KEEPING YOUR COOL WHEN HEAT IS ON

Well, it's official then! I am perfectly normal!

Keeping your cool when heat is on
John Mullins
27 September 2006 at 11h00

It's not often that people admit to losing their cool. To be honest, I don't lose mine that often. I'm not even sure at what point you qualify for losing your cool. Is it just raising your voice, or is it a full physical reaction that includes confrontation? Whatever it may manifest as, losing your cool at work can be damaging to relationships and embarrassing too when you realise how easily you have lost control of yourself.

I've been around long enough to see the most respected of leaders really lose it when the heat is turned up. Picture the scene: in walks the leader who is about to present his turn-around strategy for a business in distress to a large group of sceptical employees. You can imagine the anxiety and stress that person was already feeling, walking into the room. After a few technical glitches with slides and projectors failing, the audience soon became agitated and began to murmur. You could call this the last straw. Whatever the exact trigger, the next thing that came from the leader's lips was a shrieking scream for everyone to bluntly "Shut up!" The small amounts of credibility that he had hoped to walk away with vanished in a split second. No matter what apology followed, there would always remain the memory of the leader who lost his cool.

Now I seriously will not attempt to take you through an advanced lesson in anger management in the remainder of this column. Anger is far too complex to unpack fully in a few paragraphs. What we can do, though, is try to understand the basics of anger, and also understand why it is a natural thing that we should not always try to avoid. You see, anger does, to some degree, fall into the same category as stress. Somewhere along the line someone may have reminded you that you can get positive and negative stress. Stress, too, is a natural human reaction. Anger is also a natural response.

Getting angry is a sign that you are functioning in a normal way. Just imagine the opposite for a second. What would happen if you never ever got angry with anything or anyone? At what point is your button going to be pushed? If you had no trigger, you'd probably be steamrollered into accepting and believing everything that was thrown your way. There has to be some way for you to feel that you are opposed to something. Anger is a sign of that.

I read once in a brochure on stress and anger that what anger does is to enable people to create an emotional scale which is linked to their ethical principles and to the need to avoid experiences which have resulted in pain.

You could say it is similar to a defensive mechanism. Anger and stress is a way of us staying alert and ready to act against the environment we find ourselves in. If it is hostile, our stress and anger triggers can prepare us to fight for our goals. OK, so you get the point about anger not always being necessarily a bad thing. So what makes it bad? It pretty much lies in what is described as the duration and intensity of your response.

You get active and passive responses, and depending how long you stay in these states, this will determine how bad your anger is. Active responses include the typical fighting, screaming and object throwing or breaking. Passive means sulking, mood change, tension. Now if you add this to the fact that we all have different thres-holds of anger response, you can begin to see why it is quite complex.

Getting actively angry over the small things or remaining passively angry for long periods can be considered "not good". Now this is where you come in. You have to remain aware of your behaviour choices and responses to your feelings of anger. If you learn to understand your threshold, and then self-evaluate your responses, you can begin to learn new behaviour choices. Let's face it. If you are at work, and you have a short fuse, you need to be aware of exactly where the sparks are. If not, you're going to explode, and that could be messy.

Tips for remaining calm
Understand your threshold and what ignites your anger.
Evaluate how minor or significant these triggers are.
Take time to pause before reacting to the trigger.
Breathing deeply actually does help.

These moments will help you evaluate whether your response is appropriate.
Force yourself to speak in a controlled and softer manner.
By not raising your voice, you will stay in control of your anger for longer.
Vent your anger.
Find the right forum to express your emotions.

Losing it in front of staff is not appropriate.