Hypnosis for Assertiveness at Work

The meeting ends. You had an objection, a real one, and you did not say it. Someone else put it into words ten minutes later, less well, and they were listened to.

On the way home you replay the scene. This time you find the words. That evening, you find them again.

There is also the extra file accepted with a "of course, no problem" when the week was already full. The message sent at ten at night that you answer straight away. The out-of-place remark you smiled at. And that one time when, after enough of it, it came out all at once and far too loud, which confirmed to you that it was better to stay quiet.

None of this is a personality flaw. Speaking up is a skill, not a character trait, and a skill can be learned at any age.

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Two colleagues standing in front of a whiteboard, arms folded

What is Assertiveness?

Assertiveness means expressing what you think, what you feel and what you need, while taking the other person into account. No more, no less.

The notion comes from behavioural therapies, where assertiveness training has been an established practice for decades. It rests on a simple distinction between four positions.

  • Passive: you accept, you stay quiet, you let it go. The cost is paid later, in exhaustion and resentment.
  • Aggressive: you may get your way, at the price of the relationship. That side is covered on our page Hypnosis for Anger.
  • Passive-aggressive: you say nothing but you let it be felt. That is often what happens after being passive for too long.
  • Assertive: you say the thing, clearly, without attacking and without apologising for existing.

Nobody sits in a single box. Most people are assertive with some people and not with others, which is already useful information.

A few distinctions that matter

Assertiveness is not self-confidence. Confidence is a feeling, assertiveness is a behaviour. You can act assertively while feeling uncomfortable, and that is in fact how it starts. The deeper work on self-esteem is covered on Hypnosis for Confidence, Esteem and Assertiveness.

It is not charisma, which is a matter of presence and influence, and not the subject here. Nor is it shyness: shyness is a temperament, and many shy people are perfectly clear about their limits.

Social anxiety is something else. When fear of judgement becomes intense, when it spreads well beyond work, when it leads to avoiding situations and when it lasts, that is a recognised disorder, one that responds to care and for which cognitive and behavioural therapies are the reference approach. Only a doctor or a psychologist can assess it: if you recognise yourself in this description, that is where to go first. See also Hypnosis for Fears and Phobias.

When it is not an assertiveness problem. Some situations have nothing to do with personal development and must certainly not be treated as though they did.

Harassment at work is governed by law. In Quebec, the Act respecting labour standards provides that every employee has the right to a workplace free from psychological or sexual harassment, and that the employer must take reasonable action to prevent it and, once informed, to put a stop to it; a complaint can be filed with the CNESST, and a time limit applies. Federally regulated employers (banks, telecommunications, interprovincial transport) fall under a different regime.

In France, moral harassment is defined by article L1152-1 of the Labour Code, and the employer is obliged to take the steps needed to prevent it. Several people can be turned to: the employer or human resources, occupational health services, staff representatives and the works council, the labour inspectorate and, where necessary, the industrial tribunal or a criminal complaint. The detail is on service-public.gouv.fr, and public-sector employees fall under a separate regime. Discrimination follows the same logic of recourse.

Burnout shows itself through other signs: exhaustion that no longer repairs, detachment, a sense of ineffectiveness, disturbed sleep, physical symptoms. These deserve to be assessed by a doctor or by occupational health services.

In all three cases, working on yourself will not settle the situation, and it can delay a step that would help. That does not mean you should go through it without support: it means support does not replace the steps. We will tell you so if that is what we hear at the first conversation. We are not lawyers, and none of the above replaces legal advice.

The impact of holding back at work

A woman sitting slightly back from a meeting table, listening to her colleagues

What it costs not to say things is rarely paid in the moment, and almost always somewhere else. The load builds up first: every task accepted by default adds to the last, and the overload ends up looking like a problem of organisation or of personal efficiency when it is in fact a problem of boundaries. Then resentment settles in, and you find yourself resenting colleagues who asked for nothing, since you never once told them no.

Rumination takes over the evenings. You replay conversations, you prepare answers you will not give. That mechanism is covered on our page Hypnosis for Letting Go.

Recognition goes missing, because invisible work stays invisible, and that weighs on progression as much as on morale.

The body absorbs it: sleep, tension, a knotted stomach before certain meetings. See Hypnosis for Stress and Anxiety.

