Equally important as following the common positive characteristics of good leaders, is avoiding commonly sighted negative characteristics.

10 Things to Avoid as a Successful Leader

1. Not Listening: Listening is important to building a loyal and faithful team. Everyone needs to be part of the process and the bigger picture.
2. Dismissing ideas other than your own: Don’t make employees feel like they are pitching to you, encourage them to brainstorm alongside you. Understand their potential and give credit where it is due.
3. Accepting Experience over potential: Note that some of your best talents will come from passionate individuals. Take advantage of their enthusiasm and their fresh outlook on the industry.
4. Ego: Release your ego and focus on becoming an inspirational figure. Look out for your team because if you are without their full support, you will get nowhere.
5. Overworking: Set an example for your team and learn how to take a break. Make sure your mind isn’t always focused on one thing -work. It could cause a negative atmosphere and your team may also think they have to follow suit and work all hours.
6. Lack of empathy: Leaders must do their best to remove obstacles so a team can prosper.
7. Under-prioritising leadership development: Create a growth plan for your team and encourage them to become leaders within their departments. Give them a personal goal and build their enthusiasm.
8. Being too conservative: Have faith in yourself and your team. Missing opportunities could be a detriment to your organisation. Create excitement by using your gut and have an open mind, you never know what opportunities may come your way.
9. Assigning blame: Take responsibility for team failures, because they are your responsibility. It is your responsibility to find a solution.
10. Inconsistency: Don’t confuse your team with misdirection. Use your ethics and vision to define the ultimate goal and stick to it.

Here are practical tips, tools and skills to improve time management. Time management starts with the commitment to change. Time management is easy as long as you commit to action. You can train others and improve your own time management through better planning; prioritising; delegating; controlling your environment; understanding yourself and identifying what you will change about your habits, routines and attitude.

The key to successful time management is planning and then protecting the planned time. People who say that they have no time do not plan or fail to protect planned time. If you plan what to do and when, and then stick to it, then you will have time. This involves conditioning or re-conditioning your environment. For people who have demands placed on them by others, particularly other departments, managers, customers, etc, time management requires diplomatically managing the expectations of others. Time management is chiefly about conditioning your environment, rather than allowing your environment to condition you. If you tolerate this and accept without question, the interruptions and demands of others then you effectively encourage these time management pressures to continue.

Time management has enormous implications for organisations and the whole economy. See the astonishing ‘wasted time’ statistics on the time management quick tips page.

The urgent/important matrix tool offers very quick easy improvement in time management.

Time management skills training

First, this one rule could change your ability to manage your time more than anything else, which is why it’s first: If you are a slave to your email system, and particularly if your pc is set up to notify you immediately upon the receipt of any incoming email, then I urge you to make this simple change – it will dramatically improve your control over your time. Turn off the pop-up or noise which notifies you that you have mail. For many people, this is the single biggest obstacle to successful time management. 

Establish a new habit of checking your email at certain times in the day, when it is sensible for you and the business to do so – say, first when you arrive at your desk or start work, second just before lunch, third around an hour before normal business closes. 

You must decide when to look at your emails – this control should not rest with everyone out there who sends emails to you (nor indeed should this control rest with the spamming and virus-spreading community). If your organisation has a policy that insists that you be constantly interrupted by your incoming emails try suggesting that the policy is reviewed – involuntary email notification is the single biggest time management detractor in the world today.

Be prepared to make drastic changes. Be creative to find and introduce different ways of doing things. Challenge and question your own habits, routines, and the way you defend your time when others try to dictate how you should use it. The Pareto Principle (80:20 Rule) is a simple easy starting point for assessing where you currently direct your time, and for identifying where your time could better be directed.

Really think about how you currently spend your time. If you don’t know keep a time log for a day or two. Record everything you do for a day or two, better still if you have varied days, keep the time log for a week. You’ll be amazed; for instance, how long on average are you able to work between each interruption? Many managers struggle to achieve more than five or six minutes. If that’s you, you need to make changes.

Challenge anything that could be wasting time and effort, particularly habitual tasks, meetings and reports where responsibility is inherited or handed down from above. Don’t just assume that just because ‘we’ve always done it this way’ it’s still appropriate or even required at all. Think about why you are doing things, and whether there is a better way. You can view and download a free time management assessment tool in the free online resources section, which will help you or another person to objectively judge your time management, and underlying issues. This tool is also excellent preparation for time management training or coaching.

