As men we all have a certain penchant towards anger. Defending ourselves, our opinion, our dignity. But the anger I am talking about is unexplainable. It seems to come from nowhere. It has such a hold on our thoughts and actions that it seems as if it is something outside our body that has grabbed a hold of us.

In that statement lies the first step in defeating anger…………..It is something outside of our body.

This is an area that I am unfortunately an expert in. Whilst over the last 10 years I have mellowed and am a completely different person to who I was. From the age of about 10 to around my mid-thirties I was a very angry man.

The biggest issue I faced was that I am a red-head and of course gingers are naturally angry people. You here it all the time….”Careful of the ginger he’s an angry little bastard”. The problem is that I identified being angry as simply a part of who I was. It wasn’t something to be controlled, and when people told me to control my temper that just made me angrier.

I believe some men a more quick tempered than others but I don’t believe anger is a natural emotion. Anger is a symptom not a cause. In my own case I was beaten up regularly as a kid, to the point where I developed a bad stutter because of it. My solution I found was to fight back, which sounds great, but problem was I couldn’t fight. That just lead to more punishment as the bullies would see how quickly they could set me off. Unfortunately I brought this through into my career and I couldn’t face any sort of criticism without being aggressive and angry.

It was only when I recognised that my anger was a symptom of my past experiences, and was not simply because I was an angry man (or a ginger), that I started to be able to accept that anger was something outside of me that took me over as a defence mechanism.

I didn’t change overnight, it was a long slow progression, but until you understand that your anger is not who you are as a person, you will continue to live under its influence.

Anger...