Anger in Small Business

Large corporations usually have someone in a Human Resource Department who handles problems such as employees who regularly lose their temper with co-workers or supervisors. The employee might be summoned to the Human Resource office, much like an insubordinate student is sent to the principal's office. Once Human Resources takes over, the handling of the situation is out of the hands of the immediate supervisor. If a company has an Employee Assistance Program in place, the employee might be required to attend anger management sessions or classes.

When an employee in a small business exhibits angry or hostile behavior, the situation is more likely to pose a threat to the company's productivity on at least two levels. First, the work space in a small business tends to be more confined, with employees working in closer proximity to each other. They can hear and see exactly what transpires. They can feel the tension in the air, resulting in anxiety and apprehension over what will happen next. Attention is diverted frm performing their assigned tasks to listening and watching the angry episode. Secondly, as a result of all this, less work gets done. Perhaps fewer clients or customers get called back, fewer orders get processed, or fewer items get produced. So, both employee satisfaction and the company's profits for the day are lower than they might have been in the absence of the episode.

While small business owners protect their businesses against losses of all kinds, anger in a small workplace can generate hidden losses in the form of employee morale and the company's bottom line. What's your small business' plan for handling hostile situations?

Harmful Anger Can Ruin Your Health

Anger is a normal human emotion. However, it's important to make a distinction between healthy anger and harmful anger. Healthy anger enables you to respond assertively rather than aggressively. It also helps you to set boundaries and limits when others make inappropriate demands on you. Fiinally, when you express anger in a healthy way you are better able to solve problems and resolve conflicts.

Unhealthy, harmful anger is another story. Besides damaging relationships and your own mental health, it takes a toll on your overall physical health. Of all the emotions, unhealthy anger results in the highest heart rate and blood pressure levels. It affects your gastrointestinal organs, causing ulcers and colitis. Your immune system becomes depleted, which exposes you to other illnesses.

Pay attention to your body's signs when you become angry. Become familiar with your own personal physical reactions. Remind yourself to breathe. Notice which muscles feel tight. Tense them and relax them several times until the tightness loosens up. If you address a situaion with a more relaxed posture, you are more likely to respond less aggressively and more productively.

A Little Empathy Goes a Long Way

When you have empathy, you are able to put yourself in another person's shoes and view a situation from the other person's perspective. The first step in acquiring empathy is to listen actively. This means that not only are you hearing the words the other person is saying, but you are listening so closely that you are able to paraphrase back what you think the other person said -- without adding your own spin or advice. This is easier said than done. Too often when we "listen" to another person our mind is already forming a response or creating a solution for the other person's problem.

Try this as an exercise with a friend: Ask a friend to talk to you about a problem he or she is struggling with, or an issue that concerns him or her. Your task? Just listen to the words. Then, use your own words to paraphrase back what you think you heard. The next step is to put yourself in your friend's shoes and imagine what feelings your friend is experiencing. Once you think you've identified the feelings say, "I imagine that makes you feel __________." Your friend then gets to confirm or correct what you imagined. Were you right on the mark, way out on third base, or somewhere in between?

Empathy in the form of active listening can help to defuse an angry situation. Rather than adding to the other person's anger by interjecting your own thoughts and feelings, step back and really listen to what the other person is saying. If you feel the need to defend yourself or bring up a counterpoint, hold it. If you empathize effectively first, the other person is more likely to listen to your thoughts and feelings later.

Get Rid of Those "Shoulds"

I challenge you to keep track, for one day, of how many times you use the word "should." Also notice how you feel after you make a "should" statement. Does it make you feel better about what you're currently doing, or worse? When frequent "shoulds" dominate your thoughts, you are likely to feel stressed and frustrated by the end of the day, as though you had a loud inner critic sitting on your shoulder all day, ignoring what you did accomplish and pointing out only what you did not achieve. That's enough to make a person angry!

When you catch yourself using the word "should," replace it with the words "want to." The entire tone of the sentence changes. My guess is that you'll be more motivated to find a way to do something you "want to" do rather than something you "should" do. For example, if you tell yourself, "I should be making more money at this stage in my life," you're blaming yourself or others for your current situation, and blame leads to anger. Instead, telling yourself, "I want to be making more money at this stage in my life" opens the door for some creative thinking about how you might accomplish that. Changing just one word can change your perspective.