And there is the occasional explosion, the one that arrives after months of silence, that strikes everyone as disproportionate, and that leaves the person convinced they were right to keep quiet until then.

The recognised approaches outside Hypnosis

If the signs of burnout are there, the point of entry is your doctor or occupational health. And if the situation amounts to harassment or discrimination, it is the recourse mentioned above that applies first.

  • Assertiveness training, as practised in cognitive and behavioural therapy. It is the only approach to have been tested in controlled trials on assertiveness itself, and it is named in the French guidance on social anxiety. It is very concrete: you learn phrasings, you rehearse them, you try them out.
  • Psychotherapy, where the difficulty is long-standing, touches every area of life, or is rooted in a personal history.
  • Professional coaching and communication training, useful for technique: preparing for a meeting, structuring a disagreement, negotiating. See our page Life Coaching.
  • Staff representatives, your union or human resources, when the difficulty is collective or structural. It is more often than people think.
  • A mentor or a trusted colleague, whose practical contribution often outweighs any method.

Hypnosis places itself alongside these approaches, on the side of apprehension and of the automatic reactions that stop you doing what you already know you should do.

Video available in French

S’affirmer au travail : assertivité, dire non, oser prendre la parole avec l’Hypnose
Video transcript

Hello! My name is Anne-Géraldine Lavielle. I'm a hypnotherapist, professional coach and trainer. I regularly work in companies, providing individual, group and organisational coaching, but I also see clients in my city office and by video conference. My clients often come for both personal and professional issues, because I take a holistic approach, one that looks at the whole person.

I also offer hypno-coaching, that is, classic coaching sessions with one or two hypnosis sessions to make change easier. Hypnosis is a method we use in the field of brief therapies, in order to cooperate with the person's brain, and more specifically with their unconscious, when they come to see us. The magic of hypnosis is that it can set psychological and behavioural changes in motion that can take root over time, because our brain has this capacity to change.

It is a method grounded in science, linked to neuroscience, but it is also very creative. Hypnosis is a good option when you have tried lots of classic methods that have not given results. I also use other approaches such as mindfulness meditation, EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), NLP, and art coaching… In particular, this approach to hypnosis helps people learn to assert themselves in their personal life and also at work.

That is what we are going to talk about here. Generally speaking, clients who find it hard to assert themselves want to reduce their anxiety, gain self-confidence and improve their communication skills, for example in handling conflict, and also to loosen their limiting beliefs. More specifically, they want to work on their assertiveness: setting their limits better, learning to say no, and working on their communication.

For example, asserting themselves in meetings, or speaking up in public more easily. Take, for example, someone who manages a team of five and feels a great, paralysing stress when she has to stand her ground with a person who is already very assertive and wants to be right, or when she has to speak in public: she is afraid of making mistakes and she also fears other people's judgement.

As we talk, we realise that she went through situations of this kind during her school years, and that her brain, which is trying to keep her safe, signals through stress that she is in danger. The idea here is to begin deprogramming the brain so that it no longer confuses the present with the past, and so that she develops new resources and skills. After several sessions, she confirms that her stress level has dropped, that she has let go, and that she feels calmer in these situations.

In very practical terms, we of course start by discussing their goals and which situations are difficult for them. Often these are situations that were experienced badly in the past and remained stored in unconscious memory, which is exactly what creates these blocks and anxieties. I can suggest a few exercises that are easy to put in place, for example exercises to strengthen self-esteem.

Self-esteem is the value we give ourselves, regardless of our successes and failures. We can help the person focus more on their past successes and help them visualise themselves achieving their goals. Because our brain has a great capacity to forget the positive and focus more on the negative. I also use post-hypnotic suggestions. These are suggestions given for after the hypnosis session, which reinforce assertive behaviour.

For example: "Every time I speak in a meeting, I feel deep calm and confidence." This helps reinforce the client's positive behaviours after hypnosis. And finally, transforming the past through reframing. Milton Erickson used to say, "It's never too late to have a happy past." All of this helps reprogram the brain so that it "softens" your negative past experiences and transforms them.

I meet many managers, directors and executives, both men and women. People who sit between several levels of hierarchy and have little room to manoeuvre. But also people who are sensitive to authority. People who have just experienced a personal or professional setback and so have lost confidence in themselves. And I also see people who experienced trauma in their childhood.

