My Anger
The other day, Mary told me about a specific time when I got angry with her – several years ago. She actually got scared.
It all came flooding back – the incident, the importance of my repeated and unheeded requests that affected a roomful of people – ah, yes, I was indeed angry. John, in a leadership position, to whom I had been addressing my requests, was studiously avoiding any confrontation with Mary, who was consistently repeating the same mistakes. Nobody was giving Mary any feedback, making suggestions, or moving her to another role on team – one in which she could have been more effective, less disruptive to the training dynamics.
Bottom line, I’m OK with being angry. Sometimes, it’s the bump in energy that it takes to change things – in this case, to break through John's pattern of not rocking the boat. (Which basically only delays the boat being rocked, and the delay usually rocks the boat harder.) It’s not my preferred mode of communication, but I want access to that energy – not as a way of making someone wrong, but as a way of waking someone up.
I did apologize to Mary for making it easy for her to be scared, that certainly was not my intention. My actual intention was to wake up John and also to better serve the whole training. Given the same scenario, I'm betting I would do exactly the same again, because it wasn’t until I upped my volume that things changed. And I wanted things to change for the good of the group.
Life giving me diamonds of wisdom just at the perfect moment. I get it in a completely different way now. I will not apologize for my anger next time. In a work situation, the same thing kept happening over and over again, no matter how I approached supervisors about a situation and attempted to be future oriented and positive, goal oriented, as well as playing a game of baseball multitude of different ways, it was not changing. It took something nearly happening to a patient and I got angry in the moment. Doing everything in my body, in my authority and IN MY INTEGRITY and to stay present. Once again shared with supervisors – Lets be future oriented and goal oriented and make change this time for the team and for patient safety! I regained composure w/i 5 min. Change will happen. The safety of human life is most important. It takes someone stepping up and showing emotion sometimes for eyes to open. Life is as it is….
Good one, Ann. Right now I’m working on that edge between making wrong and waking-up anger. It seems that my head does the make-wrong while my body does the waking-up anger, but sometimes I “trust” my head more than my body. That’s part of what I want to change … Thanks for the post.
Anger is a tool, much as anything else we are given as part of this human experience. “The second law of thermodynamics: everything winds down unless some outside force winds it back up.” Fr Richard Rohr in Falling Upward.
Fine line between boat-rocking for someone’s growth,and anger that blames. Once we see our judgements (which MTL has so graciously given us the tools to see) the very opportunity to be the catalyst for change arrives. Discernment within, truth-telling is key. Thanks again Ann, for bringing learnings to light!