Being Point

Tag: anger

  • What Are The Best Responses When Others Break Promises?

    What are the best ways to respond to others when they do not keep their promises?  Clearly, responses like anger, resentment and recrimination are counterproductive.  What kinds of positive choices are available?

    A basic first step is to appeal to the core values that may have been the foundation for the promise in the first place.  Appealing to basic values like fairness, integrity and truth may shift the result.

    The desired degree of action about a broken promise is most often a function of its importance and impact.  At their most extreme, broken promises can result in significant emotional distress and other kinds of difficulty.  Yet, the principle of a broken promise can be deeply troublesome even if the issue is primarily one of keeping one’s word.

    How have you wanted to be treated when you have broken promises in the past?  What are the extents to which you have gone to have others live up to their promises?  What are your limits and boundaries about broken promises?  Most importantly, what have you learned about promises and how to engage in productive promise-making that produces great results?

  • Upset, Anger and Staying In Equanimity

    The opportunity for upset has presented itself more than normal, it seems, since we’ve been discussing equanimity this week.

    Last evening, a friend and I dined at a local restaurant on the ground floor of an office building in Brentwood. After dinner, we lingered to work on a project together. In the parking garage, we were told we owed the maximum day parking charge even though we had been validated for two hours. All this while other customers were leaving the parking lot and not being asked for their tickets at all.

    Interesting, huh, to want to stay calm and not be triggered by feelings of being treated badly as the parking attendant wouldn’t say his name, was taking down our license plate numbers, basically threatening us? What?

    We made a choice of equanimity: remaining centered, calling the manager and staying an extra 20 minutes until the situation was resolved.

    There were other choices: get really angry and leave without paying, pay and leave really angry, or pay and feel victimized. Upset was very tempting, but ultimately it would have been counterproductive.

    How do you handle upset at restaurants, banks, stores and the like? Are you able to hold on to equanimity? What kinds of experiences have you had where either the presence or the lack of equanimity had a significant impact on the outcome?

    Copyright 2009. E. B. Hutt Bush and Coaching for Results, Inc.