Review your activities in terms of your short-term and long-term goals, and prioritise your activities accordingly. Especially, plan preparation and creative thinking time in your diary for the long-term jobs, because they need it. If you don’t plan for the preparation you’ll never do it, and all the work will get left to the last minute (sound familiar?). The short-term urgent tasks will always use up all your time unless you plan to spend it otherwise.

Use a diary, and an activity planner to schedule when to do things, publish or display it, and try to stick to it.

If you are subject to demand and requests by others in your organisation and need to recondition their expectations as to your availability and their claim on your time, you should produce a weekly schedule, showing your planned activities and time-slots for everything that you do. This is a vital tool in helping you to explain and justify to others why you must prioritise and schedule demands from others when it suits you, not others.

Weekly activity schedule

The items here are examples of various activities. You can show precise timings if you wish. It’s not necessary to know exactly what will fill each time slot, especially if you are subject to unpredictable demands, as most people are; the important thing is to schedule the time to deal with what arises, and activities that you can predict will need to be done at certain times. You’ll know what sport of time you need for these unforeseen activities, so plan time slots to accommodate them. Plan time-slots to check emails and posts, but not to deal with each one fully there and then – desperate emergencies are rarely communicated by email or post – mostly they’d be by phone, so think about the originator’s realistic expectations. 

Most emails you’ll need simply to acknowledge and give an indication of when you will respond in full, which can be scheduled later, when it suits you, depending on the level of importance and urgency. Plan time slots for returning and making phone calls – don’t just do them when you feel like it or when you happen to remember. Plan and schedule things sensibly and logically – try to kill several birds with one stone. Think about how best to use lunchtimes – and don’t work through every single one – you need to unwind and take a break now and then. Once you’ve produced your first weekly activity schedule it’s easy to keep it going; many of the slots will repeat. You’ll also notice monthly patterns too. The more senior your role, the further ahead you need to plan.

Time management task/activity schedule example

Use a simple weekly planner to manage and protect your planned activities. You’ll manage your time by managing your activities – that means protecting the time slots you plan for your tasks. Time management is mainly dependent on planning activities into time slots and then protecting the activities from interruptions, whether from other people or your own distractions.

Here’s a free time management task scheduler template based on the above.

Try to plan and defend time slots for everything that you do. Make lists and work on them. You are at your most efficient the day before you start your annual leave. If you really want to you can be this well-organised every day. You must also plan time slots for unplanned activities – you may not know exactly what you’ll need to do, but if you plan the time to do it, then important things will not get pushed out of the way when the demand arises.

Use the test: is this urgent or important? A job may be terribly important, but may not need doing now. Get the genuinely urgent jobs out of the way first, and don’t allow yourself to be distracted by the bigger jobs that you can do later.

The following matrix tool will help you manage your time according to urgent/important task response, prioritising and planning. It is based on, and extends, the time management matrix featured in Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People.

Urgent and important time management matrix

The judgement as to whether activities are urgent, important, both or neither, is crucial for good time management. Most inexperienced people, and people who are not good at time management, nor in managing their environment, tend to spend most of their time in boxes 1 and 3. Poor time managers tend to prioritise tasks (and thereby their time), according to who shouted last and loudest (interestingly, loudness normally correlates to seniority, which discourages most people from questioning and probing the real importance and urgency of tasks received from bosses and senior managers). Any spare time is typically spent in box 4, which comprises only aimless and non-productive activities. Most people spend the least time of all in box 2, which is the most critical area for success, development and proactive self-determination.

Summary overview matrix

Time management activities examples and management methods

Other time management tips

When you’re faced with a pile of things to do, go through them quickly and make a list of what needs doing and when. After this handle each piece of paper only once. Do not under any circumstances pick up a job, do a bit of it, and then put it back on the pile. Do not start lots of jobs at the same time.

Be absolutely firm in dealing with time allocated for meetings, paperwork, telephone, and visitors. When you keep your time log you will see how much time is wasted. Take control. If you keep a weekly activity schedule you will be able to control the time allocated for your tasks.

