A friend recently confided that he had “acted badly” at work. He had raised his voice and snapped at his team. Now he felt ashamed.
I asked him to describe the situation.
“Greg” had repeatedly asked his logistics team to bill their trucking partners using new parameters. Time and again, Greg discovered that several of his staff were still using outdated pricing. This was unacceptable!
His anger seemed understandable to me—Greg’s directives were being ignored. Of course he felt angry. But instead of recognizing that his anger was an internal message to take action–Greg simply felt that it was “bad.” Ironically, suppressing his anger led to a bigger outburst. If he had allowed himself to simply acknowledge his mounting frustration–first to himself, and then to the others–Greg could have expressed himself with more skill.
While anger can lead to many harmful behaviors, anger itself is not the problem. If we feel ashamed of our anger (a common response) it will be even harder to navigate this emotion.
Laura Lewis-Barr
Anger is a result of numerous nerves firing across synapses in the brain. This communication process is the result of stregnthing the nerves to fire based on experience, evolutionary development, and how one processes the environment (usually based on life experiences). I believe that knowing that you react with certain expressions of anger ususally does not result in changed behavior (although this is a start). When you fail to understand how the brain automatically causes you to react you might tend to believe that failing to improve EQ is a result of failing to learn, when it quite possibly is the way you percieve that needs work to change the communication process in the brain.
Nice example of how people negatively judge their own anger to their detriment. Many people don’t realize the positive value of anger and that it really isn’t about aggression.