I used to be one of those Christians that would roll my eyes and dismiss anything you had to say if you said any “four letter words.” And h*ll, sometimes I miss those days. Life was simpler then, living in a world where the avoidance of particular words meant I got to ignore other opinions and feel more holy. It was simpler to think that I was better and others who didn’t follow that code were lesser. It was simpler…
I won’t lie, friends: it’s been a tough week to be grading final exams. Don’t get me wrong: I dearly love seeing the wins during these interpersonal and small group communication and leadership take-home finals. There’s usually nothing as cool as hearing about the ways the concepts my students are learning about conflict styles and stress and shame and civility are already impacting lives. There’s usually nothing so fabulous as hearing the super-smart and shy students talk about how much…
Greetings! I still have 14 final papers to grade before tomorrow for my interpersonal communication class, but since it’s #TeacherAppreciationWeek, I wanted to take a short break to talk about the emotional labor involved in assertive grading. Especially for us recovering avoider-accommodators, but also I think for recovering aggressors as well, it’s not easy to tell students their work doesn’t meet the standards I’ve laid out. It’s just not. I say this having taken many steps over the years to…
Surely you’ve heard what Hemingway said about writing, haven’t you? You know: “Writing is easy. You just cut open a vein and bleed.” (Or something like that.) At any rate, I was asked to speak in the “Encounters with the Risen Christ” short talks my local PCUSA church has as part of the Easter season services last Sunday. I wanted to share the talk I gave in part because I really feel like I practiced assertive spirituality in that talk….
Where were we? Okay, so in the first part of this post we had covered the definitions of assertiveness and a bit about the definitions of what assertiveness is and how I see assertiveness to work based on my studies and teaching of stress, trauma, and conflict communication as well as my life experiences. In this part, I’ll be discussing how this applies to spirituality, and what I mean by assertive spirituality. To be honest, I was a little shocked…
“So what does assertive spirituality look like?’ A friend helpfully said when I was telling her about the idea I had for this new blog. “Does it look like a good thwack over the head?” That’s when it occurred to me that I might want to start things by defining assertiveness for my prospective blog readers. So here it is, dear friends: “Assertiveness,” say Gloria J. Galanes & Katherine Adams in Effective Group Communication: Theory and Practice, “refers to communication behavior…