Review your work environment, layout, IT equipment, etc, and set it up for efficiency. Tidy up your workspace and keep all paperwork filed away unless you’re working on it. Keep a clean desk and well-organised systems, but don’t be obsessive, or spend all week adjusting the settings of your screen-saver.

If you have one, give 25% of your responsibility to your successor. 

Delegate as much as possible to others.

If you can’t stop interruptions then go elsewhere when you need time alone. Fight for your right to work uninterrupted when you need to.

Review all the regular reports you write and receive for usefulness, and make or recommend changes. Set up an acceptable template for the regular weekly or monthly reports you write, so you only need to slot in the updated figures and narrative, each time. Why reinvent the wheel?

If you can, get a good assistant, secretary or PA.

Sharpen up your decision-making. If you can’t decide, then decide how to, (eg consult, get more information, delegate, etc), but don’t just let it sit there. Remember ‘JFDI’.

Learn to say ‘No’, politely, and constructively. Don’t make a rod for your own back. Be careful about accepting sideways delegation by your peers to you. If you find it difficult to say ‘No’ you’ll find it easier by using business reasons to justify your position, eg., “I understand this is urgent for you, but I have other priorities which I must deal with first for the good of the business – I’d rather agree a realistic deadline with you than one which I can’t meet.” And show people your schedule, which justifies and proves how you prioritise and manage your time.

Always probe deadlines to establish the true situation – people asking you to do things will often say ‘now’ when ‘later today’ would be perfectly acceptable. Appeal to the other person’s own sense of time management: it’s impossible for anyone to do a good job without the opportunity to plan and prioritise.

Never try to eat an elephant all in one go, (ie break very big tasks down into digestible chunks). Use project management methods for large jobs.

And above all, choose at least three of the above tips – preferably more – and put them into effect.

Skill development

Here are some ideas for time management training.

Focus on the practical issues. Time management training benefits from a practical approach. Time management theory is difficult to put into effect because problems are often caused by habit and environment, so training should concentrate on helping people to implement necessary changes to their routine, planning and especially their response to others. Successful time management, especially for front-line or internal services staff, is about re-conditioning the environment, as much as making changes to personal planning and task completion.

Use the time management tools, templates and examples here, and explore how best to adapt them for your own people’s best benefit.

Work with the delegates to identify problems, and solutions and then agree on commitment to making changes, which need to be supported by line managers. Follow up with one-to-one mentoring and coaching (and involving managers to get their support).

Particularly good improvements to time management can be achieved with small groups from the same department (max 4 training delegates) – comprising colleagues from the same work team. Small group sizes and short sessions, up to two hours each, enable a strong practical focus and results-based approach. Fortnightly sessions enable follow-up and identification of next actions and changes.

It takes a while to change time management – ongoing follow-up is critical or it remains a theory. Delegates are helped by a group discussion about time management issues, causes, and personal difficulties in implementing change and control, which also allows the trainer to identify and coach solutions. Identify practical improvements and then formalise commitments to make changes (no need to do it all at once – identify solutions one by one; seek improvements in stages rather than strive for one big all-or-nothing change).

Look at the basics like diaries, wall-planners, a place to do big tasks free from interruptions (eg home), better control and use of systems: mobile phones, email, Outlook, etc. – they can all undermine time management if they become masters, not tools; day-books and updating daily priorities lists, planning time-slots (for projects and routine activities) and keeping the time slots protected. Use flow diagrams to establish and plan time slots for routine tasks.

The involvement of colleagues in the group is essential because mutual job covering enables time slots to be protected, and interruptions to be reduced. Involve delegates’ managers in changes – it’s in their interest to understand and support (managers are often the main cause of time management problems because they don’t respect their staff’s time-planning and protected slots for projects or big tasks activities). Time management requires re-conditioning the environment rather than allowing the environment to condition the worker.

Time management training works when people can examine and develop solutions for their practical issues – identify problems, develop solutions, agree on commitment to change, and arrange support (mutual within the team, and from managers).

