Here's how you can balance assertiveness and diplomacy when interacting with peers.

How do you know yourself? You can always begin with others. How are you being interpreted by others? What do people think and feel about you? What makes you to them as "you"? what do they say about your extremes? And there's your self-knowledge about you. What do you think you are? what do you see yourself as? what makes you to you as "you"? what are your extremes? Discovering yourself is a diplomatic intervention in itself. Is your assertiveness a part of your professional persona? what makes your opinion valuable? why should people listen to you? How do you handle people who counterassert you? Knowing your extremes and everything within is a metacommunicative understanding of yourself. Your communication with balance begins here.

Where to start with listening actively? Listening is difficult. because we are designed to listen selectively. And we listen mostly to defend or to assert. Active listening can be a powerful tool and an even more powerful weapon. Your choice. What, then, makes a balance? Listening with a tolerance of extremes, modulations, and opposites. Listening with potential diversity of opinions in mind. Listening with the notion of a difficult task in mind- that integration is hard. The world is asymmetric. expectations are amplified. Interpretations widely vary and that's natural. Balance sounds smooth, but to achieve it is the way to embrace the rough edges of understanding. Listen to yourself actively. Attend yourself. Integrate within.

What is the value of speaking? Why the act of speaking matters? For yourself? for others? Speaking and thinking are two rivers birthed by the same single waterfall. Do you think what to speak? Do you speak what you think? Do you see the "no division" between your thoughts and spoken words? Do you make connections between these two? Next time you speak- notice the discords of your thoughts, desires, emotions, and your expression. See what prompts what, what gives beginning to what. Then, try to match your inner silence with your outer. your courage with your words. Your assertiveness inside with you, the speaker. your lack of knowledge inside with your humbleness outside. Speak with a sense of wholeness. speak with clear thoughts.

Let us start with a caution. Your empathy can be your superiority speaking. There's a reason empathy isn't a go-to method for diplomacy. And this is where we will start. Are we OK with our "superiority", since superior is such a loaded word when added with a complex or archetype? Being superior is never an issue. We have systems, rules, protocols, and strategies to work with superiority. We actively make or expect people to be superior. The question is- what is empathy with recognized superiority? Empathy is our shared knowledge of our ability to sense, comprehend, and do something in a situation. This "something" is a spectrum. Superiority places us somewhere in that spectrum. So, don't show empathy. Fuse empathy in your approach.

I did not write and advocate to find a common ground. Because you will not find common ground in most of the real-time cases. In most cases, you will be forced to decide on a very small window of time. What will you have to decide on? On resources, people, wins, losses. And these decisions will not be easy for you. They will have powerful logic to defeat your desire to be in the middle, or to find a ground to stand. What can you do? you trade lightly. you negotiate for a solution that cuts both corners and heals each other. and chances are, that will probably fail too. Then you compromise, with a human solution in the heart of your decision. You accept your limitations, you resonate with the wounded. You seek wisdom in your losses.