DairyBusiness

By Robert Milligan

Have you experienced the following reaction recently: “Wow! I never saw that person so angry?” 

A “yes” answer would not surprise me.  With the challenges facing both agriculture and our economy, anger is a common response:

• Anger is a known stage in our response as humans to loss (the “grief cycle”). Any change we view as loss – personal, family, employment, business, workplace, community – initiates this pattern.  The intensity and duration of the time in each stage – including anger – varies dramatically by an individual’s perceived degree of loss.  Frustration, anxiety, irritation, even shame or embarrassment, is normal.  Two dangers must be addressed – becoming “stuck” in this stage and allowing the anger to elicit unacceptable behaviors.
• Anger is a typical and very human response to anything that we perceive as being unfair.  This includes treatment by friends, family members, colleagues, customers or anyone else. Decisions, trends or outcomes that we experience at work or at home may also create an anger response.  

As is indicated in the discussion above, the answer to the question in the title is that emotion is both an emotion and a behavior.  Understanding and reacting appropriately and thoughtfully to the differences is crucial to our response to anger.  Let’s start by looking at each:

Anger as emotion:

• The emotion and its effects are internal to oneself — it is very personal.
• The impacts of the emotion are primarily on oneself.
• The emotional reactions affect how we view things and can cloud our ability to think clearly.

Anger as behavior:

• The emotions produce responses that lead to behaviors – the behavior part of the emotion.
• The affect of the behaviors is primarily external to ourselves.
• The affect of these behaviors is primarily on others.

All emotions – including anger – are experienced and acted on.  The experienced part is anger as emotion and is a normal part of being a human.  The acted upon part is the behavior part of anger.  The latter is the focus of the remainder of this article because each of us makes decisions about our behavior when we are angry.  Decisions we make will determine both the consequences of our anger and our continuing emotional responses.

In general we have two choices when we are angry:

• Instinctual behavior: We can just react and, thus, ignore the decision opportunity by expressing or acting on the anger emotional experience.
• Thoughtful behavior: We can think and, thus, take the decision opportunity and proactively discover the root causes that made us angry.

Although often difficult with emotions running high, we should always choose the thoughtful response.  This involves carefully discovering the real or root cause of our anger.  This is not always easy as what we often experience is the anger behavior.  The issue or problem – root cause — is typically hidden or at least less obvious.  For example, you may recall a time when you were growing angry at a friend, co-worker or employee for a particular behavior you experienced while interacting with them.  However, later you discovered – the analysis – that their behavior was understandable because the anger actually originated from another event in their life.  As a result of this discovery, your anger with the person disappeared.  In this example, your instinctual response was misplaced anger; your thoughtful response was to question your assumption about the anger behavior.

Once you understand the real cause of your anger, you again face a fork in the road.  The question now is whether the real cause of your anger is within your influence – do you have sufficient control to make changes that will reduce or eliminate the cause of your anger.  I often use the example of a supervisor growing increasingly angry with two employees who disagree and argue every time work assignments are made.  Upon some questioning – the analysis – he discovers the problem has nothing to do with work assignments.  Rather these two employees have a personal issue resulting from a non-work dispute.   This is a situation where he has control – he is their supervisor.  He can make it clear that this behavior is unacceptable.  If it continues, he can decide upon and implement appropriate consequences.  Assuming that this works, the results are much better than had he reacted without thinking and fired them. 

In many situations, especially today, we do not have control over the real causes of the anger – the weather, low prices, low profits, etc.    The first opportunity is to refocus our energies into what we can control.  We cannot control the weather, but we can manage the situation with better planning, etc.  We cannot control prices but we can refocus our energies on doing everything we can to minimize losses given the low prices.  

Remember we make decisions about our behavior when we are angry.  The quality of those decisions will have tremendous impact on our interpersonal relationships and our success in life.