Like other comments have suggest steer towards assertiveness and away from hostility. How did I learn to develop assertiveness? I had kids. I wish I were kid

Like other comments have suggest steer towards assertiveness and away from hostility. How did I learn to develop assertiveness? I had kids. I wish I were kidding. Children love to exercise their defiance and sometimes they simply ignore you repeatedly. Aggression is a natural response and somethings it speaks more loudly than volume or words and when aggression is in full blossom children no longer claim ignorance though they don't always end their defiance. Having and managing children in combination with the time limitations of balancing a military career with a corporate programming career has taught me professional confrontation with minimal words. In most cases a 1 word answer is enough and preferrable: yes or more commonly no. Some people might find that offensive when I provide a one word answer to their 20 minute question, but I don't care. When I am trying to make a point and people want to play fuck fuck games I will ask a question repeatedly until the other person distills their answer down to a single word. There is absolutely no reason to develop this communication behavior unless you are consistently short on time and frequently surrounded by nonsense. Counter-intuitively an aggressive posture is good for convincing people to not be in a hurry. Hurry is an excellent one word answer for panic or I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing but I want to look important. I have never heard this expressed so eloquently as I have from dumb Army guys: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. In other words don't hurry, but instead be deliberate, plan, conduct rehearsals, and make fewer mistakes. You will get done much faster. Unfortunately, the corporate is completely lost on this concept. When you need to express aggression in writing... don't. Treat it like sarcasm and don't put it in writing where its value will be lost and the result is only confusion. Save aggression for face-to-face communication only, particularly in front of a group if you have leadership responsibility. Even then its only the appearance of aggression that is important and only when a situation demands it. If it becomes common people will learn to ignore it and you. In writing its best to be immediately confrontational, but phrase it in a way that sounds helpful. An example: What do you need from me to publish those documents today?. You are phrasing a pointed command with a specific deadline as a kind suggestion to volunteer some assistance. If still you wish to be assertive, not aggressive, in a personal confrontation do so because your opinion is important for health of the organization. Do not do so because you are dumb blunt weapon to beat somebody with. The goal is to push things forward and prevent selfish people distracting others with their foolishness. If you must exercise aggression or confrontation do not ever make it passive. People will view this as cowardly or untrustworthy. You should always be trying to build stronger and positive relationships and nothing will burn down those bridges faster than cowards lighting torches to hurt the organization. Always strive for the moral high-ground with directness, clarity, and brevity. For more details on this please read about the 4 Horsemen of Relationships: https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-four-horsemen-recognizing-criticism-contempt-defensiveness-and-stonewalling/ https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-four-horsemen-recognizing-c...