Don’t get angry. Get to work

What is the right way to act when something doesn’t turn out as you would have liked it to?

Most of us have found ourselves in a situation where we would have preferred a different outcome. Often such events don’t rise to the level of calamity, but instead result in a disappointment.

It rains on our walk to work. A favorite sports team loses a close game. We drop a pen between the front cushion of our car and the middle console and can’t fish it out. These and other such incidents rarely result in apoplectic rage.

But there are occasionally events that do seem to fill us with a palpable sense of rage. A tyrannical manager wreaks havoc on our workplace without being called out for his or her behavior. A teacher seems impatient with our inability to grasp a complex topic in the classroom. A politician we claim to loathe wins an election against our favored candidate.

One response to these more severe incidents is to embrace an anger that we carry with us as it festers. Rarely does this anger result in a positive outcome. More often the anger causes us more harm than it does the person to whom it is directed.

A quotation attributed to Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher of the first and early second century, captured how anger may not be the most constructive of emotions: “Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.”

So what then is the right thing to do when things don’t go your way, when you find yourself waking up to a situation that at least for the moment seems untenable?

Rather than allow anger to consume us over an outcome we didn’t like, a different tack might be to double down on whatever efforts we have done to accomplish a task or to fight for a cause and channel any energy born of disappointment into finding new ways to reach those goals.

At the 1980 Democratic National Convention, Sen. Ted Kennedy rose to address the crowd after his rather disappointing run for the presidential nomination against sitting President Jimmy Carter. With the writing help of political operative Bob Shrum and others, Kennedy delivered what turned out to be one if not the most memorable speeches of his career. He ended with these words:

“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Those words seem useful to heed when things don’t go as we had hoped. If we were truly concerned about a cause, that cause doesn’t disappear because we didn’t get our way. Rather than stew in anger or regret, the right thing seems to be to double down on any efforts to engage in whatever work is needed to set things straight.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin. 

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