Exercise Your 3 Personal Rights to Speak with Assertiveness

Knowing and exercising your personal rights are so integral to building assertiveness and feeling good about yourself.

This episode explores the relationship between assertiveness, personal rights, and how it intertwines with stuttering.

In those moments when expressing yourself can be physically challenging, we explore what might be getting in the way of assertiveness.

Discover the Personal Bill of Rights and the profound impact it has on assertiveness, self-esteem, and confidence.

Standing up for your personal rights is a journey towards self-respect, and improved relationships. Remember… your voice is worthy and powerful!

Links

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Recovery from Stuttering Relapse: Coaching solutions with Paige
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Transcript

In today's episode, we're going to explore a topic that I hope you find is helpful. It's about the dynamic between assertiveness and personal rights and how it connects to stuttering in times when it can be physically challenging to get the words out. And I know all about that. It's also those exact moments when it can be hard to be assertive and stand up for yourself.

Sometimes it's just easier not to say what you want to say, but is it really do to a fear sound or word, or is there something else going on? A missing ingredient to being assertive. This is what we're going to explore.

Okay, let's start with the definition of assertiveness. What is it? Assertiveness is about expressing your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in a direct, honest, and appropriate way. To be clear, this is much different from aggressiveness, which sometimes tends to be confused with assertiveness. They are not the same.

Assertiveness is still respectful. Now, if you feel like you struggle with being assertive and you want to feel more free in expressing yourself, the main ingredient behind assertiveness is what's called the bill of personal rights. Assertiveness means standing up for your personal rights. Now, you might think that assertiveness is something you're born with, but the truth is we all have access to it, and it's also a learned skill just like anything else.

But here's a question. Why is it so hard to be assertive? Well. A lack of assert may be due to the fact that we don't know we have the personal right to express our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. If at the moment you're not feeling very assertive, it may be for either of these two reasons. First, you know your personal rights, but have forgotten to exercise them, or more than likely, you never learned you had personal rights in the first place.

This learning usually happens in childhood. When I was growing up, I was shy and quiet, but also creative and sensitive. But I was also never taught to believe that I had personal rights, and because I didn't know they even existed, or maybe because I was not allowed to, I never exercised them. But now, as an adult, you can make a different choice.

It's important to know that even if you've never known or forgotten to exercise your basic personal rights, it's never too late to learn.

I learned about the personal Bill of Rights in a book called The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook by author Edmund j Bourne. I remember the first time I read over the entire list of the personal Bill of Rights, My reaction was one of utter disbelief, and my jaw just dropped. I was just so blown away. It was a huge revelation. Like what? I, I couldn't believe that everyone else already had these rights.

You mean other people in the world already know this stuff but me? Wow. No one, not my parents or anybody ever told me or taught me that I had these rights as a child growing up. Heck, no one even let me knew I had these personal rights as an adult. Discovering these personal rights led me to believe that maybe my anxiety around speaking and anxiety in general was not a personal failing, but tied to something deeper.

Now that I understand the importance of knowing your personal rights are so integral to assertiveness and feeling good about yourself, I've made sure to include an adapted version of the personal Bill of Rights in the Find Your Flow to Fluency Coaching program. This is an important step as assertiveness lays the foundation on the journey to your increased self-esteem and confidence. In the list, there's a total of 25 personal rights.

Now that's too many to cover here in this podcast episode, so you can either source the list from the book I just mentioned, or even do a quick Google search as there are many variations online as you'll learn. These are not rights to be special or superior to others. At the core, these personal rights are the most basic rights of what it means to be a human being.

Here is a selected handful from the entire list. I have the right to ask for what I want. I have the right to say no to requests and demands. I can't meet. I have the right to say no to anything. When I feel I am not ready, it's unsafe or it violates my values. I have the right to be uniquely myself. I have the right to my own needs for personal space and time.

I have the right to have my needs and wants respected by others. I have the right to be treated with dignity and respect, and I have the right to be happy. Wow. Just reading and hearing these out loud feels pretty empowering, doesn't it? All of these personal rights laid down a framework for being assertive and feeling confident in yourself as these rights are so universal, they do affect every part of you and your life.

There's a saying that goes, how you do one thing is how you do everything. There are three personal rights that I would like to put special focus on looking at them through the lens of stuttering. The first one is, I have the right to make mistakes and not have to be perfect.

Let that sink in. You have the right to make mistakes and not have to be perfect. Oh my goodness. I only wish my younger past self knew this back then, and even now, to some degree, stuttering is perceived as making these horrible speaking mistakes, not a unique way of speaking. Sometimes My younger self learned through experiences that speaking mistakes in the form of stuttering brought negative consequences in being humiliated and punished to protect myself. I tried so hard to speak perfectly with no stutters to speak as fluently as possible.

Of course, I never achieved this trying so hard not to stutter. I created so much force and tension in my little body that I wasn't able to create fluency either. Where did I pick up the message that I couldn't make a mistake when speaking that there was no room for doing it wrong, that I had to be perfect.

Well, we learn from our environment and the relationships within it. If you had a parent teacher or other adult figure who criticized you as a child and shamed you for stuttering, then it makes sense that you might now be hypervigilant and self-conscious of stuttering, just like I was for much in my life as well.

For a child's development, it's important for adults to allow them to make mistakes in speaking and otherwise, it's the only way to learn that it's okay to make mistakes, otherwise you never learn how to make mistakes and to move on from them. It's true that the learning phase can be a difficult process because while you're gaining mastery, mistakes just naturally happen, anything short of perfect results then becomes the thing to avoid at all costs instead of going on the journey of learning and growing.

Remember, you have the personal right to make mistakes and not have to be perfect. A second personal right is this, I have the right to not be responsible for others' behaviors, actions, feelings, or problems. You may be at a point where you believe that your stutter is the cause for help people respond to you, especially if the response is not always a positive one.

It would seem on the surface that this is just a simple matter of cause and effect, but the truth is. If it's your parent, partner, boss, sibling friend, or any other relationship in your life, and the look they give you, how they behave, what actions they do or don't take, or what feelings or problems they have, you are not responsible.

While you might feel shame. Anger, sadness, or even sympathy regarding their actions, feelings, or problems. Give yourself the gift of taking that weight off your shoulders. It's not yours to carry. Remember, you have the right to not be responsible for behavior, actions, feelings, or problems. Now for the final third one, I have the right to express all of my feelings, positive or negative.

This personal right is about having the ability to express yourself in the full range of human emotion that's available to you. Feelings are experienced in the body as energy, each feeling bringing unique sensations that are both positive and negative. Feelings also need to be expressed verbally, either spoken or written as the lower energy of some of these emotions tend to get stuck and they need to go somewhere.

there's a part of me that wonders if there's a connection between self-expression and stuttering and what came first, the chicken or egg kind of thing. Was it really because I stuttered that I did not assert my right to express myself verbally and communicate my feelings? Was it really at the cost of being perfect and trying to speak without stuttering that I did not exercise my right to express feelings or did I not know or learn it was my personal right to express myself, which resulted in holding back and stuttering as a chronic symptom.

These are some interesting questions that I encourage you to think about, and if I was to answer this for myself. As a child, I was in an environment where my primary relationships did not teach me or allow me to exercise my own personal rights. And not just this, right, but many more of the other 24 personal rights as well.

Remember, you have the personal right to express all of your feelings, positive or negative. So what are some strategies to becoming more assertive, if that is your goal? Number one, choose your rights. Only you decide what personal rights are important to you. You may even create your own rights that are not on the list.

An example may sound like I have the right to choose when, where, and how I want to speak. I'm sharing this one with you because it's been a powerful one for me because it allows me to give myself permission to take control of when, where, and how I speak. I. Strategy number two is be willing to exercise your rights.

This step involves taking responsibility to exercise your personal rights. It's especially critical in situations where you might feel threatened or infringed upon. It's about standing up for what's important to you and enforcing it. You need to be willing to say yes to yourself. Only you can exercise your basic personal human rights.

Number three, be mindful to express your rights. If this is all new to you, read the list of personal rights carefully and repeat them every day. You may even wanna print out a copy of the personal rights or write them down, or create your own declaration of personal rights around speaking. Place this up in a favorite spot so that you can see it on a daily or regular basis.

Be mindful of how this makes you feel and feel the power in these words. And finally, number four, know that resistance might come up. If you feel hesitation or any sort of resistance, this is a clue to shed some light and kindness to that part of yourself. It may feel foreign at first, but that does not mean you don't deserve to exercise your personal rights.

Remind yourself that everyone is entitled to these rights, including yourself. Let's take a few minutes to reflect. Here are some questions you can ask yourself. How would your life and relationships be different or improved? If you exercised your human rights, how willing are you to believe in and exercise each one?

Creating a bill of rights for yourself is a way of affirming your self-worth, and showing others how you expect to be treated. Reminding yourself of these rights can validate your own needs, opinions, and boundaries with others, and in doing so, making it easier to assert and express yourself. As I wrap up this episode, remember, we all deserve to have our basic rights honored.

It allows for assertiveness to grow, build self-respect, and improves your relationships. No matter what our childhood was like as adults, we now have the power to exercise our own personal rights because you and your voice matters. Thank you for listening to the end. If you have any thoughts about this episode, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at paige@thehappystutterer.com.