Skillfully Processing and Communicating in Anger

Anger has the power to overwhelm and often does, leading to highly reactive, sub-optimal reactions instead of emotionally balanced, poised, socially intelligent, productive responses. Learning to be more skillful and masterful within the emotional storm is the ongoing challenge, one worth undertaking and conquering.

Jennifer Edwards knows this well as a business and leadership advisor, helping equip professionals to work best under pressure and stress.

She is also the co-author of the soon-to-be-released (mid-February, 2022 release date) book, “Bridge the Gap: Breakthrough Communication Tools to Transform Work Relationships from Challenging to Collaborative.” 

In this conversation, Edwards briefly talks about the biology of anger, our instinctual reaction and chosen response, smart and effective questions to ask ourselves. She also touches on poise and patience to get to that point to where we will stop and ask the critical, clarifying questions, and moving ourselves into a certain chair, so to speak, to make much better decisions.

In your professional opinion, from your knowledge, observations and experiences, what do you often see in other people's anger that creates future problems in professional relationships, or ends relationships?

Anger is fueled by a dangerous biological chemical cocktail that often sends the brain to the ‘lizard mode’ of fight, flight, or freeze which impedes a professional’s ability to show up as reliable and consistent with another.

When anger hits your pre-frontal cortex, hijacking hormones attack your brain’s ability to process creatively, collaborate openly and communicate effectively.

When you feel anger, interrupt it by becoming radically curious and take a deep breath.

Ask: “What do I need to know or explore here, to better understand what is actually happening and how I might use my evolved thinking as opposed to lizard thinking.”

How can people exercise more emotional regulation for stress management and use assertiveness and less anger deemed toxic by other people, which decays our reputation and lessens our communication effectiveness? 

When anger hits your brain, you have a choice to disrupt the hijack of the emotion.

With self-awareness, you can gain control of your cognitive thinking by simply taking a big breath in through your nose for 5 seconds and exhaling out your mouth for 5 seconds. Repeat several times.

By doing this, you are optimizing your executive function and allowing your brain and tongue to gain control, which allows you to exercise greater persuasiveness and increase your ability to be positioned as a leader of influence.

How have you seen people successfully develop and improve their reaction and response in anger?

How we respond to anger is completely related to how we manage our biological reaction to whatever triggers us.

The most successful people who improve their anger issues, often own their feelings and exercise presence to understand that their anger is but a reaction and they can choose to respond with curiosity as the antidote to the rage they may be feeling.

They ask questions like, “what is this actually about… behind the anger? What is causing me to feel so explosive as opposed to curious?”