Mary Hartley | Personal Development Author

How To Be Assertive in Everyday Conversation

The ability to engage with others is one of the characteristics of success and satisfaction in our professional and personal lives.

Relationships in and out of the workplace are formed and developed through communication. At the most basic level, you don’t need to speak in order to acknowledge and be acknowledged by those whose paths you cross as you go about your daily business.

A smile, a nod, an eyebrow flash as you pass, a little sound of recognition, all demonstrate polite awareness that we are in each other’s radar.

Toxic friends — dump the word, not the people

by Mary Hartley

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Toxic friends’ has become a familiar phrase, sneaking into our vocabulary and blunting our awareness of the subtleties and the ebb and flow of relationships.

With words such as ‘cull’ and ‘dump’, we are encouraged to take stock of the people we call friends, work down the checklist of warning signs, and ruthlessly remove from our lives those who just aren’t making the grade.

How To Develop Assertive Body Language

by Mary Hartley

High-achieving women and men communicate assertively with confidence, style and grace. A good start to communicating assertively is saying the right things.

Now here’s the sad news. You can say the right things and use the right words, but if your body language conflicts with your spoken language, you might as well not have opened your mouth.

If you want your message to sound authentic, every aspect of your delivery has to be congruent.

Here’s the good news. You can learn to manage your non-verbal signals so they convey confidence and authority. In fact, if you adopt convincing assertive body language, to some extent the job is done before you speak.

How To Develop An Assertive Communication Style

by Mary Hartley

A straightforward way of communicating is one of the characteristics shared by high-achieving women. Read more »

How To Build Good Habits

by Mary Hartley

‘You’re getting to be a habit with me,’ sang the great Frank Sinatra in a timeless song describing how the lucky recipient of his affections gradually becomes an essential part of his life.

That’s what a habit is — a component of our behaviour and our thinking which is woven in to the fabric of our daily lives, and is so automatic that we hardly ever question its place in our view of ourselves.

Think of habits as a series of practices which can sustain and nurture you in all areas of your life.

Regularly doing things in certain ways will help you to create the home environment that suits you, to develop and maintain good relationships, to flourish at work, to have the kind of social and cultural life that you enjoy.

How to Develop Empathy for Work and Personal Success

by Mary Hartley

Empathy has been identified as one of the personality traits associated with high performance at work, which sounds rather odd at first, since this word has overtones of tea and sympathy (or crying into your beer) and may suggest a softness of approach which puts you just this side of being a pushover.

Actually, empathy is a high-order skill that you can develop to help you deal with a range of situations in your work and private life.

An empathic approach shows you to be a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent person who makes valuable connections and sound judgements.

How to Discover your Passion at Work

by Mary Hartley

When we say passion at work, we really mean something far less intense, unless you are looking for the love of your life in your workplace, in which case I hope you find happiness.

Passion has become one of the most overused and misleading expressions in workspeak. It implies a degree of engagement which for most of us is unrealistic and is also often inappropriate.

But we can feel inadequate if we bring less than our whole hearts to our daily tasks, or dissatisfied because spreadsheets, databases and customer liaison don’t make our pulses race. Here’s how you can find the spark to light up your work.