Anger can be incredibly destructive. Uncontrolled anger can damage your reputation, destroy your important relationships, damage your health, and limit your professional opportunities.
3 Steps to Help You Manage Your Anger:
Step 1: The first thing you need to do is to be honest with yourself. You must admit to yourself that you have an anger issue. This is about only you and no one else. Ask people you trust how they are experiencing your anger. Their perspective will allow you a different lens to see your reactions and behavior from. For an even richer understanding of yourself, take a conflict assessment such as the Thomas-Killman Conflict Inventory to understand your response to conflict.
Step 2: Do you know what causes you to feel angry? It is important for you to understand your triggers (e.g., certain people, words, tone of voices, nonverbal gestures). Now, create a hostility log in which you detail events when you were angry. Capture what happened, what was said, who was present, how you were feeling, and how you responded. Review to recognize patterns and then look for triggers.
Step 3: After you understand what your triggers are, create a plan. The plan should address each potential trigger and identify a different way to respond. You do not want to just understand your triggers and then hope to react differently to them in the moment. Like an excellent athlete, you need to condition yourself. That means preparing for the trigger, creating the appropriate response, and practicing. Becoming less prone to anger, takes understanding yourself more deeply, committing to change, practice, and patience.
Commit to living a life uninterrupted by the chaos, stress, and damage that results from anger.
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured. - Mark Twain