What ‘The Karate Kid’ can teach us about assertiveness

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Wax on, wax off. Sand the floor. Paint the fence. Paint the house. This isn’t a list of weekend chores. It’s a code. A code to discipline body and breath to work in tandem. A code to defend yourself from an oncoming attack. A code to an ancient yet eternal philosophy of how to be in the world. A code best taught by an apartment building superintendent in Reseda, Calif.. If you know, you know that these lessons are taught to a scrappy kid from Newark, N.J. by a wise old man from Okinawa, Japan. Not just any kid, but “The Karate Kid.”

There are many lessons to be gained by this 1984 movie classic. Don’t trust gangs of teenagers with feathered hair wearing skeleton costumes for Halloween. If you get into a fight on the beach, it will inevitably lead to sand getting in your eyes. It is very easy to get a crush on actress Elizabeth Shue. But of all the lessons this movie teaches us, the importance of managing the right balance of assertiveness and humbleness is one that will gain you more than the All Valley Karate Tournament trophy. It will also gain you a power skill that will support you throughout your career.

What is assertiveness?

As we continue to explore the many facets of social and emotional intelligence, we now move from self-awareness to self-management. Self-awareness is about better understanding ourselves and how our internal landscape reacts to external stimuli. Self-management is the next step, turning the awareness we’ve gained into action in response. Assertiveness is one aspect of self-management. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines assertiveness as “an adaptive style of communication in which individuals express their feelings and needs directly, while maintaining respect for others.” Let’s pull that definition apart and examine its components.

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The first part of the definition describes “an adaptive style of communication.” “Communication” indicates that there is a feedback loop that involves a give and take between speaker and listener. “Adaptive” indicates that the speaker adjusts their content due to circumstances and context. “Expressing feelings and needs directly” is easier to understand than it is to practice. Most of us can define what our needs are at any given moment. Some of us can define what our feelings are at any given moment. Many of us, however, whether by the nurture of family, community or national culture, are dissuaded from expressing our feelings and needs in a direct manner. Directness can be read as aggression by others, or at least that is our presumption. But that is where the final part of the definition of assertiveness comes into play. “Maintaining respect for others” is the ballast that keeps us afloat, ensuring that we integrate situational awareness into the direct statement of our feelings or needs.

In “The Karate Kid,” when Daniel LaRusso gets beaten up by Johnny Lawrence and his fellow hooligans from the local karate studio Cobra Kai, a character named Nariyoshi Miyagi, AKA Mr. Miyagi, comes to his rescue, as the event took place near the apartment complex where both Daniel and Mr. Miyagi live. After the fight, as Mr. Miyagi nurses Daniel’s wounds with warm compresses, tea and advice for peaceful remediation, Daniel asks Mr. Miyagi to come with him to the Cobra Kai studio to talk with the sensei there, John Kreese (played with malevolent glee by Martin Kove). The goal of the meeting is to convince Johnny and his gang to stop using karate for offensive action against Daniel. The meeting at the dojo, however, doesn’t go as planned, but it does finally convince Mr. Miyagi to take Daniel on as a student. In that moment after the fight, when Daniel asks Mr. Miyagi to accompany him to the dojo, he is affirmatively stating his need, in this case seeking Mr. Miyagi’s back up in a hostile environment. He is aware of the context of his request after Mr. Miyagi had already gently admonished him for originally seeking to learn karate for revenge purposes.   

What is the relationship between assertiveness and self-management?

In a 2021 article in Positive Psychology entitled “What Is Assertiveness in Psychology? 5 Practical Examples,” the author defines self-management as the ability to regulate emotions, impulses and stress; control reactions under pressure; and act in alignment with goals and values. The first two parts of that definition relate to regulation and control of our internal landscape, that is our reactions to external stimuli that drive our physiological responses in the form of chemical reactions, of which our feelings are made up. Acting in alignment with our goals and values is the connecting node between self-management and assertiveness. As Columbia University professors Daniel Ames and Francis Flynn describe in their research “What Breaks a Leader: The Curvilinear Relation Between Assertiveness and Leadership,” “assertive behaviors can be both proactive (e.g., vocalizing needs) and reactive (e.g., defending against imposition), both verbal (e.g., articulating clear demands) and nonverbal (e.g., displaying annoyance), and both local or immediate (e.g., a face-to-face disagreement) and diffuse or prolonged (e.g., influence tactics over time).” So self-management is a prerequisite to being able to choose the appropriate assertive behavior in response to the stimuli to which we are responding.

Julie Pierce is an angry Bostonian teenager in the 1994 reboot of “The Karate Kid,” aptly titled “The Next Karate Kid.” Is she angry because it is the birthright of every Bostonian to have a “fork you” attitude? Probably a little bit. But Julie is mostly angry because of the circumstances she finds herself in. Both her parents were killed in a car crash. Now living with her grandma, Louisa Pierce, Julie’s unprocessed grief and anger pour from her uncontrollably, causing her problems at school and in the neighborhood. When Mr. Miyagi connects with Louisa at a commemoration of the storied 442nd Regimental Combat Team, in which Louisa’s husband, Jack, acted as Mr. Miyagi’s commanding officer, Louisa implores Mr. Miyagi to help Julie to channel her feelings into a more productive outlet through karate. After some time, the results, and Julie’s growth through her trauma, are clear.

