Month: October 2017

When it comes to anger, control is important so that you do not go off the deep end.  This is what it means to stay calm.

Staying calm does not mean that you stop being angry.

What you want to learn is how to both manage and master your anger so that it works for you and you can use the energy it gives you to correct a negative situation.

This is what I mean when I talk about strategically deploying your anger.

Let me give you some background information so you understand what anger is and what happens to you when get angry.  I will then give you some suggestions you can use to help you master your anger so that you can say what you need to and deal with the situation.

Anger is one of the 6 basic emotions (mad, sad, glad, fear, surprise and disgust) that humans have had since time began.  The job of anger is to prepare us to fight off threats that will harm us if not dealt with.  When we were living in caves, these threats were always real and usually were life threatening.  When angry, adrenaline is released into the body and prepares us for battle by giving us the energy we need to overpower our adversary

Fast forward to the 21st century.

Today, anger acts on  you the same way that it did for Mr. Caveman.

Your anger tells you that you perceive a threat to you.  Today, unlike for our ancestors, most threats are not survival based.  They are threats to our ego, our sense of right and wrong, our values and so forth.

I call these psychological threats.

With the above in mind, let’s take a look at what you can do.

• The suggestions I will be making sound simple to do and they are.
• However, they will not be easy to do in the situation when you are angry.
• Consequently, in order to use these suggestions, you will have to practice them.

This is a mistake that many writers make.

• The writer offers a strategy. The reader tries to implement the strategy.  Nothing changes. The reader feels more frustrated.
• I hope this does not happen to you, my readers.

Anger management:

You should practice moving into anger management as soon as you become aware that you are getting angry.

You manage your anger when you create both psychological and physical “space” between you and the person with whom you are interacting.

You create psychological space when you lower your initial arousal level so that you can respond rather than react to your situation. You do this by taking a deep breath as soon as you become aware of your anger.

There are two reasons for taking a deep breath.

1. The first reason is that the deep breath relaxes you physically and lowers your arousal (level of energy).  If you need to take several deep breaths, that is okay.

Most people tend to get over-energized in angry situations.  The deep breath helps to counter this,

2. The second reason is that the breath gives you a few seconds to collect your thoughts.  Your thoughts (perceptions) are what create the anger in the first place.

You create physical space by taking a step back from the other person.

You do this for two reasons.

1. First of all, it gives you some additional safe space if you need it.

2. Secondly, it sends a message to the other person that you are not a threat to them.

This physical space can be a small or a large step back.

Anger Mastery

Anger management involves lowering your level of arousal and most writers talk about anger management as an end goal.

I suggest you move on to anger mastery which involves resolving the situation in which you find yourself by either strategically deploying your anger if the threat is valid or letting go of the anger if you determine that you have misinterpreted the other person’s behavior.

When you master your anger, you attempt to assess the nature of the threat and choose your most adaptive response.

When you are in the middle of an interpersonal interaction the goal of which is to communicate your concerns, there are two assessments to be made:

1. On the one hand, you need to assess the validity of the threat that you perceive in the situation that is leading up to (not causing) your anger.
2. Secondly, if the other person is expressing anger (or its lesser cousin irritation), you should attempt to assess the threat that he (or she) perceives in you.

There are two reasons for assessing the nature of the perceived threat (both yours and theirs).

1. When you think about the threat, you give yourself a few moments to “calm down” a bit further and plan your response.

Note: You are not becoming less angry.  You are simply letting some of the energy go so you can take effective action.

As an analogy, when you are in your car, you slow down just enough to get around the curve.  Too much speed, you get in an accident.  You don’t stop the car, you just drop the level of energy (speed, in this case) to remain effective.

2. Thinking about your adversary’s perception of threat gives you an advantage in that it helps you manage your own anger by giving you some awareness of where their anger is coming from so you don’t take it personally and helps you deal with him or her.

If you can’t figure out what their threat is, this is okay.  You can still master your own anger.

You may decide that there is no real threat and just let go of your anger.

If you decide that the threat is real, you can use all of your energy to effectively deal with it.

As I said above, it is easier for me to make these suggestions then it is for you to implement them when you are angry and over-energized. But you can learn to implement them!

With this in mind, I suggest that you “practice” these strategies.

Here is how…

In the comfort of your own home,

A. Review the strategy in your mind ==>

1. As soon as I become aware of my anger, I will stop and take a deep breath.  If I need to, I’ll take two deep breaths.

2. Once my thoughts are more clear, I will think about the nature of the threat I perceive.  If I can, I’ll try to get a fix on his or her perceived threat.

3. As my thoughts continue to clear and my energy level drops just enough, I’ll engage him or her in conversation.

B. Next, think about the last time you got angry and did something that was not very effective ( like crying or screaming)==>

1.   Let’s say this is point B in the interaction.

2. Try to think back to point A when you first became aware of the anger.

3. Imagine yourself taking a deep breath and successfully implementing the strategy.

4. Do this several times.

C. You can also practice taking a deep breath with other feelings such as stress, anxiety and so forth.

The purpose is to give you a sense that you can do this (YOU CAN) so when you find yourself in the next angry encounter, you are more prepared to take effective action.

I welcome your comments.

