Confidence & Performance · Hypnosis session
You Said Yes Again. Then Won the Whole Argument in the Car.
No audience. No date in the diary. Just a request, a two-second gap, and a yes that came out on its own. Assertiveness training is one of the older behavioural treatments there is, tested since the seventies, and most of it is a handful of sentences that cost nothing to learn.
“I’d point someone here who says yes and then spends the drive home furious with themselves. It won’t teach you the words — the free script above does that. What it works on is the flinch that arrives before them.”
Assertiveness Training
US$18.95one-off · no subscription · about A$27
I earn a commission if you buy through this page. It doesn’t change what you pay, and it doesn’t decide what I recommend.
Ninety days to change your mind, nothing to justify. Checkout opens on hypnosisdownloads.com in a new tab; priced in US dollars, and some cards add a foreign-transaction fee.
The publisher reports 4,982 purchases of this title.
Is this the shape of an ordinary week?
- The extra job taken on at four on Thursday, because the pause before no felt too long to hold
- A meal eaten around the part you did not order
- A rate unchanged for three years, and a spreadsheet that disagrees
- An opinion at a family lunch, and your face arranged into agreement
- The whole reply, perfect, delivered to the windscreen twenty minutes later
Count two and keep reading. Count none and a session in the guide below will fit you better.
One line worth drawing before anything elseThis page is about what you do in a conversation, not about being frightened of people, and the tell is what you dread. The consequence of asking — the sulk, the cold Tuesday, the reputation for being difficult — and you are in the right place. Being looked at and found wanting, in shops, on the phone, at a table where nobody wants anything from you, and that is social anxiety disorder, a clinical diagnosis with its own treatment. Start at social anxiety.
What is the difference between assertive and aggressive?
Almost everybody who tells me they cannot be assertive is describing a fear of being aggressive. They have watched somebody do it badly — a parent, a boss, themselves at nineteen — and filed the category under cruelty.
Robert Alberti and Michael Emmons drew the line in Your Perfect Right in 1970: acting in your own interests and saying what you feel, without denying the same to anybody else. That clause is the whole distinction, and it is behavioural, not a matter of tone.
Test it on one sentence. Somebody wants you to work Saturday. Passive: “Um, I might be able to, I’ll see what I can do.” Your want is not in there. Aggressive: “Typical. You always do this to me.” Theirs is gone, and a verdict on their character has arrived instead. Assertive: “I’m not available Saturday. I can do an hour on Monday.” Both wants are in it, nobody is being graded.
Volume and slammed doors are what people picture, and neither is the variable. You can be aggressive in a whisper, and the polite usually are.
Write those three versions out longhand for something you genuinely owe an answer on, four times this week. Not for the wording — so you stop being able to confuse the third with the second.
Why does saying nothing so often end in shouting?
Because nothing is not free. Each swallowed no banks up against somebody who has no idea there is an account open in their name. Then something small arrives — the dishwasher, the fourth message on a Sunday — and the balance comes out at once, out of all proportion, aimed at a trivial target. You hear yourself. You apologise for a week. Then back to yes, harder than before, having just proved what happens when you speak up.
The calm version never gets a turn, which is why the fear is misplaced. You are not frightened of saying no. You are frightened of the version of you that finally does.
Assertiveness TrainingUS$18.95 · instant download · full refund within 90 days if it isn’t right.
Opens the publisher’s checkout in a new tab. Or keep reading — the free techniques below cost nothing.
Part of the cost can be counted. The Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute surveyed 1,099 Australians in late 2024 for its Go Home on Time Day report: employees averaged 3.6 hours of unpaid overtime a week, 187.9 hours a year, about five working weeks. Much of that is understaffing rather than politeness, so take only the arithmetic. Five weeks is what a year of small agreements adds up to, and none felt like a decision on the day.
What can you practise this week for nothing?
Three, and between them most of what a course teaches. One is a script. One builds practice in an order that will not cost you a relationship. The last is for round two, where attempts collapse.
- Learn one script properly: DEAR MAN
From Marsha Linehan’s dialectical behaviour therapy skills manual, first published in 1993 and revised in 2015, where it is taught as an interpersonal effectiveness skill. Seven steps, written out before they are said.
Describe the facts and nothing else: three of the last four Fridays you’ve asked me at four to stay back. Express how it lands, as yours rather than as their crime: I’m wrung out by Monday and I’ve stopped mentioning it. Assert the request, once, no hinting: I need Fridays to finish at five. Reinforce — what is in it for them: you’ll get a better Monday out of me.
