My Anger and Learning to Listen

I run a department at an engineering firm, and the work rarely lets up. The pressure is baked into how the business operates, and for a long time I handled it badly. On bad days I'd feel myself edging toward something close to a breakdown, and the anger that came with it landed on whoever was nearby. My staff got it during working hours. My family got it the moment I walked through the door. I knew most of it wasn't fair. Anger doesn't care much about fairness, though, and anyone who has lived with a short fuse knows how little sense it makes.

The trigger was always set low for me. A small annoyance could set the whole thing off, and I've got memories of this going back years, long before I joined this company. Some minor thing would catch me wrong and I'd erupt, and people would walk away hurt.

The job put the responsibility for the whole department's output on me. If targets slipped, I was the one who had to explain it to my supervisor, nobody else. So when someone on the team made a real mistake, I'd go from calm to furious in a few seconds. In those moments I genuinely wanted to hurt the person who'd caused the problem. A few of them lost their jobs over it.

When the anger took hold my voice climbed, and words came out before I'd thought about them at all. I'd stop hearing whatever anyone was trying to tell me. Sometimes I barely registered that there was a person standing in front of me, which is a cold thing to admit, and it wrecked the way people related to me.

Eventually I couldn't ignore what it had cost. My colleagues would only talk to me about work, nothing else. They kept away from me at tea breaks and offered nothing about their own lives. That was the point where I decided something had to give, and I made up my mind to stop losing my temper.

I started by writing things down. Every time I flared up, I logged it, and I made a rule not to dress it up with excuses. The idea was to catch the early signals of my own anger so I could step out of the pattern before it ran away from me. Each morning I'd remind myself what I was trying to do: stay calm, be patient. Getting a grip on my thoughts turned out to be the way I got a grip on my emotions.

A friend pushed me toward an anger management course. I decided to try doing it on my own first. Tracking my behavior showed me where the problems clustered. I kept a running list of incidents and ticked off the ones that had tipped me into anger, and the pattern was pretty clear: I'd blow up when I didn't get the result I wanted, when I was rushed, or when I was worn out.

The changes came slowly. I started letting people finish, actually listening to my staff instead of talking over them. It didn't feel like much progress from where I stood, but my co-workers said the difference was large. Around the same time I was reading more about self-development and attitude, and I took a short leave to spend time with my family, which pulled some of the stress off me. When I came back I put effort into the people I worked with, set up regular check-ins, talked with them during breaks, and asked questions that gave them room to speak first. Their performance picked up after that.

If there's a takeaway, it's this: once you accept that you won't always get what you want exactly how you pictured it, you can ease off and deal with the situation with more sense. The anger made me miserable. Patience made the days better. Charlie