Leaders and managers of people need to develop emotional and psychological strategies for both self-preservation as well as to use in the management of their teams. A key strategy in self-management is to understand, if not be in total control of, ones emotional and psychological response to situations which occur in the workplace. In the last few papers in this leadership series, we have looked at what it means to be emotionally intelligent and emotionally resilient. In this paper we will look at one manifestation of being emotionally intelligent, that is being legitimately assertive. In the sense used here being assertive relates to the timely and measured use of language to ensure you, as a manager or leader get what you need from a situation, it does not, as so many managers seem to think, mean getting your own way at the cost of others — in that sense it is legitimate.