Many lines of work are binary: There are leaders and there are followers. In executive communications, we ghostwriters have to be the followers. No, we're not order-takers and are expected to come equipped with everything from ideas to strategy. But, we are not leaders.
Leaders can get away with less than perfect management of anger. We can't. That's where Sue Shellenbarger's article in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL on hotheads comes in. She cites research on the possible causes of the tendency to blow and provides some tactics for curtailing that. Obviously, the analysis is useful to those of us in executive communications who have not been blessed with a high resistance to stress.
I want to add one more recommendation. In researching an article on the psychological challenges among college students I interviewed a retired psychologist from corrections in Connecticut. He sure encountered a God's Plenty of those who got into the soup because of anger. His take was that underneath the anger is hurt. Heal the hurt and the anger triggers can't be activated.
That's the rub: How we heal is highly idiosyncratic. Often it requires considerable trial and error to discover what or what combination of spiritual program, therapy, success, bottoming out through failure, financial windwall, romance, and friendship will generate the needed internal paradigm shift.
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