Keep (mildly) losing my temper at work
December 13, 2019 1:26 PM   Subscribe

I have been working as an administrative assistant for the past ~6 years, in 3 different jobs. At each one, I have had at least one incident where I have lost my cool and either raised my voice at a co-worker or said something I shouldn't have. I am starting a new job next month in IT and I want to make sure to not repeat this pattern now that I'm in a better position so that I don't risk my job.

The most recent incident (today) happened when a coworker who I genuinely like, but who is very stubborn and cannot accept criticism, kept arguing with me about something that she both didn't understand and wasn't even responsible for. I was honestly telling her what she wanted to hear, but that didn't seem to matter. I eventually realized the conversation was going nowhere and tried to end it/ opened her office door to walk out, but she kept pushing the issue and I ended up saying 'I don't want to talk about this, it is stupid' in a raised voice and walked out. Because I had already opened her office door at this point, a number of other people witnessed my outburst.

I have been trying to think of the common threads to each incident and the two things that are jumping out are 1) that the person is refusing to listen to me and 2) that I feel physically trapped.

In my personal life, if someone is being unreasonable and won't let something go, I can usually just walk away. At work, it is harder to do that and I feel like I end up having to stay in the situation a lot longer, raising my emotions, until I finally snap by yelling something along the lines of 'being done' and walking out abruptly.

I also think a big part of what contributes to this problem is working as an administrative assistant. The job seems to always come with some inherent degree of disrespect.

Although I am switching into the IT field, it is still in a support role and comes with the knowledge that people are going to get angry with you even when it isn't your fault. It was stressed during my interview that I need to be able to handle these situations, so it would be great if I never lost my cool again.

Any advice or anecdotes are appreciated - thank you!
posted by prism4tic to Work & Money (11 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
i think the best thing to do, when you know you're about to hit your limit, is to say, "let's finish this conversation later." and just walk away. hard to do if it's a superior, and unfortunately i think in those situations you have to just sit and stew silently.
posted by misanthropicsarah at 1:39 PM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I think it can be very helpful to learn to recognize how your body feels in the moment you're ramping up to your loss of temper. (You can do this, to some extent, by remembering/imagining such a situation and paying attention to whether you're tensing up, your heart speeding up, etc.) That way you can anticipate when it's in danger of happening and remove yourself from the situation. It's much harder to do it once you're in the full flood of anger. To me, that little escalating feeling is now a clear sign to me I'm about to do something that might be regrettable and should take a break first.
posted by praemunire at 1:46 PM on December 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


Best answer: Echoing what's already been said! When working with clients (both children and adults, in my role as a mental health therapist) it's helpful to explain that everyone has limits and our bodies can help us to know when we are becoming escalated. This is a part of the human condition, it's just the way we are made! It's important to know what your "10" feels like (when you speak loudly and must leave a situation), but you also have to know what 2, 4, 6, and 8 feel like so you can exit a situation before you get to the point where you raise your voice. Pay attention to the signs your body is giving off and before the need arises, come up with an exit plan. You will likely lose your cool again, but it's better to have that happen while you're walking around the parking lot or in the bathroom by yourself than in front of co-workers.

In one of previous roles, all of the staff and youth in the facility had to create a 5 item "safety plan." These were steps we could take when we were feeling ALL OF THE BIG FEELINGS. My safety plan included leaving the area, taking a drink of cold water, drinking Diet Coke, looking at pictures of cute animals, and reaching out to friends (non work friends) to vent. These could be anything that matters to you, but involving some kind bilateral movement (moving both sides of your body), and movement that crosses your midline can be very helpful in dissipating angry energy. You can stretch, dance, do some yoga, whatever. Doesn't have to be for a long period of time, or fancy, but just taking the time to listen to your body will save your bacon over and over. Best wishes to you!! (I am an angry crier, so I do these things myself, and it works. Sometimes I still cry, but it's in private, and that's a win for me.)
posted by heathergirl at 2:29 PM on December 13, 2019 [7 favorites]


Best answer: "Excuse me, I have to use the restroom," and walk out. Then use your bathroom time to run some cool water on your wrists and take a moment.
posted by phunniemee at 2:37 PM on December 13, 2019 [14 favorites]


Have you taken some time to think about why disrespect+being trapped are your triggers? I have some that are similar and it wasn't until I did some work thinking over what memories I was reliving that I was able to breathe and manage my emotions in those situations. It can be surprisingly effective in helping your brain understand that Annoying Stuff Now is not Upsetting Stuff Then.
posted by emjaybee at 3:40 PM on December 13, 2019 [4 favorites]


I eventually realized the conversation was going nowhere and tried to end it/ opened her office door to walk out, but she kept pushing the issue and I ended up saying 'I don't want to talk about this, it is stupid' in a raised voice and walked out.

You are halfway there. You did the right thing at the beginning, by opening the door to walk out when you recognized the danger signs. You need to find a way to keep moving out that door. The “I need to use the washroom” excuse is perfect, because it’s not something a reasonable person can argue against, and it allows you both to save face.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 3:43 PM on December 13, 2019 [8 favorites]


I work in tech support/customer service and get shit on over the phone on a very regular basis by people who, for whatever reason, feel entitled to be awful to the lone person trying to help them.

There's a difference in action options if you do phone support than in-office in-person interactions, imo. I have to stay on the line with the customer but in-person frustration can be a little easier to manage.

