Anger Management for Entrepreneurs

Everywhere you look in today’s world, you see anger. Every now and then, you hear about bullying, senseless shootings, brawls and other violent expressions of anger. It is evident that now more than ever, people need anger management tools. And entrepreneurs are a special case though!

Understanding Anger!

In order to come up with tools to manage anger, it is important to understand what anger is.

Anger is a natural reaction born of the need to survive and defend one’s self. This reaction, however, triggers a whole set of other reactions in the body, particularly in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex brain.

The amygdala and other brain structures set in motion responses that radiate throughout the body. However, this does not mean that the frontal lobes cannot devise a way to deal with this anger. This is where learned anger management techniques can be of help.

Anger Management for Entrepreneurs: 8 Strategies

Here are 8 tips entrepreneurs can use to manage their anger successfully.

1. Recognize Stress

Stress frequently precedes the unwanted transition from feeling peaceful to experiencing angry feelings in various situations.

Scientists have discovered that the stressor (whether external or internal) stimulates the major systems into anger which is one of the human organism’s powerful and sophisticated defenses. Anger management skills pre-empt the fight-or-flight response to provide a more constructive alternative.

2. Develop Empathy

Empathy means seeing, hearing and feeling as another person would which leads to constructive communication.

Lack of empathy, on the other hand, leads to poor and adversarial communication, which in turn results in a failure to understand others.

3. Respond Instead of React

Many times anger is basically a reaction to people and situations that hit people where they are most vulnerable and so they automatically with behavior that has been learned through the years.

Rather than reacting to triggers people can acquire the appropriate strategies and choose to deal with frustrating situations logically.

4. Use Reason and Talk to Yourself

A crucial skill in dealing with anger is having a logical conversation with yourself. Learn use “self-talk” to analyze the situation objectively and steer yourself towards finding a solution.

5. Communicate with Confidence and Assertiveness Instead of Hostility

Good communication is necessary for anger management because poor communication causes conflict, misunderstandings, and emotional hurt. Learning to communicate clearly, without inflicting ridicule or pain is one of the most basic skill in anger management.

6. Adjust Your Expectations

Managing anger often means learning to adjust expectations so that they are realistic.

Sometimes this means adjusting these expectations upward and at other times downward. Realistic expectations help people cope with disappointments, with problematic situations or difficult people.

These expectations also help individuals accept themselves and enable them to live with the fact that some problems are both unsolvable and perpetual so that the best direction is not finding a solution but learning to live with the situation.

7. Take Time out to Think Things Over

Research shows that people cannot resolve conflict or even think rationally when their stress level reaches a certain point. It is often best to take leave the scene and take a temporary time out.

However, this skill is often perceived as threatening act rather than a positive gesture. This will work better if the person doing the time out commits to return after a reasonable amount of time to work things out, and if the time away from the situation is used for constructive “self-talk.”

8. Learn to Forgive

Letting things go and forgiving is possibly the most powerful skill for anger management. With this life-changing step is difficult to accomplish, when it is taken old resentments lose their power over an individual; new situations will stop being connected to old hurts and will therefore be easier to manage on their own merits.

This is by far the hardest skill to acquire but it is also the most transformative and the most rewarding.

Conclusion

Entrepreneurs can use these 8 tips to make their life anger free. Please share with us, which strategy work for you.