Handling aggression - training for managers and professional people

Handling aggression is difficult.  It seems almost instinctive to respond to aggression with anger or fear or both.  Sometimes spontaneous rows can clear the air and in the long run be good for working relationships.  But it’s risky. 

Emotional intelligence is about finding a better way of dealing with emotion, including handling aggression.  The reason why emotion is difficult to handle is that when people are emotionally aroused they become unable to think rationally.  What they say doesn’t represent what they think, it expresses how they feel.  When someone is aggressive towards you your own emotions are aroused.  You are likely to be aggressive back.  Two people are now attacking each other and saying a lot of very stupid things. 

Emotion is energy, and it will find a way of coming out. There are two ways of expressing it.  Take anger as an example.  One way of expressing it is to attack someone physically or verbally, to say hurtful things, to be aggressive.  The other way is to talk about how you feel, to say explicitly that you feel angry, to admit it in conversation.  That’s not an attack and it does no harm, but it’s equally effective at calming you down.  That’s what you’ll learn on the London based "Skills with People" course.  You’ll learn not only to talk about your own emotions but also to help other people talk about theirs.

Unfortunately this idea clashes with the lessons that many of us have had drummed into us from our culture, upbringing, education and experiences in the world, and so the lessons of emotional intelligence may feel uncomfortable at first.  But there’s great power and relief in them, and it’s worth persisting.  They can enable us to be much more successful at doing difficult things such as handling aggression.

See the Skills with People course contents.