All too often anger management and conflict management is really about stress management. The vast majority of the people we work with do not actually have a specific anger issue but they do have an unhealthy relationship with stress. Put it this way, have you noticed how when you are genuinely relaxed and calm and have nothing on your mind how your likelihood of becoming angry is so much less.

When you are calm your ability to see other people’s points of view and your capacity to allow others their errors and mistakes is improved and your superhuman ability to make things up and jump to conclusions is taken away.

Working out what is stressful

Understanding our own relationships with stress is not always easy. It’s not always the presenting issue which we project our stress in to that is causing the continual build up of pressure in our lives. This is why we encourage people to look at stress from different viewpoints.  Once they are aware of the big picture to do with their stress they will often stop focussing on the little issues and develop calming strategies that are longer term and more effective.

We have two ways that we help people examine the bigger picture. The first is our stress test which you can take right now. Just follow the link. This is not really a test and is much more a map and an indicator for you of where, in your life, you are holding stress. The more information you have the better and the better the strategies for calm you can build in.

Dealing with stress is the first step in becoming emotionally resilient. Emotional Resilience is one of the greatest skills we can develop in these times of continual change and uncertainty.

The second way we show people to reposition their relationship with stress is our unique 5 Pillars of Stress model which challenges us to redevelop and mend our relationship with the fears we have been building up over time. We don’t mean the fears of spiders or snakes but instead the relationships with fearing being out of control and our fear of trusting others to name just two.

I started off by saying that anger management and conflict management are to often about stress management and they are. One of the challenges we all face is that there is still a huge stigma attached to admitting we may be stressed. This in itself builds internal pressure and resentment towards work which all too often people carry home and act out in front of loved ones.  Stress is about fear. Fear is about vulnerability which is why too often we act out anger when really we are stressed.

This brings us back to the stress.

There is no one solution to stress which is why we help clients with a multi targeted and multi strategic view. This means that our clients carry with them strategies and tactic for calm wherever they go.