Then the delivery. Stay Mindful: return to your one sentence when the talk is pulled sideways into last year. Appear confident — feet still, voice down at the end of the sentence rather than up, because a request on a rising note has already been withdrawn. And Negotiate, since a bare no invites a fight: I can do a Thursday with a week’s notice.
Six lines, tonight, for one real conversation. Then say them aloud once.
- Build the ladder by who, not by how frightening
Start where the relationship costs nothing. Send the coffee back. Decline the extended warranty without explaining. Say it is too short while you are still in the chair. Then people you see weekly: a colleague, a neighbour. Only then the ones you love, and last of all the person you most need to say this to.
One rule makes it work. Beforehand write what you predict will happen, in the words you expect to hear; afterwards write what actually did, in the same notebook. Nothing in your head corrects a prediction. Three at each level before moving up.
- Kill the automatic yes, then hold round two
The yes escapes in the first two seconds, so take those seconds off the table with one prepared line, used every time, for everything: let me check and come back to you by five. Not a stall. A decision made somewhere other than under a face waiting for an answer.
Then the pushback. Manuel Smith called the answer the broken record in When I Say No, I Feel Guilty in 1975: repeat your sentence, unchanged and calm, as often as it takes, and add no new reason. Every fresh reason is another thing to argue with, and that is how a decision becomes a debate you lose.
If the reason you cannot say no is what happens when you doSome people are not free to be assertive, and telling them to hold their sentence could put them in danger. If a partner or family member controls the money, the phone, who you see or where you go, or there are consequences for disagreeing, that is coercive control rather than a confidence problem. The 2021–22 ABS Personal Safety Survey recorded partner emotional abuse in 23% of women and 14% of men.
1800RESPECT is free and confidential, day and night, on 1800 737 732. In immediate danger, ring 000. Nothing below this is for you.
Does assertiveness training actually work?
Better than most things sold under the confidence heading, and it is not new. Joseph Wolpe was using assertion as an anxiety treatment in 1958, Alberti and Emmons wrote the popular book in 1970, Spencer Rathus published a thirty-item scale for measuring it in Behavior Therapy in 1973, and by the mid-seventies it was ordinary practice.
Then it went out of fashion. Speed, Goldstein and Goldfried made that their argument in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice in 2018: a once highly popular area of investigation, neglected, research diminished drastically despite the evidence behind it. They called the paper A Forgotten Evidence-Based Treatment.
The current number is Hede, Malouff and Meynadier in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 2026, pooling twelve randomised trials and 503 people: a Hedges’ g of 0.62, interval 0.32 to 0.92. Medium, though only three of the twelve reported follow-up.
Then the part that matters for a shopping decision. To count, a trial had to deliver work on the beliefs, role-play, and homework carrying it into real life: four to twelve sessions, mostly in groups, somebody watching. A recording has none of that. The evidence belongs to the free half of this page.
Does hypnosis do anything for this?
The specific literature is close to empty, and I went looking. The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis ran a paper in 1977 on hypnosis alongside assertion training, and it is a case study: one person, no control, half a century ago. I can find no randomised trial of hypnosis for assertiveness at all.
So the fair description is what the session is built to do, not what it has been shown to do. It works on the flinch: the arousal in the two seconds before you answer, and the film of the other face going cold. That is what the script has to be carried out through. It cannot supply the words. It has never met your sister-in-law.
A recording, or a communication course?
Assertiveness is taught commercially, everywhere, and much of it is decent. The University of Sydney’s Centre for Continuing Education runs a two-day Assertive Communication Toolkit, sixteen hours, at A$1,270. On a payroll there may already be a training budget with something like it in it. A course does what a course does: role-play, in front of other people, with somebody correcting you. That is the format the trials tested, and if this is costing you money or a job, sixteen hours beats twenty-nine minutes of audio.
So, the proportion. One audio file, about A$27. The same publisher sells a ten-step assertiveness course at US$175.00, nine times the price, and I will not pretend the cheap one is the expensive one.
What is in the Assertiveness Training session?
Twenty-nine minutes and seven seconds in Roger Elliott’s voice, the longest session in this part of the site, by half a minute. The extra time is not extra content: it means slower settling and more room to rehearse particular scenes, the mechanism these recordings run on. It also does not fit a lunch break or one leg of most commutes, so decide where it goes or it will not get played. Length is not value. You are not buying minutes.