You are probably wondering what an “anger” is.  And, rightly so. I am using the emotion of anger as a noun or as an event.  In other words, when you get angry, I am suggesting, for the sake of the discussion, that you are experiencing an “anger”.

In both of my Amazon bestselling books and other posts, I have written about anger  as an emotion that:

• communicates a specific message
• can be mastered
• can be strategically deployed to improve your life and your relationships.

Whenever I write about specific emotions, about emotions in general or about the model of emotions, I talk about all emotions, including anger, as tools.  This is a very useful metaphor because you use tools on a daily basis including your cell phone, your computer, your car, your TV remote and so forth. In the same way that you learn how to get the most out of your cell phone as a useful tool, you can learn how to get the most out of your anger as a useful tool.

While this model of emotions  remains useful, I want you to think about the display of anger as an “event”. In other words, your getting angry at someone is an anger event (or an “anger”) and you can get a better understanding of anger by analyzing this event and learning from it.  This is true whether it is your anger or anger directed at you.

My goal is provide many different ways of understanding anger not because one is better than the other (They are all effective.) but because one metaphor may work  better for you than another.  You pick which model works best for you.

Or use some parts of each model.

Events

Let’s say you are setting up an “event” such as a book promotion, a soft-opening for a new business, a surprise birthday party for a good friend, a plan to study for an upcoming exam or a trip to the store to do grocery shopping.

Every event can be analyzed in terms of at least three elements:

• What is the purpose you wish the event to accomplish?
• What set of actions do you need to complete in order to fulfill the purpose of the event?
• What is the outcome that you can measure to determine whether or not your event was “successful” in fulfilling the purpose?

This “outcome” is what happens after the event has taken place.

Anger as an event.

Purpose

Anger, as an emotion, has two purposes.

• One purpose of anger is to alert you to and prepare you to deal with a perceived threat.  Typically, this threat will involve a specific goal of yours, a basic value such as respect or your view of right and wrong, your finances, your view of “territory” including your personal space, your home, your family and so forth.
• The second purpose of anger is to warn others that you perceive them as a threat, that you are prepared to defend yourself and that you are ready to go to war to eliminate the threat.

Actions needed

When you get angry, you choose the amount of force needed to eliminate the perceived threat.

If the threat is relatively minor (yet important enough to be seen as a threat), you will act accordingly including engaging the other person by expressing your concerns and so forth.

If you perceive a major threat, you may go on “red alert”, fire up your “phasers”, and take your best shot. (Sorry for the Star Trek analogy.)

Measuring the outcome.

Once you have completed your “anger” (remember the event), you can look back on it and decide whether it was successful or not.

This is the step that most anger management approaches miss because they tend to focus on controlling the anger rather than mastering it as a strategic tool.

Your own anger.

Let’s go back to the events listed above and say that the specific event we are looking at is a trip to the store.

You go to the store, do your shopping, get home and realize that

1) you forgot to buy milk,

2) you spontaneously bought some items you really didn’t need (Think about all those goodies beckoning you on the shelves by the check-out counter.)or 3) you purchased some items you already had at home.

When you analyze your shopping event, you realize that you made some mistakes.  You did not make a comprehensive list and you were hungry when you went to the store. So, while you did get many of the items you needed (advantages), you had outcomes you didn’t want (disadvantages).

So, let’s look at your anger.

You get angry and, once you calm down, you look back on your anger event so that you can learn from it for next time.

Did you achieve your purpose in that the threat was eliminated without unnecessary collateral damages?

If you were ignored or criticized for your anger, or you ended up hurting someone physically or emotionally, or the threat was not nullified, then your anger was not completely successful and you will need to make some adjustments the next time you perceive a threat and get angry.

Some relevant questions.

• Did you misperceive the nature of the threat?
• Did you miscalulate the amount of force you needed to deal with the threat?
• Was your message misunderstood, misinterpreted or ignored?

Someone else’s anger

I wrote  three part series of posts entitled “You are the target of someone else’s anger.”  which covered this topic in great detail.  You can get to these posts by clicking the February and March 2017 tabs in the archives.

The short version is that you can get a better understanding of this other individual by analyzing his anger (event).

Some relevant questions to gain understanding.

• What is the nature of the threat that he perceived as he interacted with you?
• Did he correctly interpret something you did?
• Did he misunderstand what you were doing or saying?
• Did he want me to give him some space (put me on notice)?

Some important questions to determine your response.

• What is my goal in this interaction?
• What is the best way to communicate with him in this situation?
• If I was “wrong”, how can I effectively apologize?
• If I did nothing wrong, how can I help him understand what I have done?
• If I can’t directly deal with this person because of his “superior” authority, power, or potential to “harm” me, how can I safely accomplish my goals with “indirect” action?

I think you get the idea.

When you get angry, you set in motion a series of consequences, actions, and reactions that are directly related to your “anger”.  This is inevitable.

Your responsibility, after an anger, is to analyze whether you were effective or ineffective in resolving the situation which elicited your emotion and resulted in (not caused) your anger.

When you learn from your experience, you have the opportunity to change your behavior the next time you perceive a threat, your “anger” becomes more adaptive, and you avoid making the same mistakes.

You can become a better..

• shopper
• event planner
• student
• angerer

I welcome your comments.