It was Michael’s idea.
I was relaxing on my patio when the phone rang that sunny Tuesday in July 1970. On the line —
Wait! Does anybody read the introduction to a book, anyway? Let’s start with the basics: what this book is about. The history can come later for those who may be interested.
Your Perfect Right is a step-by-step guide to:
Your Perfect Right is not a guide to:
Okay, if that’s all you need from an introduction, you can skip to chapter 1. For those readers who would like to know something of the background of this book, read on.
We started this book with the idea that some people — a number of our clients in a university counseling center — needed help overcoming the fear of speaking up for themselves. In fact, that’s where our title — Your Perfect Right — came from. It concerned us that so many seemed to be manipulated by others, pushed around, denied equal standing in relationships. We had done a good deal of work helping such folks learn to deal more effectively with life situations that called for a stronger response.
Here’s our starting point, as described in the introduction to the first edition of this book. (We hope you’ll consider the date — 1970 — and forgive our masculine pronouns. We’ve learned a lot over the years!)
This book describes for the lay or professional reader some methods of dealing with anxiety through assertive training… . When a person becomes able to stand up for himself and do things on his own initiative, he reduces appreciably his former anxiety or tenseness in key situations, and increases his sense of worth as a person.
We’ve endeavored to keep the book up-to-date beyond that first edition’s emphasis on “some methods of dealing with anxiety through assertive training.” New editions over the years, in response to a ton of research and practice by colleagues near and far, have addressed better ways to handle anger, a broader view of social skills, approaches to dealing with social anxiety, greater sensitivity to others, expressing caring and compassion assertively, recognizing and asserting needs and goals, assertiveness and social issues, online methods of self-expression, assertive intimacy and sexuality, on-the-job assertive skills, and dealing with difficult people.
Now, where was I? Oh, yes…
I was relaxing on my patio when the phone rang that sunny Tuesday in July 1970. On the line was my university counseling center colleague Mike Emmons. “You’ve done some work with assertive training, haven’t you?” he asked.
“I have,” I told him, “but why do you ask?”
Mike told me he was surprised to learn from a search of the psychological literature that there was virtually nothing published that explained assertiveness training in detail. We were both familiar with the pioneering work of Joseph Wolpe and Arnold Lazarus, but their discussion was limited to a chapter in a text for professionals. There was a dissertation project or two and a much earlier book by our later-to-be-friend Andrew Salter on what he called “conditioned reflex therapy” — related, but not about assertiveness as such.
Mike’s next comment caught me off guard: “Let’s write a guide for counselors,” he proposed. Now, I enjoyed writing and had no doubt we could put together something useful, but did I want to take on a book? Well, why not?
We decided to give it a shot, and I spent the rest of that summer getting up to speed with Mike and jotting down lots of ideas for a small manual. By early October, we had assembled what became the first edition of this book. Full of optimism about the project, we set up a card table at the first Southern California Conference on Behavior Modification in Los Angeles on October 16, 1970, and began advance sales of the book at $2.50 a copy. We were amazed at the interest: we sold sixty copies on the basis of a table of contents and a couple of paragraphs of description. Impact Publishers was born.
Our wives typed the text on an IBM Selectric typewriter (some of you may be old enough to remember typewriters!), and that original 100-page manual came off the press in January 1971. One of the first copies went to Dr. Michael Serber, a psychiatrist who had agreed to prepare a review of our little book for the then-new journal Behavior Therapy. As luck — or “planned happenstance” — would have it, our card table at that conference in Los Angeles was next to the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy table, and we got acquainted with AABT’s first president and the editor of Behavior Therapy, Dr. Cyril Franks of Rutgers University, who became a lifelong friend and supporter of our work.
We sold our first 1,000-copy print run (produced on a small-job press in my parents’ garage) in about a year. The next run of 2,000 went in six months, and another 5,000 in another couple of years; after that, my folks couldn’t keep up. We revised and expanded the work and issued a commercially-printed-and-bound second edition in 1974. About that time, the university public affairs office issued a press release about our success. The Los Angeles Times picked it up, and — in today’s vernacular — the project “went viral.”
While Your Perfect Right was the first book devoted solely to the topic of assertiveness, it wasn’t alone for long. Our success spawned literally dozens of other titles (including a few that we published at Impact), a handful of which remain in print today. It was clear from the research literature, the glowing reviews we were getting, the remarkable sales of the book, and the feedback from colleagues around the nation and beyond that assertiveness training was helping a very large cohort of therapy clients and self-help readers.
In the late 1970s, Michael and I conducted a series of training workshops for professionals around the country, teaching them the procedures we had developed and learning from them lots of great ideas to add to our model. Those ideas were vitally important to the development of the process — and the succeeding editions of the book.
As I sit at my keyboard preparing this new tenth edition of Your Perfect Right, I can’t help recalling what this book has meant over the last forty-seven years. So much has changed — in our lives, in the world, in the meaning of assertiveness.
The most notable change, sadly, is that Mike is gone now. His declining health prevented him from active participation in this new edition, and I missed his wise, thoughtful, and foresighted perspective so much as I wrote. I’ve given you my best effort, but it’s not the same without his input.
As you might imagine (or perhaps hope!), I’ve done a good deal of research into the literature of assertiveness, social skills, and social anxiety in preparing this revision. I’ve found a ton of recent research on applications of assertiveness, not much on new methods. (Perhaps I should find that reassuring.) Much of the recent research has been conducted around applications of assertiveness in Africa, eastern Europe, India, China, Japan, Thailand, and Iran. The concept certainly has legs, and they’re traveling around the globe.
Some of the most interesting applications have dealt with business leaders, nurses, couples, teacher trainees, social workers, hospital employees, midwives, and adolescents. Research and training efforts have focused on women in developing nations, nurses in China and Ireland, headache patients and university students in Turkey, managers in Japan, IT workers in Spain, customer service providers in Israel, operating room nurses and low-income women in the United States, adolescents in the rural United States, and midwifery students in Australia.
When we began our work with assertiveness training in the late 1960s, the world was a simpler place, and being assertive pretty much meant standing up for yourself, not allowing others to push you around or take advantage of you. Given the tenor of those times, the meaning quickly expanded to include support for sociopolitical movements: civil rights, women’s equality, individual freedoms.
Those personal and social issues are still with us, of course, but these days, “living assertively in a crazy world” comes with a caution. It’s more important than ever to assess the probable consequences of an assertive act. It’s usually worth the risk — but sometimes the best course is to “let it go.”
As the world continues to grow smaller, we envision a number of factors likely to impact what it means to be assertive in interpersonal relationships. We all can look forward to the development of:
We can’t really predict, of course; nobody has a working crystal ball. What we do know is that now and in the future, you’ll find that an assertive approach to equal relationships in your life will help you meet your needs and achieve your goals. And if you follow the model we describe here, the other people in your life will benefit as well.
We believe this book provides the tools you need to build those skills. We wish you well on your journey toward more effectively assertive self-expression.
— Robert E. Alberti