This is a guest post by Jane Sheeba
Implementing tips is a great way to manage or deal with life situations in a quick manner. But I’m more of a strategic person.
What’s the difference between implementing a strategy and practicing a tip? Tips are quickie solutions—you face a problem, implement a tip you learned somewhere, and voila you’ve succeeded in dealing with the issue. If you face the problem again, you can often use the same tip.
By dealing with a problem in a strategic manner, you get to understand the issue completely, and that allows you to gain total control over it. That provides you with a working model you can use to avoid recurrence of issue.
Anger is just a feeling
Yes it is. Anger is an emotion and you can gain control over it. The cause of anger can be something silly or something really serious.
Understanding the fact that anger is something you feel, and reacting to it appropriately will make a big difference.
Treating it as a feeling will help train your mind in a way that you can help you to tame your anger instead of being tamed by the anger.
Let me give you an analogy. Let’s say you’re traveling for hours and you’re very hungry. For whatever reason, you don’t have access to food (let’s assume you’re on a train and you forgot to bring your own sandwich, the dispenser in the train doesn’t work, there is no canteen service in the train, whatever!).
Now the train stops in between two towns, waiting for a crossing signal from another train. You see nice green lands on either side of the train. Will you get off the train and graze? Of course not.
What will you do instead? You will control your hunger, wait for an appropriate place, and then grab some food to satisfy your appetite.
In the same way, it’s better to do the same thing when you get angry—to wait patiently until the situation cools down and then react rationally.
Once you train your mind to understand that anger is a feeling, you can begin to tame it for your benefit.
Delay your expression by giving it some rational time
Anger usually urges you to respond fast. And while angry, we often react, making a mess, instead of taking the time to respond after thinking rationally.
Your mind has blinders on and doesn’t allow rational or reasonable thinking into its space. In the urge to respond, there is often the wrong output, at the wrong time, and in the wrong place. Then, later, when you think about it, you will probably feel bad about you reacted.
Rather than responding to the situation immediately, why not try and train your mind to delay the response?
I find that most of the time when I control my anger, and delay my response, my reaction would have been totally childish if I had reacted the way I was about to—and I find there is no need to respond that way.
When I let some time go by and think about the issue later, I usually find it was not an issue worth the worry and stress and anger. As a result, I avoid a lot of unnecessary issues and emotional outpourings.
Do you strategically approach anger? If so, have you found it effective? On the flip side, if you’re not very good at managing anger, try to implement the above strategies. I’m sure they’ll work for you.
Jane shares personal development and motivational tips on her blog. You can also subscribe to her Personal Development playlist on Youtube.
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