Boundaries: Training Your Clients in Assertiveness Skills
4-Session Live Online Course | Wednesdays, starting February 28, 2024
8 CE Hours Available
Inside the course, expert trainer, psychologist, and author of the Assertiveness Workbook, Randy J. Paterson, PhD., will teach you not only the importance of assertiveness skills, but how to impart those skills to your clients in an experiential way.
You’ll explore the four basic styles of communication (assertive, passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, plus a fifth: passive-to-aggressive alternator) and the motives and beliefs that drive them. You’ll learn about specific barriers that prevent clients and clinicians alike from using an assertive style, including:
- How stress can pull people away from assertive responding
- Social history and the unchanging, rigid expectations for others to act “how they always have”
- The ways that beliefs — such as “assertive people are obnoxious” or “politeness means being a pushover” — shape behavior
- And over 4 experiential sessions, you’ll practice specific action-oriented strategies to overcome those barriers. With these tools, clients will be able to recognize their own communication style and identify what is stopping them from being assertive.
With the techniques you’ll gain from this course, you’ll be able to train your clients to navigate boundary-challenging scenarios — such as saying “no,” giving and receiving feedback, making requests, and dealing with conflict — while feeling less threatened and staying true to themselves. And you’ll be able to help clients establish and maintain good interpersonal boundaries and cultivate more fulfilling relationships.
Throughout the course, you will be invited to perform the exercises in your own life as a way to fully embrace the material and prepare to apply it in a clinical setting. And you may discover how these skills can benefit you and your practice as well.
Join us for this important new online course, and learn to help your clients develop the essential assertiveness skills they need to take back control of their own life.