These training programs were targeted at the problems faced by my non-confident people in their daily lives. Each session I would ask them to tell me about life situations. We would rehearse it, video it, and play it back. I used the methods I had learned from Patricia Jakubowski who came to Australia in about 1982 and ran workshops on assertiveness training. 

I was particularly interested in the difficulties of one young man, a haemophiliac who was also a thug - a most unfortunate combination. He came to me and asked me to teach him how to stop fighting. So each week we would hear about his interactions at the pub, and we would play the parts of aggressor and aggressee, trying to capture the truth of the moment in our role plays.

We soon realised that aggression is a dance, in which each person must play their part, or the dance cannot be consummated with a fist. 

With that knowledge, I took several young men who were being constantly abused and beaten up, and taught them how to change the outcome - without force, without any "killing remarks". 

"You want to fight?" says the thug.

"No thanks, but try one of those guys over there" says the formerly beaten-upon. With a simple gesture of the forefinger, he intercepts the gaze of the thug, and turns his head with his finger following, taking the thug's gaze to the other side of the room. With the staring competition broken, and the simple young man's attention now returned to his beer, the thug must re-initiate the entire contact. 

Which he doesn't know how to do, because thugs are socially inept!

A Pocketful of Confidence talks about the dance, not so much about the violent dances I had been resolving, but more about the pleasant dances that I also dealt with. I had help from co-author John Winston Bush, a New York psychologist.  

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