Anger is one of our most powerful emotions. Unexpressed, it can cause adverse effects to our health, such as migraines, ulcers, high blood pressure, anxiety disorders, and depression. Expressed violently, it can cause serious damage to relationships, friendships, career, and even our lives.
How can we deal with anger in reasonable, healthy, and productive ways? Professionals in the wellness and life coaching sector may find themselves helping members of their community learning techniques to safely manage their anger.
If you’re interested in pursuing a career path in wellness coaching, an experiential learning program can help you learn firsthand some of these techniques. You can take part in your own wellness transformation – emerging with a clear sense of purpose and the skills you need to help others do the same.
Consider the following ways wellness counselling training will help you tackle the topic of anger:
Launch Your Life Coach Career by Understanding Anger’s Causes & Purpose
Anger is a natural feeling that occurs in response to fear, frustration, helplessness and loss.
Experts know anger usually stems from and follows a specific pattern: a need or desire is delayed or not met, causing frustration and/or feelings of helplessness. Anger then emerges, at which point people must choose whether to suppress, internalize, or express the anger responsibly.
“What I think is so important for us to know is that our anger is there to serve us,” explains social worker and anger scholar Dr. Joann Peterson in a workshop co-created by Rhodes Wellness College program instructor Greg Gurel. She and her colleagues say anger simply gives us insight into our own emotional states, and becomes negative if it’s suppressed or expressed in harmful or violent ways.
Learn About the Relationship between Anger & Violence in Life Coach School
While anger and violence often go hand in hand, it is possible to eliminate violent actions from anger-expression when the right tools are employed.
“Unlike anger, violence is not a feeling,” explains Dr. Peterson. “It is an action – the crossing of a person’s boundaries without informed consent or choice, with an intention to harm or control.”
This involves expressing anger directly through physical violence or indirectly through passive insults, coercions, and threats made against a person’s safety. Throughout your life coach career, you’ll find yourself able to identify violent behaviours, often driven by the emotion of anger.
To help future clients separate their anger from violence, you’ll help them develop a strong sense of self-awareness and self-control. You’ll teach them strategies for achieving inner peace in environments of stress or hostility, and to disengage from potentially violent situations.
Practicing Physical Anger-Relieving Exercises
Road rage, youth violence, and domestic abuse are just some examples of irresponsibly-expressed anger. Graduates of life coach school and their peers in the counselling industry know that physical exercise offers great alternatives for expressing this kind of aggressive energy.
Life coaches can offer clients healthy options for releasing their anger
Writing and talking about anger, engaging in healthy physical activity or artistic expression, and even crying or shouting out in the open can help release aggressive energy. As a life coach or professional counsellor, you will create the safe spaces in which these healthy activities can be responsibly and effectively explored.
Embracing the Lessons Your Own Anger has to Offer
By learning to look beneath anger to learn from any feeling of hurt, fear, frustration, helplessness or loss, you’ll be able to more effectively combat your own anger and contribute to a more peaceful, non-violent society.
“It takes just one person to make a difference,” says Dr. Patterson. With the right training and motivation, that person could be you.
Are you interested in becoming a life coach?
Visit Rhodes Wellness College to get started.
