoiding committing to one thing or another is a decision in itself, true, but this practice can feed a lack of self-confidence. Doing difficult things is the royal road to building self-confidence, and making choices builds a sense of agency in the world, helping us feel more competent and confident.

Reference:

Pert, C. B. (1999). Molecules of emotion: The science behind mind-body medicine. New York, NY: Touchstone.