In our home, we joke that we ought to hire Luigi out as an assertiveness coach, and make him earn his keep. Luigi is one of our two dogs, an 8-lb. shih tzu (maybe) we found running along a highway 10 years ago. Eight pounds of dog, 100 pounds of assertiveness. What’s more, when he’s his assertive best, one actually wants to please the little guy.

We even have insider shorthand relating to his assertiveness. We call him Mr. Clear Channel Communications. And when one of us gets up to do something that Luigi clearly wants us to do, we say it’s a dew-claw moment—as in, wrapped around his little dew claw (we know the dew-claw is the equivalent of the thumb, but you get the point).

If any dog trainers are reading this, we’ll probably be banished from dog-training circles everywhere, given what this dog gets away with. Our Newfoundland mix, Hugo, certainly doesn’t get away with anything close and his sad eyes remind us of that daily. But Hugo isn’t assertive. He could learn a thing or two from Mr. Clear Channel, by using Luigi’s Recipe for Assertiveness Success:

• Get clear on your own needs and wishes for that situation.
• Communicate them in a clear, direct and honest way.
• Assertiveness isn’t aggressiveness. Keep the other person’s needs in mind—this isn’t about treading on their needs in the quest to communicate your own.
• Keep it simple. Don’t water down your message with wordiness.
• Wag. It also helps if you have big brown eyes and a cute little mustache (Luigi insisted I include this part).

If assertiveness, an essential negotiation and conflict resolution skill, is a challenge for you, I recommend People Skills by Robert Bolton.

Conflict Zen® by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.