In conclusion, you now have a few tools to help you assert yourself at work. For more information about hypnosis and how it can help you in everyday life, get in touch with me. The whole Solutions Hypnose team is here to support you, in person or by video conference, which works very well too. Don't hesitate to ask your questions and share your experience; we'll be happy to read them.

And if you liked this video, don't forget to like and subscribe for more tips. See you very soon for a new video.

Hypnotherapy is a complementary form of support and does not replace medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns about your health, please consult a physician first.

Hypnosis for Assertiveness: aims and benefits

Let us start with what hypnosis does not do.

It does not change your manager, your organisation or your company culture. It will not make you charismatic, and that is not the aim. It does not teach you the phrasings to use, which is a matter of training or coaching. It replaces no legal recourse in a case of harassment. And it will not turn you into someone else, which would in fact be the opposite of assertiveness.

What support aims at

  • Reducing the apprehension that comes before the situation. That is often where it all happens: you know what to say, and something closes at the moment of saying it.
  • Setting up an anchor you can use on the spot. A discreet gesture tied to a state of calm, practised in self-hypnosis, available before walking into a meeting.
  • Preparing a specific situation by rehearsing it mentally, the way an athlete or a musician prepares for a fixture.
  • Working on what is being replayed. Many difficulties with assertiveness at work are not about work: it is one figure of authority that recalls another. Spotting it is sometimes enough to loosen things.
  • Getting out of all-or-nothing, that alternation between prolonged silence and the outburst that ends it.
  • Recovering afterwards, so the evening is not spent redoing the conversation.

The deeper work on self-esteem, on which part of all this depends, is covered on Hypnosis for Confidence, Esteem and Assertiveness.

When it is not a confidence problem

This needs saying plainly, because no page on this subject says it.

Some of the people looking to be more assertive at work have no assertiveness problem at all. They are perfectly clear everywhere else: with friends, in their family, in a previous job. What changed is the environment.

A manager who systematically cuts you off, a team where mistakes are punished, an insecure status, a setting where saying no carries a real cost: in those situations, keeping quiet is not a flaw, it is a rational adaptation. Working on limiting beliefs that do not exist will produce nothing, except the added conviction of having failed at something.

So the right question at the first conversation is not "what is blocking you?", but "does this happen to you elsewhere?". If the answer is no, the work changes nature: it bears on what you want to do about this situation, what you are prepared to lose over it, and what steps exist. And sometimes the honest conclusion is that the problem is not in you.

What the research says

First, a correction. You will often read, including in the previous version of this page, that "the brain does not tell the difference between the real and the imagined". That is false. A person under hypnosis stays aware of where they are, hears what is going on around them and remembers the session afterwards. That is precisely what makes the experience safe. What changes is that what is suggested is often experienced as coming of its own accord, without effort. It is that quality, not a confusion between the real and the imagined, that does most of the work.

What is true, and sufficient, is that picturing a movement or a scene in detail engages part of the brain regions involved in actually carrying it out. Part only: the most recent work shows that overlap to be more limited than has long been written. That is what makes mental rehearsal worthwhile, long used in sports preparation, where it modestly improves performance without ever replacing real practice. We prefer to put it correctly: an appealing but false formula always ends up turning against whoever uses it.

Then the state of knowledge. Assertiveness is not among the indications of hypnosis that have been evaluated. The widest review available to date (forty-nine meta-analyses of randomised trials published since 2000, collected in Frontiers in Psychology in 2024) covers pain, medical procedures, anxiety, depression, sleep and irritable bowel syndrome, not assertiveness. The report the French Inserm devoted to hypnosis in 2015 does not evaluate it either. What exists on this particular subject amounts to old case descriptions. What is documented, on the other hand, is the assertiveness training that comes from behavioural therapies.

On the hypnosis side, the data covers neighbouring manifestations. A meta-analysis published in 2019 in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, covering fifteen studies and seventeen trials, reports a greater reduction in anxiety among people supported with hypnosis than in control groups, with a modest number of trials, and better results when hypnosis accompanies other interventions rather than being used on its own. The 2024 review already cited reaches a comparable conclusion across all indications: real effects, highly variable between fields, and methodological quality that is often poor, only nine of those forty-nine reviews being rated as high quality.

