9 Way of reframing ANGER, from destructive to CONSTRUCTIVE and RATIONAL In 2022 – By Matthew Hill
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Aaggghhhh
What is your normal reaction when someone is coming in hot like Top Gun, displaying dramatic levels of anger – with their red face, in your face, chucking out Anglo Saxon expletives, and hosing you with their spittle?
It is easy to react only to the symptoms, let our animal programming take over, and: fight back, avoid and runaway, or freeze, as the moisture builds up on our cheeks.
In this piece, we wish to demonstrate a completely new and spit free approach.
Today, we will reframe anger in 8 ways that will help you engage constructively with your volcanoing colleague, and move the drama forward, save time, tackle the actual issue, and, possibly, save the relationship too.
9 Perception shifts:
1. Frustration – walking a kilometre wearing one of their shoes (the definition of empathy in practice), we can change our view, no longer seeing them as damaged, dysfunctional, or displaying threating behaviour but accessing a glimpse of them as a thwarted and frustrated genius.
Maybe they just have exceptionally high professional standards and expectations, wishing for the best outcome in your joint project, and the mess that currently exists is extremely disturbing for them. A perfectionist, even if they do not appear on the spectrum, will be triggered by chaos, incomplete information, or interrupted progress, and a project trajectory heading towards an average or poor outcome.
Reframe – press reset on your emotions, revisit your hasty evaluation, and start again, seeing them now as a quality driven contributor, that, if you let them in, can help you shine by getting the project back on track, regarding pace, quality, and a valuable outcome. Seek for the hero inside themselves.
2. Misunderstanding – many of us are comfortable in our high shared context, homogeneous buddy bubble, regularly working with people we’ve come up with, and with whom we have plenty in common. All these shared experiences mean we are excellent at playing charades, and in a work context, speaking together in shorthand. We can be unconsciously confident that the other person is referencing the same lexicon and will understand us.
When we encounter people who have a different cultural background, a different education, or who bring a different set of experiences to the work environment, our comfortable and easy understanding levels plummet. Suddenly we find that confusion reigns, the speed of progress drops, and we / they get angry.
Reframe – first, accept difference as being of potential value to any project. A variety of points of view, POV, will help you avoid group think, ethnocentric myopathy, and, with more exploration and exchange, their gifts will be revealed to you, uncovering new ideas, taking in a wider perspective, offering more tools to use now, (and store in your bag for later), and leading to a more inclusive and robust sets of solutions for the work you are carrying out together. Let in the different, dial down the anger or your reaction to anger, and find the synergy.
3. Fear, Risk and Danger – their angry outburst may be centred in a more advanced or accurate sense of what is going to go wrong in the future. These agitated showstoppers are in fact valuable futurologists, sending cynical you a potentially lifesaving warning.
Reframe – instead of being put off by their dramatic display, maybe you should be thanking them for throwing you a project saving lifeline. They feel valid fear, have assessed, and uncovered a credible risk, and can clearly see a danger that you cannot. So, listen to them. This “business prevention officer” with an attitude, maybe the only thing standing between you and disaster. Don’t fly blind into the danger zone.
4. Scarcity – their anger has been triggered by issues of time scarcity, an absence of sufficient resources, and the current limitation to the team’s working capacity.
Reframe – their concerns should be topics of commonality, not difference and irritation. When you open up to them, and articulate your agreement with their analysis, you can then join forces in an aligned and powerful team, to problem solve together to overcome your joint resource deficit. You are stronger together, forever.
5. Threat – these people seem to be taking everything so seriously! Linked to 1., they may be reacting emotionally to a threatened diminution to their personal brand. It is interesting to note, that this can be manifest more frequently in older and senior executives. We suppose, the more they have to lose, the greater the reaction to threat.
Reframe – remember we all need a quotient of credibility just to function in a network, industry, or company. And senior people have more reputation and brand to lose in this area, so you have a human duty to help them maintain face and dignity, if you wish to access all their energy, benevolence, experience, and effort. Saving face saves bodies too.
6. Competition – the wrong competition can trigger even the best of us to anger.
Reframe – internal, cannibalistic win-lose competition is not helpful or commercial. Your job is to analyse the situation, and see if this is happening, and put a stop to it if you discover, zero sum competitive activity. Destructive internal competition is expensive. Competitive behaviour is best directed toward…competitors – the clue is in the name. Point your stream outside the tent.
7. Stress – there are three levels of stress, and maybe “Mr Angry” is operating at the top level and has just snapped. For comparison, if they were dancing at the bottom of the stress pole, they might not even have turned up to the office, or done any work at all, so their contribution would have been worthless.
Reframe – with a little listening, and soft intervention, we can get them down from being stuck to the stress ceiling and sat back down, operating at a functional and optimal stress level, where they are motivated to function well, and contribute maximally. When the times get tough, help the tough to get going.
8. Damage – if someone has been working with you for years it is unlikely that number 8. is relevant i.e., their anger is coming from some past deep trauma. But you never know. Is there an element of this project that has taken them back to some horrific past event – their own Vietnam, and they are now feeling trapped again in this nightmare memory, and are displaying their pain in the form of anger?
Reframe – take a time out and see if they’re prepared to talk about it. Since you are not a trained trauma therapist, direct them towards a qualified, and experienced professional who can help them process and dissociate from their life changing event. Night is a dark time for everybody.
9. Powerlessness – a cornered animal is a dangerous thing. If they feel they have nothing to lose, then watch out.
Reframe – in this circumstance it is good to keep your nerve and remember, “we are never totally without power.” Find a way for them to claim the power that they have, and to deploy it constructively. They can look into their untapped reserves of personal, professional, and social power. They just need to remind themselves of this, and swap over from being emotionally triggered to becoming tactically engaged. They’ve got the power.
Conclusion
When we conquer our cultural aversion to engaging with people displaying excesses of emotion, anger, and power, and we empathically move from our overreaction to the symptoms they are displaying, we can focus on uncovering causes, and thus re-engage the resources, value, and ingenuity of Mr or Mrs angry. This, stop, re-calibrate and re-start, method can avoid relationship damage, and get the joint project work back on track, to produce an outcome representing super performance and collective achievement. A result that is good for all parties.
It starts with us, interrupting our animal brains and reactions. It continues with courageous engagement, in the face of anger. It results in de-escalation of the drama, engagement, stimulating exchange, with all parties regaining full access to their genius and experience. It ends with fantastic creativity, problem solving, and leading to memorable and award-winning project outcomes.
We hope you have enjoyed these 9 perceptual shift suggestions, and will walk into your next hot zone, confident, and armed with tools that will extract the nuggets of executive value from the hot volcanic lava of anger.
About the author – Matthew Hill is an accredited mediator and adjudicator, as well as a management development facilitator, author, and keynote speaker. Contact him via matthew.hill@hillnetworks.com
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