Hey, it’s Graham here from The Confident Man Project again and today you’re going to learn about becoming assertive by using “I” statements in conversations. I find that a lot of times when talking to people or listening to people who lack confidence, what we often tend to do is we use the word “you” where really we mean “I”. Often the reason behind this is simply bad practice, we’ve got into a bad habit of doing it, and also we’re wanting to try to connect with the other people who we’re talking to so we end up saying “you” to talk about general experiences in the hope that they’ll get where we’re coming from instead of saying “I” where we’re talking about our specific experience.
Now, this is a problem because we’re generalizing things that might be true for us but are not necessarily true for other people, and it also weakens the impact of what we’re saying because we are talking about other people instead of talking about ourselves and our own experiences.
Other people find it easier to relate to us when we use “I” statements instead of “you” even if their experience is different to ours, in fact, especially if their experience is different to ours, because when we use the word “I”, we’re owning what it is that we’re saying and other people can accept that that’s our experience without it necessarily having to be theirs.
So have a bit of a look at this when you’re talking to other people and you start generalizing and using the word “you” when in fact you’re talking about your own experience. Start replacing “you” with “I” every time that it makes sense and you’ll notice that you start connecting with other people more deeply and also you start to feel more assertive and self-confident.