In other words, hypnosis is a credible support for apprehension and preparation, and it is not the reference method for learning to be assertive. The two combine very well.

An example of support

An illustrative example. The name is changed and the path described belongs only to the person who lived it.

A meeting room seen from a seat towards the back, around the table

Karim, an engineer, described a scenario that kept repeating: in team meetings he did not speak up, then spent the evening formulating what he should have said. He had ended up treating it as a character trait nothing could be done about, and what worried him most was not the silence itself but the idea of finishing his career in that role, sitting there watching other people say what he was thinking.

The first conversation served to check one point: did it happen to him elsewhere? The answer was mixed. With friends, no. With his direct manager and two more senior colleagues, every time. There was neither harassment nor overload, but a specific configuration.

The work bore on the apprehension of the minutes before speaking, on an anchor usable while seated at the table, and on what that configuration reminded him of, which he had not been aware of until then.

"I did not start speaking up in meetings. I started not thinking about it in the evening. It came in that order."

Karim, name changed

He says he now speaks up from time to time, not always, and no longer takes every silence personally. Every situation is different, and Karim's path says nothing about what you will experience.

How a Hypnosis session on this subject unfolds

The conversation. The precise situations where it sticks, with whom, since when, and above all whether it also happens outside work. We will also cover your workload, your sleep and the atmosphere in your team, so that we can point you to the right person if your situation is about burnout or harassment, which are not ours to handle.

The aim, framed together and tied to a real situation, never to a general quality. Not "having confidence", but for instance: asking a question at Tuesday's meeting, or answering an evening message the next morning rather than straight away.

The induction. A natural state of attention you already know without naming it. You stay conscious, you hear everything, you can speak and you can stop whenever you wish.

The work. On this subject it usually takes three forms. Recalling moments when you did assert yourself, even outside work, to identify what you drew on then and make it available elsewhere. Setting up an anchor, that is, tying a discreet gesture to a state of calm, reactivable before a meeting. And rehearsing a coming situation mentally, in detail, until it becomes familiar.

The return and the exercise. A conversation about what you experienced, and a self-hypnosis exercise to take away, often designed for the five minutes before the moment itself. Some practitioners hand over a recording of the session.

The number of sessions is settled at the first conversation. Sessions work in person as well as by video.

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Two armchairs facing each other in a bright Solutions Hypnose consulting room

The first conversation is there to determine whether hypnosis is the right resource for your situation, and that is particularly true here: the question "does this happen to you elsewhere?" comes up in the first few minutes, and its answer changes everything that follows. If your situation belongs to someone else (your doctor, occupational health, a harassment procedure, a coach), we will tell you.

In person, the practitioners who cover professional coaching and working life in English see clients in Quebec, in Montreal, Sherbrooke and Gatineau, and in France in Paris and Lille. By video, wherever you are: it is often the simplest format when the point is to prepare for a fixed date. Here is how it works.

A question before you decide? Write to us describing your situation.

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Frequently asked questions about Hypnosis for Assertiveness at Work

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Sources and references

Work and health

On assertiveness and social anxiety

On hypnosis

If you are struggling at work

  • Quebec: the CNESST, for a psychological or sexual harassment complaint · your union · Info-Social 811, option 2
  • France: the employer or human resources · occupational health services · staff representatives and the works council · the labour inspectorate · 116 006, victim support · 3114 in case of distress

The legal information on this page is given for guidance only and does not constitute legal advice. Check it with the bodies named.

Hypnosis as practised by the members of Solutions Hypnose is a complementary support approach. It is neither a medical act, nor a diagnosis, nor psychotherapy in the regulatory sense, and it in no way replaces a consultation, follow-up or treatment prescribed by a health professional.

Our practitioners do not assess and do not treat mental disorders or illnesses. They never ask for an ongoing treatment to be stopped or changed: that decision rests exclusively with your doctor.

No result can be guaranteed. The testimonials and examples presented on this page describe individual experiences and do not predict what you will experience.

In case of significant distress, unexplained physical symptoms or suicidal thoughts, contact a doctor, emergency services or a helpline without delay.

Anne-Géraldine Lavielle

Page written by Anne-Géraldine Lavielle
hypnotherapist and holistic coach
partner at Solutions Hypnose.
English version reviewed by David Veilleux
Updated .

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