What's Underneath Your Anger?

Anger is a secondary emotion. It sits like an umbrella over other emotions, which are your primary emotions. In fact, if the anger umbrella is large enough, it does such a good job of covering up other emotions that you may never know what they were or why they arose.

Many people are quick to use the anger umbrella because most often the feelings underneath are vulnerable ones -- sadness, hurt, disappointment. It can be difficult to express these feelings because if we risk expressing them we feel as though we are exposing our soft underbelly. So, instead we cover them up (consciously or unconsciously) and express our anger, which feels more powerful and gives us a sense of control.

Covering up the vulnerable feelings is problematic. First, the feelings that really need expressing are shoved further down inside and never get expressed. Actually, what we need when we feel vulnerable is to be able to say how we feel and why we feel that way. Secondly, when people bury feelings too deeply and for too long a time, there's a risk that they will detach from their own feelings and lose awareness of them. Then, all that they have left is their secondary anger.

Is Your Anger Damaging Your Heart?

Recent research has shown that heart patients who harbor angry memories may be at risk for an irregular heartbeat that can be life threatening. While we have known for some time that chronic hostility and depression can lead to heart disease, this most recent study adds another piece to the puzzle. Certain heart patients show a particular spike in their EKGs while merely recalling an event that made them angry. These patients are more likely to experience arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats). The jury is still out as to whether angry memories can lead to arrhythimias in people with healthy hearts.

If you find yourself ruminating over anger-provoking situations that happened in the past, it's time to let them go -- for your own sake. You might try using some healthy self-talk:

• "Just breathe through it."
• "What will I miss out on if I continue to let this upset me?"
• "Is it really worth ruining my health over it?"
• "Will the incident matter to anyone ten years from now?"

There's a part of you that's hurt and angry. There's another part of you that can help you get beyond the upsetting situation. That's the part to listen to!

Stress and Anger in the Workplace

If you've ever worked in a stressful environment, you know how easy it can be for people to let loose with their anger. It doesn't matter whether the stress is due to the nature of the work, the inability of certain employees to perform satisfactorily, the failure of employees to get along with each other, or the tendency of some to bring stressors from their personal life into the workplace. Whatever its source, once the stress is in the workplace it needs to be addressed. Managers who choose to ignore symptoms of stress and anger and allow them to continue to build up are, in effect, lighting a stick of dynamite and waiting to see how long it will take to blow up. Some sticks are slower burning than others, but if nothing is done to change a situation it will ultimately explode.

Once they are made aware of workplace stress in their areas of responsibility, managers would do well to consider the following:

• What is the source of the stress -- is it related to the work itself or to the people performing the work?
• What triggers seem to provoke the stress?
• Can we apply problem-solving or conflict management skills in this situation?
• If the stress cannot be eliminated or even reduced, what stress management skills might we teach the employees?

When managers are more aware of employees' stress levels and take steps to address them, they are more likely to receive greater cooperation and higher performance in return.

Wanting It Now

We've all witnessed the familiar scene in a mall, a supermarket, and especially in toy stores: a parent trying to deal with a child who is throwing a tantrum because he or she has seen something that they want NOW. The child cries, screams, possibly rolls on the floor. The parent applies every technique he or she can think of to curtail the acting out and subdue the child. Sometimes a parent is lucky, and hits on just the right strategy to enable the shopping trip to continue. Other times a parent must carry the child, kicking and screaming, outdoors and into the car. Shopping trip aborted. Unfortunately, there are also times when a parent gives in just for the sake of sanity.

When adults' anger is caused by a loss or disappointment, adults can become like this tantrumming child. They know what they want, they know how things should be, or they know what another person was supposed to do or say but didn't. Those expectations of others will get us every time. Of course, most people agree that they can't make another person do anything that they don't want to do. They know that on a rational level. However, on an emotional level the feeling of helplessness over not being able to get one's way can lead to anger and an adult-sized tantrum.