Part 1: The Core Philosophy (Passion to Profit)

The foundational premise of this framework is simple: Long-term career success and happiness are inextricably linked to doing what you love. We rarely excel at work we dislike. Conversely, when you operate within your zone of passion, you naturally dedicate more effort, practice more consistently, and build deeper expertise. This creates a powerful, self-reinforcing success loop:

[Enjoyment & Passion] ➔ [Increased Effort & Practice] ➔ [Higher Expertise & Quality] ➔ [Greater Rewards & Satisfaction]

Shift Your Mindset: Become a “Supplier”

Whether you want to climb the corporate ladder, go freelance, or launch a startup, the vital shift is to stop thinking like a passive employee and start acting like an independent supplier. The most successful individuals view themselves as a “company of one,” delivering a specialized, high-value service to a market that needs it.

Part 2: The 9 Natural Advantages of Passion-Driven Work

Building a career or business around something you genuinely love automatically activates several competitive advantages that are incredibly difficult for rivals to beat:

• Relentless Persistence: You will naturally work harder and stay determined through difficult periods because the work itself is rewarding.
• Continuous Skill Evolution: You will instinctively seek out new knowledge, automatically driving up the quality of your product or service.
• Infectious Enthusiasm: True passion translates into a positive attitude, which naturally attracts clients, talent, investors, and suppliers.
• Organic Reputation Building: Consistency and enthusiasm quickly establish you as a reliable, high-quality expert in your niche.
• Resilience to Failure: You will begin to view setbacks and mistakes as fascinating learning opportunities rather than definitive roadblocks.
• Trend Leadership: Because you love the field, you will naturally stay ahead of industry shifts and anticipate market changes before others do.
• Unfair Competitive Advantage: It is nearly impossible for a competitor working purely for money to outcompete someone working out of sheer love for the craft.
• Streamlined Efficiency: Tasks feel less tedious, meaning you execute them faster, reducing friction and maximizing profitability.
• Sustained Life Balance: Genuine happiness in your daily work prevents burnout and fosters long-term mental and emotional well-being.

Part 3: The 6-Step Career / Business Planner Template

Use this comprehensive, structured process to map out your transition. Take your time with each section, making your notes action-oriented with clear targets.

Step 1: Identify Your Passions

• What it means: Passions are the activities, hobbies, or subjects you love, enjoy, and are naturally drawn toward. They represent what you want to focus your energy on.
• Action & Commitments: List 2 to 3 core areas you are genuinely enthusiastic about. Do not filter them based on whether you think they are “realistic” career choices right now.
• Strategic Guidance: Lean on positive friends or mentors for feedback if you feel stuck. Everyone is fantastic at something. A passion doesn’t have to look like a traditional job to be turned into a highly lucrative career or business venture.

Step 2: Pinpoint Your Core Strengths

• What it means: Strengths represent how you naturally process information and interact with the world (your working and thinking styles). This includes your experience, skills, and hard-earned knowledge.
• Action & Commitments: Identify your specific operational strengths. Are you exceptional with numbers, people, creative writing, organizational logistics, or technical machinery?
• Strategic Guidance: Consider utilizing diagnostic frameworks like the Multiple Intelligences Self-Test or the VAK Self-Test to scientifically isolate your preferred processing styles.

Step 3: Architect the Blueprint (Combine Passion + Strength)

• What it means: This is the intersection where your passion meets your execution style to create a unique value proposition that the market actually wants.
• Action & Commitments: Cross-reference your lists from Steps 1 and 2. Brainstorm product, service, or role configurations that allow you to apply your strengths to your passions.
• Strategic Guidance: Keep your initial concepts fluid. Do not let financial constraints stall you; most concepts can be trialed on a tiny scale with zero to minimal capital. If you realize you have a missing piece (like a certification or a specific technical skill), integrate it into a structured goal planner.

Step 4: Conduct Rigorous Market & Financial Research

• What it means: Testing your blueprint against real-world economics to find your optimal “route to market” and ensure financial viability.
• Action & Commitments: Investigate how you will deliver this value (e.g., as a specialized employee, a multi-client freelancer, an e-commerce store, or a local service business). Validate that demand exists and that your operational costs won’t exceed what people are willing to pay.
• Strategic Guidance: Be highly creative with your monetization models. For instance, the platform gives away its educational content completely free, but monetizes its high volume of traffic via advertising. Look at existing competitors, interview potential buyers, and design a model that aligns with your lifestyle goals.

Step 5: Commit to an Organic Growth Timeline

• What it means: Giving your new venture the necessary time and space to mature without rushing or taking unnecessary financial risks.
• Action & Commitments: Decide on your transition speed. Define how many hours a week (even if it’s just 2 hours to start) you will dedicate to building this out in your spare time.
• Strategic Guidance: True transformation takes time. A standard freelance practice takes roughly 2 years to fully establish, while a comprehensive business can take up to 5 years to achieve deep market dominance. Rushing costs money; pacing allows you to bootstrap. You can easily fund a small, home-based start-up simply by diverting a fraction of your entertainment budget into your project.

Step 6: Step Into Your New Professional Identity

• What it means: Full execution of your plan, resulting in absolute autonomy, personal fulfillment, and insulation from the volatile traditional job market.
• Action & Commitments: Actively launch your offering, treat your career like a business, and continuously refine your approach based on real-world customer feedback.
• Strategic Guidance: Constantly visualize your end state and map it tightly using a SMART planner tool. Remember, you are now effectively the CEO of your own life, delegating actionable tasks to yourself. Treat your self-directed commitments with the same respect you would give to an executive directive.

A Streamlined Framework for Critical Thinking

You don’t need to be a subject-matter expert to think critically. While technical details vary, the core rules of logic are universal. Use this five-step checklist to see past assumptions, challenge expert opinions, and uncover the real truth behind any argument:

• 1. Pinpoint the Core Question: Strip away the noise. What is the exact problem or central claim you are actually trying to address?
• 2. Gather Objective Data: Build your foundation. Look for reliable, varied information across different mediums to get a well-rounded view of the facts.
• 3. Cross-Examine Your Own Logic: Challenge your initial gut reaction. Ask yourself: How did I reach this conclusion? Am I letting personal bias or comfort cloud my judgment?
• 4. Forecast the Ripple Effects: Look ahead. This decision might make sense right now, but what are the long-term implications? What hidden roadblocks could arise later?
• 5. Walk in Someone Else’s Shoes: Actively explore opposing viewpoints. Investigate why others see it differently, what data they are relying on, and where their own blind spots might be.

The Takeaway

Critical thinking isn’t a rigid formula—it’s a mindset. As you practice these steps, adapt them into a personal routine that works for you. By consistently asking the right questions, you’ll strip away bias and arrive at decisions that are objective, accurate, and deeply supported by facts.

1. Structure & Presentation

• Keep it to a Single Page: For most roles, aim to fit your CV on one side of a standard sheet of paper. In CV writing, “less is more.”
• Sell Your Strengths First: Structure your CV to lead with your personal profile, capabilities, and achievements, placing mundane personal details and career history at the bottom to maximize initial impact.
• Be Grammatically Consistent: If you use full stops or capital letters at the start of your bullet points, ensure you apply that exact format consistently throughout the document.
• Choose the Safest File Format: Use PDF when sending or uploading your CV. It preserves your formatting across different devices and prevents unauthorized alterations.

2. Content & Tone

• Tailor it to the Employer: Put yourself in the employer’s shoes, list what they are looking for, and use that as a blueprint to customize your CV phrases for that specific role.
• “Blow Your Own Trumpet”: Be bold, confident, and positive. Avoid excessive modesty; use strong, active business vocabulary to describe your attributes.
• Be 100% Truthful: Up to 86% of interviewers suspect CVs contain inaccuracies (especially around employment dates, job titles, and qualifications). Staying entirely honest immediately places you in a trusted minority.

3. Highlighting Achievements

• Use Quantifiable Facts: Use hard facts, figures, and timescales instead of vague claims. Hard numbers provide the evidence that backs up your personal profile.
• Emphasize Attitude Over Qualifications: Most employers prioritize attitudinal traits—such as energy, commitment, creativity, and problem-solving skills—over pure academic degrees.
• Leverage Non-Work Experience: If you have little to no traditional career history, look for transferable skills gained from life experiences, such as voluntary work, sports, school projects, or hobbies.

4. Administrative Details

• Prepare References in Advance: Don’t treat references as an afterthought. Emphasize their availability on your CV and have excellent printed reference letters ready to bring to the interview.
• Include “CV” or “Curriculum Vitae” in the Heading: This ensures your document is easily categorized, retrieved, and searchable within company computer databases or ATS software.
• Address Letters to a Named Person: When sending a cover letter alongside your CV, addressing it to a specific individual significantly increases your favorability with HR departments.

Building self-confidence and assertiveness are probably a lot easier than you think. ‘Non-assertive’ people (in other words ‘normal people’) do not generally want to transform into excessively dominant people. When most people talk about wanting to be more assertive, what they usually really mean is:

‘How can I become more able to resist the pressure and dominance of excessively dominant people?’
‘How can I stand up to bullies (or one bully in particular)?’
And also, ‘How can I exert a little more control in situations that are important to me?’
Pure assertiveness – dominance for the sake of being dominant – is not a natural behaviour for most people. Most people are not naturally assertive.

Most people tend to be passive by nature. The assertive behaviour of highly dominant people tends to be driven by their personality (and often some insecurity). It is not something that has been ‘trained’.
For anyone seeking to increase their own assertiveness, it is helpful to understand the typical personality and motivation of excessively dominant people, who incidentally cause the most worry to non-assertive people.

It’s helpful also at this point to explain the difference between leadership with dominance:

Good leadership is inclusive, developmental, and a force for what is right. Good leadership does not ‘dominate’ non-assertive people, it includes them and involves them.
Dominance as a management style is not good in any circumstances. It is based on short-term rewards and results, mostly for the benefit of the dominant, and it fails completely to make effective use of team members’ abilities and potential.
Dominant People
The fact is that most excessively dominant people are usually bullies. Bullies are deep-down very insecure people. They dominate because they are too insecure to allow other people to have responsibility and influence, and this behaviour is generally conditioned from childhood for one reason or another. The dominant bullying behaviour is effectively reinforced by the response given by ‘secure’ and ‘non-assertive’ people to bullying. The bully gets his or her own way. The bullying dominant behaviour is rewarded, and so it persists.

Dominant, bullying people, usually from a very young age, become positively conditioned to bullying behaviour because in their own terms it works.
Their own terms are generally concerned with satisfying their ego and selfish drives to get their own way, control, achieve status (often implanted by insecure ambitious parents), manipulate, make decisions, build empires, collect material signs of achievement, monetary wealth, and particularly to establish protective mechanisms, such as ‘yes-men’ followers (‘body-guards’), immunity from challenge and interference, scrutiny, judgement, etc.
Early childhood experiences play an important part in creating bullies. Bullies are victims as well as aggressors. And although it’s a tough challenge for anyone on the receiving end of their behaviour they actually deserve sympathy.
N.B. Sympathy is not proposed here to be a sole or significant tactic in countering bullying. Rather, sympathy is advocated as a more constructive, stronger, alternative feeling to being fearful or intimidated.

Non-Assertive People
Non-assertive people do not normally actually aspire to be excessively dominant people, and they certainly don’t normally want to become bullies.

When most people talk about wanting to be more assertive, what they really mean is ‘I’d like to be more able to resist the pressure and dominance of excessively dominant people.’ Doing this is not really so hard, and using simple techniques it can even be quite enjoyable and fulfilling.
Importantly, the non-assertive person should understand where they really are – a true starting point: non-assertive behaviour is a sign of strength usually, not weakness, and often it is the most appropriate behaviour for most situations – don’t be fooled into thinking that you always have to be more assertive.

Understand where you want to be: what level of assertiveness do you want? Probably to defend yourself, and to control your own choices and destiny (which are relatively easy using the techniques below), not to control others.
For people who are not naturally assertive, it is possible to achieve a perfectly suitable level of assertiveness through certain simple methods and techniques, rather than trying to adopt a generally more assertive personal style (which could be counter-productive and stressful, because it would not be natural).

People seeking to be more assertive can dramatically increase their effective influence and strength by using just one or two of these four behaviours prior to, or when confronted by a more dominant character or influence, or prior to and when dealing with a situation in which they would like to exert more control.
Here are some simple techniques and methods for developing self-confidence and more assertive behaviour.

