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aggressive by Paul
Niquette Copyright
©2012 Paul Niquette All
rights reserved. |
behaving
in an angry or rude way that shows you want to fight, attack, or argue with
someone – distinguished from assertive,
behaving in a confident way in which you are quick to express your opinions
and feelings
Dictionaries do
include aggressive as an extreme
synonym for assertive but,
curiously, not vice versa (assertive
as a mild synonym for aggressive). At least one
management seminar I have taken cautioned against aggressive behavior as counter-productive in collaborative
endeavors and, I would add, unsophisticated.
That is not to counsel
against assertive behavior, which
can be quite appropriate for expressing one’s views to fellow team
members. Same for family members, don’t
you think? What bothers me
most is that assertive behavior
seems to be utterly trumped by aggressive
behavior in the vocabulary now used by news media. Take a political
debate, for example. One candidate is described as the winner by being aggressive while the other candidate
is the loser for not being aggressive. I sense an improvement in both civility and
objectivity by the mere substitution of assertive
in place of aggressive. |
