How to Manage Anger:
Confessions of a Wealth Creation Advisor

Have you ever heard someone tell you how to manage anger? To get your anger under control? To watch out, or your anger might destroy you?

Don’t take their warnings too seriously until you read this.

What Is Anger?

If you have struggled with unfairness in your life, you have probably confronted anger and wrestled with ways to overcome it.

For most people, anger starts when tension mounts between the way things are in your life and the way things should be, at least according to the ethical code by which you live.

After no one steps forward within a reasonable time frame to set things right, to apologize and to make amends for creating this tension or for exacerbating it, anger can snowball out of control if you are not careful.

My Angry Spirit

I am an expert in the subject of anger. It has brought me success and happiness. Sounds strange, right? Here's how I did it.

The life that I now lead comes as a huge surprise to me and to many others who used to place bets on my life.

In my professional dealings, I used to put on a collected, serene face each day, grab my briefcase from the hallway closet and step out into the world wondering how I got to this place in my life and thanking the Universe that I did.

No one saw the damage underneath the custom-made suit: the shy kid who ended up taking on self-destruction as a way of life all the way to almost the end of graduate school.

Where did my damage start? Well, to begin with, I was adopted and enduring a troubled home life where the last thing on everyone's mind was addressing the rejection complex of an adopted child.

I was the kid on the block selected to get taunted by my peers because, hey, no one else is going to respect you if you don’t respect yourself. And if your own family doesn’t respect you… well you can’t really create self-respect out of thin air, can you?

During and after adolescence, I coped with a series of abusive relationships, both plutonic and romantic - these relationship repeated patterns from my home life, and as my love life crashed and burned, I started losing touch with my family and eventually became completely removed from them.

I engaged in a strange "dance" with my birthfamily for a while after searching for them in college, to see whether there was a more utopian place for me to call home.

If there was, I soon learned that wasn't it.

So how was I impacted by all of this disappointment?

Well, it took me a long time not to feel like damaged goods anymore. As I saw people all around me leading what seemed to be well-adjusted "normal" lives, I grew so full of anger and resentment that I didn’t know how to feel anything else.

By that point, my depression had begun to feel physical, like a chronic stomach condition and certainly not something that I could talk myself out of on my own.

I felt that psychiatrists were only as good as your next friend – you would be lucky to get one that really cared enough about you to actually treat you. Medication was something I was not willing to accept as a long-term solution.

I was in a hard spot, and I knew what I had to do. I needed to find a way to channel my anger, embarrassment and the uneasiness of my family condition into something productive and meaningful - if I was going to survive.

Why I Have Kept Silent Until Now?

When I started my wealth creation site, I intended to "fast forward" my history past the disappointing parts and focus on today, now that my life is filled with financial reward and healthy personal relationships.

Frankly, I was just so tired of seeing people try to get ahead by bringing up their pasts:

For the past two decades or so, the media has published one sob story after another of celebrity seekers who try to stack the odds in their favor trying to launch "sympathy careers."

It always works the same way: a fame seeker tells you a tear jerker about their lives, that they are an ordinary person just like you or me and can relate to the struggles of the audience (or some segment of it). They bet on the public's tears like a commodity that they might invest in that could win them a piece of the American dream.

The trickery becomes obvious, however, when they become famous and then start acting completely differently from the way they initially portrayed themselves:

They stop doing the same kinds of interviews, they stop talking as if they can relate to their audience, they build relationships with people that contradict their original positions, they stop expressing themselves ideologically the same way in their performances -- and you are left wondering whether they were ever truly sincere.

I didn’t want to follow in these unethical footsteps.

"Get-Rich-Sick"?

In a 1992 made-for-television movie called "Majority Rule," Blair Brown played the first female American President.

The character was not doing well in the polls, consistently failing to earn the hearts and minds of the American public. Then, her husband was shot and killed while campaigning for her, which won her the sympathies and adoration of America and, ultimately, the presidential election. Had her husband not died, she would probably have lost.

This story-line epitomizes the "get-rich-sick" climate of the 1990s and 2000s: the sicker you can show your circumstances to be and the heavier your heart and spirit are as a result, the more likely you are to convince audiences to rally behind you.

Unlike the glamorous icons who dominated entertainment in the 1980s, the new celebrity had become the ordinary person whom we were less likely to be envious of because they came carrying heavy baggage that could take a lifetime to sort through.

With get-rich-sick, we come dangerously close to basing societal worth less on talent and merit and more on how to compensate for hard upbringings and abuse.

Not that there's anything wrong with underdogs making it big - extremely big. A world in which underdogs did not emerge victorious would have a terrible impact on the morale of downtrodden people who really need to latch on to a reason that they shouldn't give up on their lives.

I just don't like to see get-rich-sick exploited through lies and half-truths. It is very easy to exploit the public with this strategy, since so many sad stories are told subjectively, and are difficult to contradict through verification of objective facts.

Moving Past Get-Rich-Sick

In spite of my problems with "get-rich-sick," it has become clear to me, by watching other high quality personal development leaders, that training is not effective when it occurs in a vacuum. We need to train by personal example.

