Dealing with Anger, with Liz Fosslien

(sand shaking) (mouse clicking) (bright music) Headspace Studios. (upbeat music) Hi, my name is Liz, your guest host this week, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Wednesday. As you know, this week is all about managing emotions in the workplace, and today we are getting into anger. Today I'll discuss anger from an evolutionary perspective, how it can actually be a sign of compassion and how to use it to our benefit. So first of all, it's very common to feel angry at work. Mollie and I, when we were researching for our book Big Feelings, we spoke to 1500 people all around the world, all different ages, backgrounds, and every single person has felt anger at the workplace. Interestingly though, some of us have been socialized or conditioned to believe that there's a high cost to anger or just to believe that, you know, anger is something to be avoided. It's bad. We associate it with irrational violence, and so often people who are feeling anger will actually suppress that and feel something else. So they might describe it as self blame or irritability or frustration, but actually when you pull the string a little more, it's anger. I think people see anger at work as so negative because we've never learned how to really address conflicts or miscommunications early on. And so what happens so often is because we don't have those skills, we don't have the language to talk about it in a way that feels not so intense. We wait and wait and it festers and it festers until finally there's something that makes us explode. Obviously, those explosions are usually not good, but it also hurts our careers when we don't express them or we don't listen to what that anger is trying to tell us, and so it turns inward or it festers, or, you know, we turn to drinking or things like just to manage that anger to not have it explode in the workplace, but we don't know how else to get through it. And so it actually, we start to self-sabotage. I think because anger has such a bad reputation, there's a lot of misconception about it, and there's, I think a lot of people aren't even fully tuned in to when they first really feel anger. I have a friend who growing up felt like her parents only listened to her older siblings, particularly her older brothers, even though she often felt like she was taking the most reasonable stance, and she often fell into the role of organizing trips and planning. And so she found it very unfair that she was not listened to as much as her older siblings. And so that in her adult life actually became an anger trigger for her, and it took her a while. It took her therapy to figure out that trigger. And so she said, anytime, looking back over the last couple years when she felt like her manager or her...