Communication 101: 10 Ways to Calm Down the Angry

You probably have heard that the first thing in defusing the angry is to stay calm.  That is one part of some very good advice, when dealing with the angry.  To be frank, I think dealing with angry people has been my hardest struggle, when it comes to my emotions.  I am great at moving someone from fear to confidence, but not as good at moving someone from angry to calm.  So I have been studying this task.  Here is what I have learned so far (organizing it according to my IQ pattern found in my ARWAT method).

Here is the best advice I can give so far in ten fairly basic steps:


1. Get Engaged - ask the angry person questions to show you are listening.

2.  Use Anger as a Meter - gauge their anger like you use a Geiger counter to alert you to the degree of the problem.

3.  Assert Your Eyes or Hit the Road Together - Show you are not trying to avoid them through eye contact or get them to move with you rather than against you.by taking a walk together.  

4.  Tune In - get involved in listening to them fast and don't wait until anger has risen to the top of the bell curve where they are now totally out of control.

5.  Own Up Maturely - make sure that own what is yours including your mistakes and admit them maturely and not condescendingly.

6.  Lower Your Thermostat - stay calm while they are angry.  It is back to that advice to return a soft answer in return for anger.

7.  Take a Step Back - See things from their perspective without necessarily agreeing.  Acknowledge what their concern is that has them angry.

8.  Use Magic Phrases - Try things like, "Yes, I agree." or "You're right" or "I'm sorry".  Nothing disarms like taking their side on anything you can agree on as common ground.

9.  Don't Feed the Angry Person Data - this can say that you are not listening and that you are being disrespectful.  Find instead some way to be respectful toward their concerns.

10.  Set Limits - Say what you will let be and what you won't let be, because you get what you tolerate.  If their rage is a little too melodramatic, a little too frequent, a little too abusive, then give them a chance to change to what you can tolerate from what is intolerable.  Give them a different kind of choice.



I got the content for this from an article by Men's Health titled: 11 Ways to Calm Down an Angry Woman. I figured there is no way I couldn't learn from an article with that title.   But like I said, I have re-organized it so that it follows my logical intelligence material (ARWAT) as well.  That way the emotional and the logical brain can talk to each other more easily through parallels.  So if you learn my logic tool as well as my emotional tool you should be able to make the emotions and logic work together which is better than either one alone by far.

Anyway, I hope these ideas give you a way from anger to calm at least for yourself and hopefully a way for yourself to help others to move from anger to calm.  I sure wish I could do this like I can move someone from fear to confidence.  That one I have known well for years due to some good teaching from my dad.

I wrote my points for moving from fear to confidence today, so maybe I can post those things tomorrow.  So I hope you have found a better way to communicate, while considering the emotions of another person's mind and not just their mind's logic.  Take care.



Sincerely,

Jon



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