I believe that inspirational coaches and other leaders have to include real life anecdotes to show that they truly know what they are talking about, and that when they give you advice, they come from a place of experience.

Would you listen to instructions about how to operate a complicated piece of machinery from someone who had never used it? No, you wouldn’t. You would run in the other direction, especially if misuse of the machinery could be hazardous to your health or safety.

You shouldn’t be expecting any less from people who claim that they can provide guidance to enhance your life financially, emotionally or spiritually.

People who claim to be able to identify the social pitfalls to success, like me, need to come from a place of deep and rich understanding of these pitfalls. Otherwise, everything we say can be dismissed with a waive of the hand as guesswork and hype.

It is a risk we take that we may be seen as part of the "get-rich-sick" generation. It's a risk I'm willing to take to help someone who may need a compass in the midst of a personal storm.

Is Anger Destructive?

So, back to the questions whether anger is a destructive emotion and whether you should ever be ashamed to brood indulgently in feelings of resentment and rage.

In my teenage years and into my 20's, my adversaries drilled it into my head that my anger would consume and destroy me. I didn't care if they were right, I was seeing red and my ears weren't working anymore.

I have found that most people who advance the warning that we need to get rid of anger are trying to side-step the consequences of their own conduct that caused anger in the first place! They are worried about how anger directed at them might cause their lives to be disrupted, even if they are just being paranoid.

This is not to say that their words don't contain a kernal of truth. We do indeed see cases where anger consumes those of us who lack self-control over their anger and lash out against their offenders in criminal ways. Don't ever do that!!

But that having been said, there’s not much that we can do about anger caused by outside forces. I don't believe that any natural emotion, anger included, exists for the purpose of destroying us. No, I think that emotions exist to help us negotiate life and tell us something about the mysteries of the world we live in.

If you are hearing warnings about your anger, my advice is that you don't let the people who have angered you in the first place then turn around and judge you on how to personally cope with your anger. That's like letting someone who poisoned you then sit back and read to you the side effects!

However, I do think it is better not to live life as an angry person. I believe that life is meant to be enjoyed without the strain of negative emotions being given a chance to settle in, anger being one of the most unpredictable of our negative emotions.

I also acknowledge that anger has adverse physiological effects on us -- on our hearts, nervous system, and other parts of the body -- which we are better off minimizing.

But I don’t think that we can avoid anger when we are being mistreated.

We have to look at anger as something that will crop up from time to time in our lives. The Byrds put it well in their timeless song "Turn Turn Turn": there’s “a time to love, a time to hate, a time for peace…” There’s also a time to take action.

Harnessing Angering

I have been able to share with you the trying times that defined my youth, and the fact that I got from where I was to where I am today using anger as a fulcrom for change, eventually shaping a life of which I could be proud.

I can’t say that without anger or other negative emotions I would have ever gotten to where I am today. I can't predict what different emotional mix might have produced the same or similar results.

So I certainly am not going to tell you to ignore anger, to push it aside and to deny that it has a component that is productive, true and just.

While getting past the dysfunction in my own life, I found tremendous satisfaction in using my anger to show people that they were not going to bring me to my knees – and in fact, that my life was going to thrive in spite of them. I was going to succeed as if these people didn’t even exist.

How did I put this plan into action? Here are some of the things that I did, when I had no other choice but to live with anger:

• I sought out and befriended career mentors and let them know what my business aspirations were, constantly staying in touch and never letting them forget who I was.

• I followed their advice to the letter. I asked question after question after question. I made them like me enough to want to spend the time with me to answer them all.

• I read as much personal development literature as I could, and let it speak to me. My focus was on not repeating patterns from the past that would hurt me in the future, including learning how to create a healthy, happy home life.

• I did as well as I possibly could in school, despite the fact that dysfunctional relationships can take a tremendous toll on your concentration level (especially if you feel the need to fix them). I pushed past the inability to concentrate.

• I kept my adversaries as much in the dark as I could, so that they could not hone in on anything they might be able to control or sabotage. I didn’t give them the opportunity to discourage me, either through negative words or deeds.

• I did everything I could to get financially independent. When pursuing an education, this is not easy. But I have seen some amazing aid packages offered to students able to convince their schools of special circumstances.

• I moved forward as if nothing my adversaries did could phase me. I always looked for second chances after failures or disappointments – and made whoever disappointed me fully aware when that second chance paid off!

These are coping mechanisms that can help anyone wrestling with with anger and other similar negative emotions.

Always remember, you are not alone in your struggle. Many of us are not dealt the cards we would have preferred in life. At various stages, and in wide ranging circumstances even lasting through adulthood, we just have no control over what anyone says or does to us or how they make us feel.

We only have control over how we manage our feelings and what we do about them.

This is what separates the successful from the downtrodden. It’s what we do with the adversity that surrounds and confronts us that characterizes our success in life.

And despite our starting points or our unique personal hurdles, a successful finish is something within all of our grasps.

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