In real estate the three most important assets are location, location, location. In the final analysis the three most important assets to transform a professional woman's relationships in the workplace are assurance, assurance, and assurance.

How to View It:

Assuredness is the feminine counterpart to the masculine energy of assertiveness. Assertiveness communicates that I will successfully act or do. Assuredness communicates the trust that it will be done. You need a balance of both energies. Men need both as well. People who have too much assertive energy are either seen as too aggressive, or they overwork and cannot relax.

Professional women who get people to respond to them have healthy amounts of assuredness. The ideas communicated in The Secret are largely based on being assured that the universe will provide for you. In a conversation with a very successful woman, she epitomized this assured attitude in the following statement. She said, " It never occurred to me that a man would not listen to me."

The application of the assured attitude in being heard in the boardroom or meeting room is the trust that sooner or later the men in the room will hear you or even be happy to hear you. It is the assured attitude that a woman feels inwardly that lets her assertively state her opinion externally.

How to Do It:

To clarify the nature of assurance, lets consider the opposite attitude, the resentful expectation that men will never want to listen to or respect a woman's ideas.

Out of this belief several behaviors will tend to flow. The first is a relatively one-down or hesitant style, exhibited in the following opener, "Could we discuss an idea?" The use of a question and the word "could" will tend to bring out the worst in many Martians. The opposite pattern is one of resentment expressed in the following manners: " For once will you listen to one of my ideas" or the complaint, "You never take me seriously."

Here are several mental images that can be helpful to activate assuredness:

1) Imagine a time that you felt assured or experienced a person or the world responding to you and you felt supported. Lock into the feeling and take that with you into the meeting.

2) Another variant is to imagine a mentor being with you and supporting you. (One powerful woman I know has the Greek God Athena as her mentor.) Mentally bring the mentor in the room with you reminding you to be assured.

3) Visualize, or repeatedly say to yourself that sooner or later your ideas will be heard. It is important to do this with a feeling of calm and patient inevitability.

4) When men interrupt and keep fighting for their ideas rather than listen to yours, trust that the Martians are just doing their Martian thing rather than being rejecting of you. Trust that men will accept your ideas once the ideas have passed muster in the crucible of the intellectual contest. Relax and stay in the game.

When men see a woman who is confident about her ideas continuing to engage in the process without hostility or defensiveness they are truly impressed. Assuredness is an internal practice that you can continue to develop in tandem with your external assertiveness skills. When you do both together there is a synergistic effect increasing the power of both.

Written originally for w2wlink by Dr. Robert Schwarz, National Director for Mars and Venus in the Workplace at www.marsvenusatwork.com .