When You Can't Accept Your Own Anger

People who consider anger as "bad" tend to ignore it in others and suppress it within themselves. To them, it's an "unacceptable" emotion that they wish would disappear -- fast. However, their inability to accept angry feelings usually leads to larger problems than if they had initially dealt with them.

To begin with, suppressing anger over a long period of time can lead to all kinds of physical illnesses: ulcers, heart disease, gastrointestinal disorders, and immune system dysfunction. In addition, hidden anger plays havoc with a person's emotional well-being. When an individual doesn't talk about his or her real feelings and pretends that everything is fine when it really isn't, that person is living a pseudo-life rather than a genuine life. An important part of being human gets disected from the person's normal range of emotions, leaving the person with only a partial range of emotions. This is bound to have an effect on relationships and the quality of a person's life.

Modern-Day Fight or Flight

Back in prehistoric times, the hunters among the earliest human species frequently experienced their inborn "fight or flight" response. When they were armed with their primitive weapons and faced the likes of a mastodon or wooly mammoth, the amygdala section of their brains triggered a reaction that pumped adrenaline and stress hormones into their bloodstream. This energized them to either run away or stand their ground. If they fled they were more likely to live longer. However, if they stood and fought they could possibly return home with prized meat and animal pelts.

Modern humans no longer need to rely on their fight or flight response to obtain fresh food -- with the exception, perhaps, of navigating the parking lot of the supermarket around the holidays. Nevertheless, we are each still equipped with an amygdala in our brains which continues to perform the same function that it did tens of thousands of years ago -- only now, the mastodons and wooly mammoths in our lives are modern day people, issues and situations. The amygdala goes to work when we feel certain emotions, one of which is anger.

Owning Your Angry Responses

One of the most important components of anger management is accountability. You may say, "He made me so mad!" or "She did that because she wanted to get me riled up." It may be true that he said or did something that triggered your anger, but you made the decision about how to respond. It may be true (or not true) that she wanted to get your goat, but it was your perception of her and the situation that triggered your anger, and subsequently you chose to respond in the way that you did. Taking responsibility for your responses and their consequences creates a filter between what you are feeling and thinking and what you say or do. If you frequently feel regret or remorse over your words or behavior after an angry exchange, think about your most recent experience with anger. At what point did you relinquish responsibility for your actions and put all the blame on the other person?

Signs That Your Anger May Be Brewing

Although it may seem as though anger arises and gets out of control in a flash, actually anger is the end result of a process that takes place within you. Unless you begin to pay attention to certain signs, you can be completely oblivious that this process is occurring -- until you explode in anger. Here are a few indicators to watch for:

1. Physical: increased heart rate and/or breathing; muscle tension. If you notice that your muscles are tense, rather than trying to ignore it and carry on with what you're doing, take a moment to be curious about it. Did someone just say or do something that bothered you? Did an event just occur that upset you?
2. Emotional: afraid, disappointed, frustrated, hurt, rejected, sad, stressed. There's usually a feeling under your anger. See if you can identify it and express it instead of the anger.
3. Thoughts: blaming, ignoring positives, jumping to conclusions, over-generalizing. Check out what's going through your mind. Sometimes your anger isn't triggered by an external event, but by your own thoughts.

Identifying these signs takes practice in self-awareness. But, the earlier you are able to notice what's going on within, the better able you will be to address an issue or a situation before you go to full-blown anger over it.

Engage a Self-Check Before Engaging Angry Words

When our anger is provoked, our first tendency may be to "let the other person have it -- but good!" While it may feel good in the moment to do this, in the long run it can ruin relationships and cause costly and unnecessary problems. Before we open our mouths, it's a good idea to step back and ask ourselves a few questions that may help us to put the situation into perspective:

• What exactly am I angry about?
• What did the other person do or not do that provoked me? (Focus on the other person's behavior, not the other person's motives for doing or not doing something. Believe me, if you ascribe motives you'll only get angrier, and your assumptions may not be valid!)
• Do I have the right to be angry about this? (If you're honest with yourself, you'll see that sometimes your anger-povoking thoughts are justified, and sometimes they're just not.)
• If my thoughts are justified, how can I express my feelings firmly but in a way that won't deeply hurt the other person?