6 Subtle Ways Brilliant People Use Anger To Get What They Want
Anger is a productive energy when harnessed correctly.
Victoria Fox via Shutterstock Anger is a powerful emotion when expressed in a healthy way. When it's not, it can overtake our lives and push away people we love. That's why highly successful people become friendly with their anger and use it to get what they want out of life.
Anger is driven by our survival instinct, but we have grown up in a culture that subliminally teaches us anger is negative. We learn anger is the source of the world’s problems, anger makes people do “bad“ things. In reality, anger isn't good or bad. It's what you do with it that counts.
Six brilliant ways to use anger to get what you want out of life
1. They use anger as a GPS to help you reach your goals
An article from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology explains that research has shown anger to be helpful in goal attainment. That's why it's smart to use your anger as a type of GPS that alerts you when you don’t get what you want and when you're moving away from your goals.
If you pay attention to its signals, anger allows you to connect with your deepest desires. Hence, anger offers deep insight into yourself and serves as a key to creating meaningful change in your life.
2. They allow your anger to become a teacher
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When you're in the right mindset, feeling and following your anger can be a teacher. Here are a few of the circumstances in which following your anger can be healthy:
- When you're willing to experience anger without repressing or reacting to it.
- When you're silent and willing to reflect on your feelings and thoughts.
- When you ask the right questions like, “What am I truly upset about?” and “Would my actions be beneficial for me in the long run?”
- When you're willing to listen to these questions and answers without judgment.
When you're in this headspace and willing to follow through on processing your anger, you can start practicing the process and move past anger productively.
3. They accept that their anger is real
Become a child again — one who expresses this emotion naturally, truthfully, and intuitively — and don't try to deny your anger. An article in American Psychologist suggested we try to inhibit the intuitive side of ourselves by rationalizing our feelings in the context of accepted and ingrained social norms. We've done this for so long that we misjudge our true reactions as a problem we must control.
Think about your feeling and yourself simply: Why is this child angry? Is it because they're hurt, sad, frustrated, or lonely?
Accepting the emotional reason for your anger is the first step in dealing with it. Feeling and experiencing your anger is the antidote to avoiding or suppressing it. Denying or rejecting never works. It either emerges as deep-seated resentment and/or physical manifestations (headaches, insomnia, etc.).
Once you acknowledge it, you can channel your anger positively.
There are a few ways of accepting your anger. Try venting with a trusted friend, exercising or even listening to music that corresponds to the emotion. You can also fix a set amount of time to feel angry at something, like 15 minutes.
The main point here is to feel your anger without judgment. This is not easy and requires the courage to face this forceful emotion while not reacting. When you deeply experience anger, it naturally dissipates.
This brings us to the next step for using anger as a transformative power.
4. They understand the roots of anger
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Once you've acknowledged your anger, you can go into your deeper self and identify your triggers. What pushes your buttons? What caused you to get angry? Was it an event, a person, a situation, or a non-negotiable belief? Grab a journal (paper or digital) and make a quick nightly list of what made you angry. Don't judge it, just write it out to revisit later.
Triggers act like messengers of your deep-seated fears. They provide the signals to spot those insecurities, worries, and reservations that sit and wait in our subconscious. To remove these triggers from your psyche, you need to recognize their distortions and correct them.
Only by understanding the triggers and the roots of anger can you move past it and use it to grow.
5. They let their anger help them grow
By accepting and understanding your anger, you can look into yourself deeply and see the actively fearful parts of you, the things you are fearful of, and what triggers these emotions. As a result, you can create active steps to minimize the negative impact certain circumstances have on you, while simultaneously using those situations as practice grounds for gradually overcoming your fears.
Life coach Patricia Bonnard explained, "Anger [...] empowers the sympathetic fight or flight response: the autonomic nervous system's natural response to a significant threat. You can also bottle up that energy, which is essentially what resentment is. Anger and resentment are, respectively, the outward and inward expressions of the same force. You dish it out to others or turn it on yourself."
For instance, if your anger is a result of resentment, jealousy, or being in the company of specific people, you can take steps to first assess why these fears arise, reassess your self-worth, and understand how these situations or people affect you. Again, a journal can be helpful in giving you distance and insight.
6. They make changes and set healthy boundaries
Once you understand your anger, you can create action steps to protect yourself through minimizing contact, communicating boundaries, and being assertive. You can also improve your resiliency toward situations that are triggered: you work on letting go of attachments and ideas you hold on to strongly while creating the space for personal and spiritual growth.
Our knowledge and cultural experiences have taught us anger is an emotion we must control or repress. It hasn't conditioned us to see the positive aspects of anger and the methods to properly channel it, learn from it, and use it to help us grow and transform our lives.
Unfortunately, our misunderstanding and mismanagement of anger do a lot of damage, as shown by research in Frontiers in Psychology. Worst of all, it intensifies the negative beliefs that hold us back from our true happiness. Looking at anger as a purely negative emotion is preventing us from achieving personal and spiritual transformation, but we can change that.
Anger does not have to be a purely negative feeling. Use this knowledge to get to know yourself better and improve the quality of your life.
Moshe Ratson is a Licensed Marriage Family Therapist (LMFT) and infidelity expert based in New York City.