Why is it important to find the right level of assertiveness?

In their 1993 book, “Assertion and Its Social Context,” University of Queensland, Australia, professors Keithia Wilson and Cynthia Gallois describe assertiveness not as an action set in stone, but an attitude toward action that lives on a continuum with passivity and submissiveness on one side, and aggressiveness and hostility on the other.

Look around your team or organization. Can you map your colleagues on that assertiveness continuum? I bet there’s at least one person at your organization who others would describe as a “pushover.” They accept whatever is handed to them, no matter the consequences for themselves or their team. They never speak up in meetings. They passively react to changing circumstances, as if frozen and unable to respond. I bet there’s also at least one person who others would describe as a “jerk.” They seek to dominate any situation they find themselves in, whether in response to their team members or outside forces. They consume almost all of the oxygen in meetings. They act immediately to changing circumstances to work to gain control over the results. Would you want to emulate either of these individuals? My guess is no. Both these examples are ignoring key components of the definition of assertiveness. They are neither expressing their feelings and needs directly, nor are they maintaining respect for others.

Both Daniel LaRusso and Julie Pierce move around that assertiveness continuum before they settle in a healthy spot. Julie and Daniel both start their stories feeling like outsiders, whether from the circumstances of lost parents or lost access to New Jersey’s Atlantic City. They lash out or make feeble and unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves. They both gain Mr. Miyagi as their mentor, and suddenly their self-confidence improves along with their karate skills.

But that self-confidence then mutates into overconfidence. Julie’s overconfidence leads to a confrontation with the Alpha Elite (a military-style high school fraternity led with even more malevolent glee by the magnificent Michael Ironside’s Colonel Paul Dugan character). Daniel’s overconfidence leads to a serious(ly funny) prank against Johnny at a school event. It is only after Mr. Miyagi teaches them both that assertiveness needs to be tied to a positive purpose for it to be worthy that the two teenagers can integrate that wisdom into their actions, resulting in some truly epic final battles (West Coast, East Coast), where balanced assertiveness wins the day over overt aggression.

How do you find a balanced level of assertiveness?

The APA’s definition of assertiveness outlines that this is an adaptive form of communication. Because we know that communication is a feedback loop between the speaker and the listener, we must acknowledge that confirmation and implicit biases play a role in how listeners will receive assertiveness depending on who is doing the speaking. The same words, the same tone packaged in the cultural subtext of speakers from different lived experiences will be perceived differently by listeners with different lived experiences than those speakers. Intercultural fluency is another power skill for a reason. 

We can’t wish away the impact of our personal perceptions of those with different lived experiences plays on our conception of their assertiveness in a conversation, but we can work toward noticing this beam in our own eye before we comment on the speck in others. We can’t deny the ways that others’ choice for assertive actions are colored by how they’ve been responded to in the past, what they have either gained or lost by making an assertive choice. I say this to be plain, because the advice that I'm about to share is general, while its application is  be specific and should be done in that context of acknowledging differences in perception.

In the 2024 MIT Sloan Management Review article “Why Leaders Lose the Room in High-Stakes Meetings,” Nancy Duarte, CEO of communication company Duarte Inc., gives great advice on how to navigate expressing assertiveness in a meeting setting. She suggests  “effective leaders regulate their emotional intensity, so their assertiveness doesn’t get interpreted as threat.” She warns that “leaders who push their point too forcefully under pressure often distort their message and alienate the very people they need to influence.” In the McKinsey & Company newsletter, Leading Off — Essentials for Leaders and Those They Lead, authors Liz Hilton Segel & Homayoun Hatami remind us to “choose candor over charisma,” as it will help to build trust. Jim Detert, John Colley Professor of Business Administration at the  University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, give us some advice on how to interpret other people’s assertiveness in his 2025 MIT Sloan Management Review article Fight Versus Flight: When a Leader’s Fears Turn Into Anger.  Detert reminds us that “what looks like aggression in leaders is often fear expressed without self‑regulation.” Colley cites Jennifer Crocker’s and  Connie Wolfe’s 2001 “Contingencies of Self-Worth,” stating that “high achievers are the most likely to have a huge part of their self-esteem tied up in looking competent and in control.”

With the high levels of uncertainty that we have all been operating under for the last few decades, aggressive assertiveness is most likely a coping mechanism in response to circumstances that are largely out of our control. This is not an excuse for this behavior, but it perhaps unlocks the previously mysterious motivation of why Diane or Darius, Irene or Ishmail, Julie or John are acting the way they are in that meeting.

The best advice I can leave you with about assertiveness comes from Edith Eva Eger, a Hungarian American psychologist, a Holocaust survivor and a specialist in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. In her book, THE CHOICE: Embrace the Possible, Eger guides us by sharing the wisdom that “To be passive is to let others decide for you. To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself. And to trust that there is enough, that you are enough.” 

Mr. Miyagi shares Eger’s perspective on assertiveness. He tells Daniel, “Trust [the] quality  of what you know, not quantity.” He tells Julie, “You trust yourself. [That‘s] important.” This is the moment. The time for you to bring out your crane or flying kick, avoid someone sweeping your leg, and assert your decision born from your feelings and values. Because as Mr. Miyagi teaches his Karate Kids, and us, “If you walk [the] road halfway, [you] get [squished].”

Adam Bazer, MPD, senior director of thought product development, ASHE.