People Skills Quotes

“Psychologists have discovered that when a person is repeatedly submissive in her interactions with another person, the other tends to feel guilty about getting her own way so much. This feeling generates pity, irritation, and finally disgust toward the submissive person.20”
― Robert Bolton, People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts

“At the opposite extreme, people are often reluctant to assert about the “little things” in life. They say, “I shouldn’t be so ‘small’ and ‘picky’ to be bothered by such an insignificant thing.” Sometimes we can truly develop more acceptance of another person’s behavior, but often a pseudoacceptance develops in the top of our mind while the irritation continues to grow in the depth of our gut.”
― Robert Bolton, People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts

“Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.”
― Robert Bolton, People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts

“Although the tendency to make evaluations is common in almost all interchange of language, it is very much heightened in those situations where feelings and emotions are deeply involved. So, the stronger our feelings, the more likely it is that there will be no mutual element in the communication. There will be just two ideas, two feelings, two judgments missing each other in psychological space. I’m sure you recognize this from your own experience. When you have not been emotionally involved yourself, and have listened to a heated discussion, you often go away thinking, “Well, they actually weren’t talking about the same thing.” And they were not. Each was making a judgment, an evaluation from his own frame of reference. There was really nothing which could be called communication in any genuine sense.”
― Robert Bolton, PEOPLE SKILLS

“If a man has one person, just one in his life, To whom he is willing to confess everything— And that includes, mind you, not only things criminal, Not only turpitude, meanness and cowardice, But also situations which are simply ridiculous, When he has played the fool (as who has not?)— Then he loves that person, and his love will save him.3”
― Robert Bolton, People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts