That'll help.....
So, do you remember the last time you got angry and made any sort of display of it? Did you achieve very much? Did you learn very much? Did anything really change – except for achieving, perhaps, the temporary intimidation of those around you?
I’d be surprised if “yes” was the honest answer to any of those questions. Emphasis on honesty there.
Displays of anger are an emotional manipulation and a fairly immature one at that. They are a communication too – “you didn’t do it right for me and just look how much you’ve upset me, I’ll be sick, I will.” I’m not suggesting we should pretend that we’re never angry, I’m suggesting there are much better things to do with our anger than impose it on everybody else. Anger can be pretty toxic.
Anger, as with any emotion, is best dealt with by feeling it, not acting it out or, possibly worse (certainly worse for our health), denying it – protesting that it’s all fine in a high strangulated voice.
Tantrums are the behaviour of those who are still children emotionally – that is to say they haven’t yet realised that they are both responsible for their emotions and capable of containing them – however uncomfortable that might be. Maybe that should be accepted, rather than realised.
The most basic principle of emotional intelligence is that no one else can make us feel anything. We are entirely responsible for our emotional state. This is the good news, if we are responsible for our emotional state, accountable might be more accurate here, then we are empowered to change that state.
But first we need to accept the premise.
Then we need to take the next step, which is to ask ourselves: What must I believe to feel this way? When we get angry with someone else what must we believe about them to feel that way? Do we really believe they are deliberately letting us down? Assuming the answer to that is no (for now) is our anger either appropriate or helpful? I’m hoping the answer to that last question is obvious. People (let alone computer equipment) rarely respond positively to anger, oh we might beat them down and have them be the way we want for a while but it’s unlikely to last.
Oh, if the answer was “yes” (they are deliberately letting us down) then what does that tell us we believe about them? More importantly, what does it tell us we believe about ourselves and our relationship with the world around us?
Often the beliefs that are shown us by this line of questioning are obviously flawed, some are laughable others we have so much evidence for they must be true, mustn’t they? But just because we have evidence doesn’t make them true – after all we collected the evidence by looking at the world through the belief in the first place and all those confirmations could have been interpreted differently, seen differently.
Sometimes our anger or frustration is simply easier to feel than our fear. The fear that the deal won’t go through, the fear we won’t earn as much as we need to keep things as they are. The fear that we’re not as good at our jobs as we should be, or we used to be.
If we are to change, grow and succeed we need to become experts in what our feelings are telling us about ourselves – this is unlikely to happen whilst we’re beating our laptop on the desk, breaking telephones or abusing the very people we will need to rely on in the future.
