Reading Assertiveness, I Chose to Face My Own Feelings First

I’ve always cared about being considerate of others and keeping the room stable. That hasn’t changed. But reading Miho Hotta’s Assertiveness: The Psychology Behind Practicing It, I realized what I’d actually been circling around wasn’t a communication technique at all — it was my relationship with myself.

Assertiveness isn’t a story about conflict

I used to think of assertiveness as roughly “the skill of stating your opinion clearly.” What the book actually deals with sits further upstream than that: respecting yourself and respecting the other person don’t have to be fixed as opposites.

I think I’ve spent a lot of moments prioritizing stability in the room, pushing my own feelings aside, and processing everything through pure reason instead. The book’s framing didn’t scold that habit so much as quietly ask me: what were you actually feeling, in that moment?

Receiving criticism isn’t the same as accepting it

One idea from the book that stayed with me was about how to face criticism. There’s a distance possible between accepting criticism and receiving it.

I used to take any critique from someone else and swallow it whole, as if it were a verdict on my entire worth. But holding that distance — receiving it rather than accepting it outright — turns criticism into something you can pick up and look at, rather than something that defines the whole of you. That distance feels close to the sense I described in The day I stopped trying to move other people — Adler’s separation of tasks, finally landing: how someone else evaluates you is their task, not yours.

Before you speak, give your own feelings words

The other idea that stuck with me is that before you communicate something, you need to give your own feelings words. If you start speaking before you’ve put what you’re actually feeling into language, in your own head, that feeling tends to leak out sideways through tone or behavior instead. So pausing before you speak, and turning your own feeling into your own words first, turned out to be a necessary step I’d been skipping.

That connects to the habit I described in “Words Are Blades” — How a Single Phrase Can Stay with Someone Forever: letting words rest before you send them out. That post was about words aimed at someone else. What I noticed this time is that a step comes before that one — words aimed at yourself, first.

Each person lives their own reality

A few things from the book stayed with me, and I want to write them down plainly.

Each person lives in their own reality. There’s a distance possible between accepting criticism and receiving it. Before you communicate something, you need to give your own feelings words.

Sitting with those ideas, I’ve come to feel that facing another person isn’t about managing them, and it isn’t about squeezing yourself down either. It starts with something smaller: not treating your own inner life carelessly.

Closing thoughts

Reading about assertiveness, what I was actually thinking about was the relationship with myself that sits underneath any communication technique.

I’ve always cared about being considerate of others and keeping the room stable, and that hasn’t changed. But I think I’ve pushed my own feelings aside more often than I’d like to admit, processing them through pure reason instead. What I read didn’t scold that habit — it quietly asked what I was actually feeling in those moments.

What stayed with me most is the sense that respecting yourself and respecting someone else don’t have to be fixed as opposites. I haven’t fully made that idea my own yet. But I think I’m standing somewhere slightly different than I was before I believed that possibility existed at all.

There’s still a lot I haven’t sorted out. I expect I’ll keep swaying between being honest with myself and taking care of the room. Even so, this reading pushed my attention away from “how to communicate well” and toward something else: not losing track of what I’m actually feeling. That shift shares its roots with what I wrote in Trust Comes Before Technical Skill for Engineers about sharing things openly instead of hiding them.

It was framed as a book about communication. But it feels closer to a question about how I actually want to live.

Related Articles

• The day I stopped trying to move other people — Adler’s separation of tasks, finally landing — separating someone else’s evaluation of you from your own task
• “Words Are Blades” — How a Single Phrase Can Stay with Someone Forever — letting words rest before you speak them
• Trust Comes Before Technical Skill for Engineers — sharing openly instead of hiding what you feel