3 Steps For Communicating When You Feel Angry

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3 Steps For Communicating When You Feel Angry

How can you keep your composure when you are shaking with anger? While you want to communicate effectively with others at work, when triggered by disrespectful or inconsiderate behavior, it’s easy to lose composure. I can recall countless times I came up with all sorts of things I could have said after the fact. Your reputation is important, and anger is also a common and important emotion. You can be more strategic when working through your anger. Here’s the challenge.

Brianna shares an office with Arielle. Brianna is neat and organized. Arielle is messy and disorganized. Arielle does her best to keep things under control, but when she is overwhelmed, she just doesn’t make it a priority to keep things neat. Brianna returned to their office at 12:00 to find two coffee cups on the worktable – both sitting on a professionally printed report for her presentation to her boss in an hour. She picked up the cups, and there were two perfect coffee rings on the cover that had gone through to the pages underneath. Arielle was at lunch.

Let’s look at the three steps that Brianna took to address her anger.

1. Accurately name what you’re feeling – all of it. Brianna was angry. As she stood there with the report in her hand feeling tense, and breathing as deeply and evenly as she could, she also noticed she had resentment about the difference in Arielle’s style and disorganized habits. But the main feeling was anger. Brianna had taken a course on the TENOR method and knew that her subconscious assessed she wasn’t on track to meet the need of asserting her rights. But exactly what rights?

2. Reflect on what rights you think you have in the situation. “Rights" are social agreements as to who may do what under what circumstances within a given social group. If you don’t fully specify the right you think you have, it can lead to higher levels of anger. Brianna thought about the rights in this situation. It was “I have a right to expect that Arielle will be respectful of our shared office space and my stuff!” However, Brianna saw that this right is disempowering for her. She can’t rely on this right because Arielle’s choices are not within Brianna’s control. There’s a good chance that Arielle, although she’ll feel sorry, will also be defensive, explaining that she just gets so busy and doesn’t realize where she puts things. Brianna revised her right to be more empowering: “I have a right to hold others accountable when they damage or lose my work.”

3. Generate options for strategically addressing your anger. When Brianna considered revising her beliefs about whether she has a right to hold Arielle accountable, she saw that she had never discussed shared office rules with Arielle. Since they are sharing space, Brianna felt it was critical to have a conversation with her about how best to meet each other’s needs. When considering changes to her strategy, Brianna realized she had to take the lead in raising this problem with Arielle. First, she had to deal with getting the coffee stained pages replaced within the hour. Then, Brianna had to plan a reasonable conversation with Arielle that would address her careless behavior. She had to point out the consequences of this behavior to Arielle. In the discussion, Brianna planned to ask that they both collaborate on a solution that would mitigate these types of risks in the future and result in a win-win office-mate solution. Finally, she considered in her strategy the time frame for asserting her right. Brianna decided to wait until the presentation was finished and presented, and make an appointment to speak with Arielle later that day. She prepared some suggestions for how they could work things through. The good new is, you always have options when you define anger as “not being on track to assert a right”. It’s now in your control to change your beliefs and change your strategies, just like Brianna.

With these three steps, Brianna felt more composed and able to deal with the situation. Her consideration of options helped her feel strategic. And because she put off the discussion with Arielle until later that day, she could let her subconscious work on the strategy in the back of her mind. If there was anything that her gut said “no” to, there was time to change the strategy to make it better and increase her confidence.

These three steps, part of the TENOR method, help you use your emotions to think more clearly.