Self Development - New Life, New Beginning

New Life, New beginning

Speaking when angry

I must say that this has been one area of weakness for me at home. I have been making conscious attempts to avoid confrontations and am successful to a great extent. I have a couple of strategies that help me take control of the situation. When my husband is angry and ranting, it makes me furious in turn; In those moments, I have trained my brain to think that - no matter what he is says he still loves me. This gives me strength and peace of mind to stay calm. Eventually he cools down and everything will be fine.

There are couple situations that are still difficult for me to handle.

1. Getting kids ready in the morning is one of the biggest challenges for me. It is a quite a task to make kids listen to instructions. During morning time crunch, sometimes I loose my patience. Yelling at kids does seem to work, but the cost is very high. When I yell, kids get scared and do their work under pressure. It makes me feel guilty and sad. My energy level goes down significantly, and adds to the stress.

2. My husband usually changes plans on me at the last minute. Other day, he asked me to work from home the next day so that I can take care of kids. He said it is a waste of time and money to send kids to day care on a school holiday when it is only a half working day for me. But next day I had an important meeting I needed to attend in person. Had I known about this in advance, I could have planned well. I lost my temper and devolved into raving and ranting caricature of an angry wife. Both of us got upset and left for work. All day I was feeling bad about what I said to my husband. It was also difficult to concentrate on my work. I made significant effort to console and make him happy. Needless to say, my husband also had a difficult day at work. Eventually, I took permission from my manager to work from home the next day.

As I analyzed these situations I realized one thing "No matter how right I am, when I get furious it has a lasting impact on people around me and we end up loosing precious moments of our life. Also my message does not get across to the other person, mostly due to the fact that I will be screaming at an empty vessel. Above all, I do not set a good example for my children." The lesson I have learnt from these incidents is to stay silent when furious. This helps keep things happy around me and avoids polluting the environment at home. I also get some time to analyze the situation and take the right action. I can hopefully put my point across in a right way if I feel the need at a later time.

This is a very difficult rule to follow, but I will try my best to stay silent when angry. I believe this is the best course of action in the situation. In case I speak when angry, I have decided to pay $10 to the person I speak with. It gives me a good reason to bite my tongue.

Withholding Information

Recently, a new member joined my project team. He is very energetic and interested in understanding all components of our project. Other day he told me that he would like to know what other team members are working on in the project. I did appreciate his interest, but due to lack of time I gave him minimum information. The project consists of various independent activities