Financial Times

Getting angry and ... managing it
By Nilooka Dissanayake
"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you;" says Rudyard Kipling "Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son."

Kipling lived before 'politically correct' was invented. So, while I do not want to be "a Man," this poem (titled aptly as 'If') used to be my favourite poem and presented the ideal I aspired to be ever since I was fifteen years old. While the aspiration has not changed, I have. So have changed the circumstances and the situations I come across. And the saddest part is, despite such lofty ideals I still have a very short fuse. So today, let us focus on anger.

Our personal relationships can sour as a result of anger. In work life, our employees and peers can get hurt unnecessarily. We can even lose our jobs, valued customers and relationships. All because of a silly, animal, gut reaction that cannot be conquered. How very primitive indeed.

I am glad to mention here that, in over 12 years of professional life, only a very few and highly deserving people have managed to blow my fuse. This was probably a result of the very valuable advice I received from my father the first day I went to work: You are going to solve your bosses problems; not to create new ones.

hatever the provocation, I do not like blowing up. I do not enjoy it. I do occasionally use anger (or what seems like anger) as an effective tool in management-yes, can be done, but only if you are in perfect control of yourself. This is even mentioned in a dhamma story. A woman uses a very pious snake as a cord to tie up a bundle of firewood.

The snake feels kindly towards the woman and quietly suffers being tied up, put in together with firewood in the loft and the resulting heat, smoke and starvation without a single hiss. The morale of the story is: even a snake has to hiss on and off to show it can be dangerous. This is a very good thing to remember in management. But, real anger, which is the greatest challenge, is a different story altogether.

Justifiably or not, when I have lashed out, I feel like such a fool after half a second. It hurts my ego. I do not like being reactive. I like being proactive. And, according to Lord Buddha, no one can make you angry; only you can make yourself angry. Since I subscribe to this view implicitly, obviously I am in the wrong. How most annoying! "When angry count ten, before you speak" advises Thomas Jefferson; "if very angry, a hundred."

As far as I am concerned, Jefferson's words and advice from Kipling about filling the "unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run," hardly helps. "Anger is a short madness" says Horace, a Roman lyric poet and satirist that lived before Christ. I fully agree. Remembering what really matters and throwing the chaff and taking the grain in that 'unforgiving' instance is a great challenge. For me, I guess that is the greatest challenge of my life.

NLP gurus advocate imagining jumping back three steps and distancing yourself from the situation. Try this by visualizing that someone else is at the receiving end of whatever makes you angry and hurt. Only thing is, it happens before you blink. You need to be faster than lightning to beat it.

But, I am determined to beat it, more out of egotistical reasons than anything else. Patience is not my greatest virtue, but the whole world seems to be bent on helping me. For example, before sitting down to write this article I switched on the radio. After the early morning 'pirith' chanting, what do you think they spoke of today in 'Dhamma Chintha'? Controlling anger!

We would like to hear from you about such things as anger that you encounter in your work life. How does it affect you? How do you deal with it, in yourself or in others?

We also did a whole review of Anger Management websites in a back issue of Ezine Athwela, the first email magazine of Sri Lanka. Please request for your free copy through ft@sundaytimes.wnl.lk or on 011-5-552524.

The writer is the Managing Editor of Athwela Vyaparika Sangarawa (Athwela Business Journal), the only Sinhala management monthly targeting the small and medium enterprises and its English version, Small Business International magazine. She also edits Ezine Athwela, the first ezine of Sri Lanka.

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