Anger Management is not Anger Control. It is about how you channel this power emotion into a more constructive avenue. There is good anger and bad anger. Good anger can motivate you to take positive action. You can learn some useful techniques on how you can channel your anger to get positive results in your life. Too often in your life, you might succumb to losing your temper and just as you do you regret your action. Anger is a powerful emotion. It has both a positive and negative effect in your life. Ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle said: “Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.
When you control your anger you are just delaying the inevitable in that you are already angry and that feeling of anger is being suppressed temporarily. Sooner or later it will re-surface and when it does the feeling might be magnified and become deadlier. What you need to do is learn how to manage your anger. That way you will have an effective control of this powerful emotion and use it in a more beneficial ways.
The objective of managing anger is in your ability to channel both your emotional feelings and the physiological arousal that anger causes towards a more constructive course of action. It is important that you realize that you can’t get rid of or avoid anger. There will be people or events that occurs in your life that will enrage you and there is nothing you could do to change these things. However, if someone is able to make you angry it just goes to show that they can get into your mind and manipulate your reasoning to generate the feeling of anger. This makes them more powerful and you will feel emotionally inapt. Such a weakness of the mind might enrage you into taking drastic actions believing that this will compensate for your ability to deal with the feeling of anger.
The first thing you need to understand in managing your anger is that anger can both be a positive thing and a negative one.
Positive anger can arise in several ways. If you feel that something is being done unfairly or that people in your life have not got their fair share of justice, although it may not concern you directly you feel a sense of anger. Such anger may trigger you to take action to see what you can do to alleviate this situation. In this way you will feel energized as you have a cause to live for and this might inspire you to take positive action. Further such a positive anger will also allow you to communicate your feeling about the issues that are bothering you and perhaps get other people fired up as well to take action. This might help you release tension in a constructive way. As you are motivated by this feeling of positive anger you might also be able to resolve hidden conflicts and discover new information about the situation that shed some light on what you can do to change it.
If anger is used inappropriately, it may cause other symptoms that give negative results. When channeled ineffectively, anger will disrupt your life and your relationship with your family, friends and working colleagues. Negative anger will also control your thought process and leaves a negative impression of the thing or person you are angry at. This will inevitably disallow you from looking at the situation objectively and you become biased and opinionated. Your action or words might hurt others and cause them to lose respect for you which in turn will cause other forms of emotional problems. Chinese philosopher, Confucius said: “When anger arises, think of the consequence.”
Healthy body gives healthy mind. The reverse is also true in that a healthy mind makes a healthy body. In a journal published by the American Heart Association, a study conducted showed that people who are more prone to getting angry are three times more likely to have a cardiac arrest leading to fatality as compared to people who are less anger prone.
Negative anger clouds your rationality and good sense of judgment. This will make you feel physically and emotionally drained. Greek thinker Epictetus said: “If you do not wish to be prone to anger, do not feed the habit; give it nothing which may tend to its increase.”
This in principle espouses the need for you to manage your anger. The choice to be angry and stay angry is one that only you should be allowed to make. If you want to resolve matters or conflict with others you first need to be in control of your feelings. Late Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi puts it: “You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.”
Dr Daniel Theyagu is a corporate trainer and seminar leader who has designed and conducted competency-based training for more than 150 organizations. He is based in Singapore and can be reached at dtheyagu@singnet.com.sg. Website: http://www.thinklaterally.com
Related Posts
RSS
Directory