There is no free preview for this title, so the thing most likely to make a recording useless to you — a narrator’s voice you cannot settle with — cannot be tested first. The refund does that instead.
Assertiveness Training
US$18.95About A$27 · one-off, no subscription.
- 29 minutes 7 seconds, narrated by Roger Elliott of Uncommon Knowledge, publishing since 1998
- Instant MP3 download plus the publisher’s app — any device, unlimited listens
- The longest session here, and no free preview — the refund covers that
- For someone who knows what to say and freezes before saying it
Opens the publisher’s secure checkout · no account needed
Figures the publisher reports about itself: publishing since 1998, more than a million customers, 4,982 purchases of this title — the second highest count here.
Nobody writes in to say they finally said no on a Thursday.
Who is this session wrong for?
Anyone whose difficulty is not about conversations, and anyone hoping it will supply words they have not written.
- Saying no to a particular person has consequences you are frightened of — the block above, not the button.
- The same dread turns up in shops, on the phone, where nobody wants anything from you.
- You have left a job or a friendship rather than have one conversation, more than once.
- Alcohol is part of how difficult conversations get had, or survived.
- Being agreeable has stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling compulsory.
- You have had thoughts of harming yourself, or of not wanting to be here.
The first belongs with 1800RESPECT. The next four belong with a GP or a psychologist rather than in a basket. The last belongs with somebody today; numbers below.
Free and confidential, open now. Tap to call.
Common questions about assertiveness
What is the difference between being assertive and being aggressive?
Alberti and Emmons put it in 1970 as acting in your own interests without denying the same to anyone else. Test the sentence: assertive holds what you want and what they want, with no verdict on their character. Aggressive drops theirs, or grades them.
Does assertiveness training actually work?
A 2026 meta-analysis in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology pooled twelve randomised trials and 503 people, finding a medium effect, Hedges’ g of 0.62. Every trial used role-play, feedback and homework, mostly in groups. That evidence belongs to structured practice, not to a recording.
Is it selfish to start saying no?
People who benefited from the old arrangement may say so, and the first weeks are uncomfortable for everybody. But a refusal that names what you can do is plainer to deal with than a yes that arrives late, resentful and half-done.
What do I say when they will not take no for an answer?
Repeat the sentence you already used, unchanged and calm, as often as it takes. Manuel Smith called it the broken record in 1975. The mistake is a fresh reason each time: every new reason is something else to argue with.
Can I hear the session before I buy it?
No, and that is worth knowing. Some titles carry a free sample; Assertiveness Training does not, so the narrator’s voice cannot be tested first. At 29 minutes and 7 seconds it is also the longest session here, better suited to evening listening than a lunch break.
What if the session doesn’t help me?
You email the publisher your order number within 90 days and the full amount comes back, with nothing to justify. One refund per customer. I have no part in it. With no preview for this title, that policy does more work here than elsewhere.
Other sessions that may fit you better
- Self Esteem BoosterIf the yes comes from a settled belief that your share counts less
- Overcome Imposter SyndromeIf you cannot ask because you are unsure you have earned it
- Beat Interview AnxietyIf what you cannot ask for is the job, or the money
- Dealing with Difficult PeopleIf saying no is only hard with one person
- Dealing with the NarcissistIf that person turns every request back to themselves
If none of those is it, the confidence and performance guide sorts sessions by situation.
Whatever you decide about buying, write the six DEAR MAN lines tonight for the conversation you keep not having, and say them out loud to an empty room. That part is free and it is the part that moves.
Ernest McLeod — clinical hypnotherapist. An Adelaide practice, seeing clients across Australia by video. Fourteen years in practice.
- ICHP
- FELLOW, ASCH
- IICT MEMBER
A page about saying no can do harm in the other direction, which is why the coercive-control paragraph sits above the price rather than in the small print. That ordering is the part I control. More →
Twenty-nine minutes, the longest here, and ninety days
If the script is written and the small refusals are under way, this is a private thing for the evenings in between.
US$18.95Instant download · 90-day refund · about A$27 · opens in a new tab
This is a self-help audio session, not medical treatment, a diagnosis, or a substitute for professional care. Difficulty being assertive is not a medical condition, but if the same dread turns up in ordinary social situations, or you avoid work or people because of it, raise it with a GP. If someone controls your money, your movements or your contact with others, that is a safety matter rather than a confidence one: 1800RESPECT, 1800 737 732, or 000 in an emergency. Never listen at the wheel.