I'm glad I read this. I don't think I realised when I bought it but this is a self help book centred around assertiveness training, something that was apparently very popular in the late 70s and early 80s but has fallen out of fashion, in spite of the fact that so many people struggle with assertive communication and find themselves suffering from social anxiety. I must have bought at least 20 copies since, but I've given them all away during my practice as a volunteer in miscarriage support. Grief and bereavement can cause serious breakdown in clear conversation. Everybody thinks they know what you are going through and how you should act, but they don't as "they" are not you. Being able to tell your truth in a clear, consistent and honest way literally does save relationships at these overwhelming times and allows the right things to be said and understood and for grief to flow fluently. The key to what I do - and what I have always done - is authentic communication as the basis of sincere relationship whether that is with our nearest and dearest, with colleagues, with friends or with those we hardly know. Taking responsibility for what we want (or don't want) and for how we express ourselves requires sensitivity to the requirements of love for oneself and others. How do we balance these needs? How do we learn to set limits and say 'no' in unclear relationships? Are we happy with the quality of our relationships? Which people do we really want around us? How can we handle conflict and tension in ways that respect different viewpoints and needs instead of solely aiming for a win/lose outcome? How do we break out of old habits of fear and conditioning and learn to find our real inner voice? I have witnessed women waking up to this experience of personal power many, many times – and in many cultures. It offers a great sense of liberation. And we need this. We need to model it to women of all ages – and to men too, so they can see that there is an alternative to dominance. There is still a lot that’s wrong in our world and assertive skills provide a blueprint of how to begin to find our voices within our everyday lives. I first read this book some 20 years ago. It quite literally changed my life. I learned how to say what I needed to say at the right time and in the right way. No more misunderstanding, ambiguity, manipulating, martyrdom from myself towards others or them towards me!

There is no one-size-fits-all model of personal power, but each woman can find it within herself. Assertive personal power means saying ‘no’ clearly when that’s what you want to say; it means expressing your needs and challenging an unfair criticism; it means initiating a difficult conversation with someone you care about – and doing all of this without inadvertently eliciting aggression in response. I am a psychologist by profession and have for over three decades been working as a trainer and educator. To those who already know of my work through reading one of my books or attending a workshop or lecture, a warm welcome too. Honestly? In most situations I'm not really one of those people. I have my bad days like anyone else but mostly I do ok. So the book isn't really aimed at me. I read it knowing this and thinking it would help me to be more effective when communicating with people who might struggle with assertiveness. If nothing else, I thought it would be an interesting read to see that perspective. Then came the section on how to accept a compliment and that one was personally helpful. The section on how to ask your boss for a pay rise was fascinating. The section on loving your own body and accepting yourself was astonishingly uplifting. The conditioning of the past is still deeply embedded in women’s psyches, which means that simply having more equal opportunities doesn’t always translate into the ability to grasp them. When we start learning assertive skills, we are usually unaware of our habitual style of communication. With practice we come to realise what is unhelpful and detracts from what we want to express. We learn to take responsibility for what we want and feel, instead of expecting others to be telepathic. We learn how to be unafraid of our anxiety and work through it to strengthen what we want to say.In the decades that followed political and cultural shifts in the UK encouraged a more individualistic focus. The core message of assertiveness was gradually weakened, with less emphasis on equality and more on believing you had the right to get what you want, whoever you had to override to get it! I continued to teach my model but with an awareness that it was increasingly countercultural. My commitment and passion have always been to equality, honesty and nonaggression: through both the facilitation of classes, workshops and ongoing courses in an extraordinarily diverse range of contexts and cultures and also through my books, I have attempted to teach and encourage others who are similarly interested in upholding these same values. Some women have embraced aggression as a form of power, and enjoy the cut and thrust of a highly competitive culture, getting a buzz when they win. The problem is that there can only be a winner if there is also a loser. And losing hurts. It demeans. It abases. More importantly, the ‘loser’ tends to store up their grievance until an opportunity arises to ease their hurt by scoring a ‘win’ over someone else, making them a ‘loser’ instead. This is how cycles of aggression continue to be fed and perpetuated in our lives. I had already been teaching assertive skills for a couple of years when I wrote my book A Woman In Your Own Right in 1982. I wanted the material to be accessible to women who couldn’t get to my classes, or to those of the women whom I taught to lead classes of their own.

While younger women in the West today have more independence than their mothers and a wider range of options, sexist assumptions persist. Grosser forms of sexist behaviour are less visible, thanks to policy changes, but sexist attitudes have not disappeared. They simply operate at a different level and only come to light when events such as the outpouring of the #MeToo movement demonstrate that the equality enshrined in policy is not reflected in the lived experience of countless women. Conflict isn’t welcomed by everyone, however, and many of us try our best to avoid it. Instead of speaking up, we keep quiet. We smile, pretend to agree, play along, or turn a deaf ear. Over time we allow ourselves to be reduced to being mere bystanders: both in our immediate environment and in the world at large.Meanwhile, aggression has been channelled into forms undreamt of four decades ago, with social media facilitating the deliberate targeting of women, with threats of violence and misogynistic comments designed to intimidate and keep us silent. We’ve made giant strides towards equality over the decades, but... this advice is even more pertinent today' LINDA KELSEY, DAILY MAIL Solid state physics Quantum theory Chemical bonds SCIENCE Physics Condensed Matter Física do estado sólido Mecânica quântica Last year I was approached by a new publisher who proposed a 40th anniversary edition. This gave me an opportunity to update my book in some ways – there is a new section on assertiveness in social media, for example – but much of the material remains as relevant now as when it was first published. Many of us still find it difficult to make a clear refusal, ask for what we really want, challenge someone else’s behaviour or disagree with another person’s viewpoint. The little gremlin of conditioning inside our heads makes us doubt ourselves: What will they think of me if I speak up? Will they bother to listen? Will there be repercussions? Will they dislike me?