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Less room for anger
Nowadays, there’s less and less room for anger in our lives. Not that we don’t get angry anymore, quite the opposite, but it’s simply no longer welcomed and listened to. It’s time for kindness, enthusiasm, and (toxic) positivity. Gradually becoming aware that our negative emotions can be harmful, they’ve been pushed under the carpet in favor of positive emotions. And if this is true for society as a whole, it’s also true for the world of work.
Anger = violence?
In the world of work, transitions are made easily:
- 😭 sadness = weakness
- 😠 anger = violence
🤦♀️
>>> This article may help you: At work, you too can be expectional
And if there’s one place where you don’t want weakness or violence, it’s at work. Except that accepting your sadness allows you to face failure and making room for anger helps, for example, to overcome a humiliating, shameful or unfair situation, but that’s not really what the world of work wants. 👋 Can you really be yourself at work?
Being happy, smiling, and acting calmly is the norm in many companies. You have to be happy at work at all costs, even if it’s just a façade. Because with anger comes the idea of protest, loss of control and if you’re an angry woman, hysteria too.
🤫 An employee who gets angry is someone who can’t control themselves, and therefore can’t be controlled and by extension could harm the smooth running of the machine. It’s better to concentrate on being happy, even if you’re on the verge of being treated like a child at work. However, discredited anger doesn’t disappear. We recognize that in a company, anger can be disturbing. It can interfere with the working atmosphere, deteriorate relationships and distract from a collective goal, but anger can also be very healthy. |
Healthy and legitimate anger
Imagine, you’re operating in a world where there are plenty of opportunities to feel annoyed, but you take that annoyance, roll it up into a ball and bury it deep down 🧶. How will it end? The little ball will rot, take up more and more space and end up exploding out of proportion 💥 or it will make us sick (sometimes leading to a burn-out). To put it more simply, simmering anger does nothing for harmony in an office, quite the contrary. I would also add that living in a fairer society, and getting rights, all start from anger 📣.
Wanting more justice, more rights, and asking for it, is also daring to be angry.
If anger is healthy and legitimate, i.e. it doesn’t just exist to intimidate, attack, etc., it can be very useful and can even bond people together. In the world of work, anger can come from a need to assert yourself, from ambition, from a struggle, so it deserves to be heard.
Listening to anger doesn’t mean submitting to it, it simply means making room for it and trying to understand it. The world of work isn’t filled with uniform, content, happy, grateful, and kind individuals. No, it’s full of individuals who are multi-faceted. Anger is one of our primary emotions, so we’ll all get angry at some point, even at work. This doesn’t mean that we have to explode in our manager’s face, it just means that we should be able to express our anger frankly and listen to it intelligently. Anger is also an energy that can be creative and enable action. We’re not talking about moaning at work just for the sake of it, but about expressing an emotion, which, like positive emotions, deserves to be heard 👂.
Editor’s note: Energy to be harnessedAnger is an emotion like any other, it may be less pleasant to feel, but it’s still a message, a piece of information that needs to be heard. Welcome your anger, what does it want to tell you? What got you into this state? What needs to change for you to stop being angry? Anger can be a very healthy emotion as long as it’s well-managed and constructive, so don’t shut it down. Use its momentum in the office! If you can’t manage this emotion properly, and you act out of anger too often and regret it, it may be worthwhile contacting a psychologist to understand the reasons for this and to put in place new, more valuable habits. 🤗 Understanding yourself, accepting yourself, being happy... It’s here and now! #BornToBeMe |
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