Methods and Techniques to become more Assertive
Know the facts relating to the situation and have the details to hand.
Be ready for – anticipate – other people’s behaviour and prepare your responses.
Prepare and use good open questions.
Re-condition and practice your own new reactions to aggression (posters can help you think and become how you want to be – display positive writings where you will read them often – it’s a proven successful technique).
Have faith that your own abilities and style will ultimately work if you let them.
Feel sympathy for bullies – they actually need it.
Read inspirational things that reinforce your faith in proper values and all the good things in your own natural style and self, for example, Ruiz’s The Four Agreements , Kipling’s If , Desiderata , and Cherie Carter-Scott’s ‘rules of life’
Know the facts and have them to hand:

Ensure you know all the facts in advance – do some research, and have it on hand ready to produce (and give out copies if necessary).
Bullies usually fail to prepare their facts; they dominate through bluster, force and reputation.
If you know and can produce facts to support or defend your position it is unlikely that the aggressor will have anything prepared in response.
When you know that a situation is going to arise, over which you’d like to have some influence, prepare your facts, do your research, do the sums, get the facts and figures, solicit opinions and views, and be able to quote sources; then you will be able to make a firm case, and also dramatically improve your reputation for being someone who is organised and firm.
Anticipate other people’s behaviour and prepare your responses:

Anticipate other people’s behaviour and prepare your own responses. Role-play in your mind how things are likely to happen.
Prepare your responses according to the different scenarios that you think could unfold.
Prepare other people to support and defend you. Being well prepared will increase your self-confidence and enable you to be assertive about what’s important to you.
Prepare and use Good Open Questions

Prepare and use good questions to expose flaws in other people’s arguments.
Asking good questions is the most reliable way of gaining the initiative, and taking the wind out of someone’s sails, in any situation. Questions that bullies dislike most are deep, constructive, incisive and probing, especially if the question exposes a lack of thought, preparation, consideration, and consultation on their part. For example:
‘What is your evidence (for what you have said or claimed)?’
‘Who have you consulted about this?’
‘How did you go about looking for alternative solutions?’
‘How have you measured (whatever you say is a problem)?’
‘How will you measure the true effectiveness of your solution if you implement it?’
‘What can you say about different solutions that have worked in other situations?’
And don’t be fobbed off. Stick to your guns. If the question is avoided or ignored return to it, or re-phrase it (which you can prepare as well).

Re-condition and practice your own new reactions to aggression:

Re-conditioning your own reaction to dominant people, particularly building your own ‘triggered reactions’, giving yourself ‘thinking time’ to prevent yourself from being bulldozed, and ‘making like a brick wall’ in the face of someone else’s attempt to dominate you without justification.
Try visualising yourself behaving in a firmer manner, saying firmer things, asking firm clear, probing questions, and presenting well-prepared facts and evidence.
Practice in your mind saying ‘Hold on a minute – I need to consider what you have just said.’
Also, practice saying ‘I’m not sure about that. It’s too important to make a snap decision now.’
Also ‘I can’t agree to that at such short notice. Tell me when you really need to know, and I’ll get back to you.’
There are other ways to help resist bulldozing and bullying. Practice and condition new reactions in yourself to resist, rather than cave in, for fear that someone might shout at you or have a tantrum.
If you are worried about your response to being shouted at then practice being shouted at until you realise it really doesn’t hurt – it just makes the person doing the shouting look daft.
Practice with your most scary friend shouting right in your face for you to ‘do as you are told’, time after time, and in between each time say calmly (and believe it because it’s true) ‘You don’t frighten me.’ Practice it until you can control your response to being shouted at.
Have faith that your own abilities will ultimately work if you use them:

Non-assertive people have different styles and methods compared to dominant, aggressive people and bullies.
Non-assertive people are often extremely strong in areas of the process, detail, dependability, reliability, finishing things (that others have started), checking, monitoring, communicating, interpreting and understanding, and working cooperatively with others.
These capabilities all have the potential to undo a bully who has no proper justification.
Find out what your strengths and style are and use them to defend and support your position. The biggest tantrum is no match for a well-organised defence.
Feel sympathy rather than fear towards bullies:

Re-discover the belief that non-assertive behaviour is actually okay – it’s the bullies who are the ones with the problems.
Feeling sympathy for someone who threatens you – thereby resisting succumbing to fearful or intimidated feelings – can help to move you psychologically into the ascendancy, or at least to a position where you can see weaknesses in the bully.

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