To cool off I do different things... take a very brisk walk around the facility parking lot (sometimes stomping and cursing like a sailor), or go sit in the quiet room (I got our Dept head to agree to create one for just such circumstances), go to the single-stall restroom and cry it out. I keep things at my desk to fiddle with - thinking putty, fidget cube, magnetic beads. Photography is a passion so I make reprints of my favorite shots and hang them around my cubicle to stare at while I'm having Calgon, Take Me Away moments. I have a flameless, battery operated candle on my desk that also gives me something else to focus on - unexpectedly soothing, actually.

With phone customers I've developed a possibly-sick? pleasure in being as pleasant as I can be in an attempt not to let my goat get got. Easier said than done. When someone is starting to rile me over the phone I'll often ask if I can call them back in five minutes because I must 'research something'. The timeout helps.

Catching it early is key for me, noticing how my body is starting to respond so I can take it like a misbehaving 3 year old to a different place until I cool back down.
posted by mcbeth at 3:59 PM on December 13, 2019 [3 favorites]


Have you ever been on the highway trying to pass an enormous truck and suddenly felt pretty sure it was going to encroach into your lane and smear you over the asphalt like braunschweiger? In that situation you--or at least I--get the overwhelming urge to just freak all the way out. Scream and whip the wheel around, say, or slam on the brakes like a lunatic. But I'm hyper aware that if I yield to my emotions in that moment, I will surely die, so what I do, I look straight ahead, I hold the wheel gently but firmly, I press steadily down on the accelerator, and I relax my shoulders and breathe deeply and slowly into the bottom of my belly until I am safely around the truck and have emerged intact and unschmeared. It would be cool if we could learn to master our emotions like that in other emotional situations when it isn't life or death. I can keep my temper pretty well at work when the person driving me nuts or just trying to is a client or a boss or a coworker at my level in the hierarchy or below, but not as well when it's someone very slightly above me in the hierarchy--or someone equal who merely thinks they're above me in the hierarchy. I do not do well in that situation.

It may help to know that I remember to this day though it was years ago a time when I was unnecessarily irritating to someone subordinate to me and drove him to lose his temper. He just said, "I can't talk to you right now" and marched out. And I was rightfully covered in shame. I did not feel he had acquitted himself poorly: I had been unreasonable and unfair and demonstrated an appalling lack of respect for another person, and in his place I wouldn't have been able to keep my temper, either. I felt terrible about my own behavior and about his I felt only admiration because he had stuck up for himself. Your coworker might actually benefit from your outburst. It's possible she could learn to cut the crap: I did.
posted by Don Pepino at 4:26 PM on December 13, 2019 [5 favorites]


Mildly losing your temper a few times in 6 years is hardly unusual or terrible. There's nothing wrong with trying to develop more self control, but I think it's also okay to simply let yourself get angry and raise your voice now and then when people are being unreasonable. Sometimes it's an appropriate response or at least an understandable one. Surely you've noticed other people in your workplaces raising their voices, storming out of rooms, complaining bitterly, saying mean thing about each other, etc. People who do that kind of thing a lot aren't generally well-liked but it's pretty normal to do it occasionally and it doesn't usually put your job at risk.
posted by Redstart at 8:21 PM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]


You made your coworker look bad. Everyone could see that you were trying to escape and that she was pushing it. I suspect that the situation makes you feel angry and ashamed, but your behaviour does not sound so far out of line that it sounds like there is a professional problem. It's more that you feel upset that you had to be in the situation where you had to be firmer than should have been necessary.

So, what has been the fall out professionally from those three incidents? Did your manager talk to you? Did you get written up? Let go? Failing bad feedback, I think the issue is more how bad you feel to have experienced those emotions, as opposed to danger of unemployment.

It's not necessarily better in IT - it's really a matter of your coworkers and managers and how reasonably they behave. You can encounter people who trigger your annoyance in any job.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:58 AM on December 14, 2019


It's great that you've recognized that one of your triggers is when somebody is refusing to listen to you. That makes me really mad, too. It's true for a lot of people, I bet. One of the things that has helped me not blow up over things is to give people permission to want things different from what I want. Maybe you want to solve their problem and they don't seem to want that. Maybe you want them to do a simple logical next step and they want to obsess about the past. Maybe you see the issue as solved going forward and they just won't stop worrying. Maybe you see that there's an unresolved problem and they want to set it all aside till next time. But the point is, you can't make them want something different from what they want. And in a lot of cases it really doesn't matter, just recognizing that they want somehting is enough to scratch the itch.

When you feel that you're not being heard, in most office-relevant cases, the moment you identify that feeling is a great time to pause and refresh your coffee or take a sip of water or whatever. 30-60 seconds. Consider what they are unsuccessfully communicating about what they really want. Consider the implications - this is work, so sometimes there are implications like "making the whole department look terrible to a key customer" and "taking out internal networks for 2 hours" but a lot of times the implications are minimal - "this item doesn't get prioritized the way I want but we'll probably get to it eventually" or "you and I have different opinions but neither one matters because manager is deciding". Just take a few seconds to calmly contemplate. Then you come back to the conversation.

Now instead of saying "I don't want to talk about this it's stupid" you're in the same point in the conversation, you've identified there's a rising problem and you're getting to to door to go, you just need to close the book more gracefully. Try to relate, and then set it down. "wow, yeah, it sounds like this has really been bothering you. I don't think there's much that directly impacts our next steps though, so maybe let's just let it stand for now." You've now stated your next action - which is to do nothing - and the conversation is over. You can leave.
posted by aimedwander at 11:32 AM on December 15, 2019


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