CO-WORKER RAGE 
This page is organized into these sections:
|
I
hear and I forget I
see and I believe I do and I understand -CONFUCIUS
(551-479 BC) |
·
Incident
·
Self-witnessing Observations using the three step method
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INCIDENT
This incident I label as a work rage.
There were many new people
starting in our section of Hawaiian jewelry. There are usually two people per
shift but this one particular day, we had 4 people on shift, 2 old, regular
employees (including me and Kelly), and 2 new training employees. From the 2
new employees, I already knew one of them, Amy because I worked with her
earlier. However, the other girl, Lianne, I only met her as of that day.
Well, the lady that I work with is
named Kelly, and I asked her when we were about to start the shift, how the new
girl, Lianne was doing (in sales). And she said,
‘oh, she’s really good. Very extroverted, and, she doesn’t feel
ashamed of talking to customers and very friendly, so she’ll be really good
salesperson later on… But she has a tendency to take other people customers. I
was working with her yesterday and I
had a customer with me. Then Lianne just comes right next to me and tries to
take over my sale!’
When I heard, that I couldn’t
believe my ears. Our section was a based on group sales. Individually, it
doesn’t matter who sales more or less because it was group commission where the
total sales at the end of the day gave everyone the same amount of commission.
So I really didn’t understand why she would do that, and I thought Kelly was
exaggerating.
Then we started our work shift.
Lianne was helping a customer and also Amy was helping a customer as well. I
was with Amy trying to help her and then I left because there were other
customers. But my customer just wanted to know the price so after the customers
left, I went back to Amy to help her because she was taking a long time with
this one particular customer. But when I turned around, Amy was standing on the
side, and Lianne was helping Amy’s customer. So I asked Amy,
“Why is Lianne helping your customer?”
And she just shrugged. So I asked
her again,
“Did she take over your sale?”
And she kind of nodded. Amy was a
type of girl who is very nonchalant and doesn’t really get mad over anything.
But I was different. I just can’t stand seeing things like that, where girls
like Lianne doing whatever she wants, without thinking about other people. So
although Lianne was still with a customer, I approached her and told her in
front of the customer,
“Lianne, you’re not suppose to
take other people’s customer like that! Amy was already helping them!”
Then, she just looked back at me with a blank look. I was about to say more when my other coworkers, Kelly and Amy stopped me, ‘later, talk to her later after the customer leaves…’
So although I was already
trembling, and flushed from the RAGE, I decided
to wait. I was standing behind her to hurry up and finish the sale and I
noticed I was getting more mad and mad looking at her, and listening to her
speak. She was so shameless. I mean, isn’t that a common sense, not taking
something when someone else had it first? In this case it was a customer but
generally speaking, if you are playing with something, you don’t want someone
to cut in and take that toy away, right? I just didn’t get how she can do this,
not just once but several times already. These thoughts were filling my mind
and I was getting way to enraged. So I asked Kelly, since she was oldest there,
I asked her to explain to her why she shouldn’t take other people’s customer. I
was too enraged at this point to talk to her calmly so I decided to take a deep
breath and just step away from the situation.
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SELF-WITNESSING OBSERVATION
1.
How did I decide what to report on?
The rages that I have
at work is the most reoccurring for me. Either at customers, manager, or
coworkers, this work setting is where I find myself most times raging about one
thing or the other. But coworkers are people that I deal with personally
everyday. I work at a department store and in my section, we work in two, and
our commission is based on group sales so it is really crucial how we work
together. I decided to choose this
episode because while this incident was occurring, I knew I was about to go
into rage and it was probably the assignment that made me become more aware of
my rage episodes. Anyway, the obviousness of my raging was probably the reason
why I decided to report this particular incident.
2. What methods did I use?
I
used the Three step method: Step 1
Acknowledge
Step 2 Witness
Step 3 Modify
And
analyzing the three-fold self: sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective.
3. What difficulties were there
and how reliable are the observations (what errors may there be there)?
I didn’t think this
episode had too many difficulties because I was aware of my raging self, and I
became attuned to consciousness and attentive to both my conscious thoughts,
feelings and actions. But if there is to be some errors, the event occurred
really fast. This particular episode lasted only about 10 minutes or so. In the
brief encounter, I wasn’t able to jot down the exact conversation right away
because I didn’t have any pencil and paper ready, and I didn’t want to write in
front of the person. My recording of this event occurred about 5 hours later,
and maybe this lapse in time period could have resulted in some mistake in
reporting back of my
4. What were the observations: Where? When? What?
Who?
· Where:
At my workplace, in my section of fine jewelry
· When:
April 13, 2001, Friday around 6:30pm
· What: There were two new trainees for
our section and this one particular girl (Lianne), was snatching the other girl
(Amy’s) customer away by pushing Amy away while she was helping these one
particular customers.
· Who: new trainee who was really selfish,
impudent, thoughtless and inconsiderate of other people.
|
Recognizing
that I am experiencing a rage episode |
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When I first saw Lianne, I didn’t really like
her right away like the other girls I have trained before. When I asked my
other coworker who have worked with her before about her, she told me how
Lianne tried to steal her customer or tried to push her away and take over
the sale. At first I didn’t believe that. I mean, Lianne was only like 20
years old, and she didn’t look that aggressive to me, and she only started to
work 3 days ago. I thought how bad could she be? But I was proved wrong. From
working with her at first, it didn’t seem all that bad but when we started to
get busy, and I was preoccupied with another customer, I noticed that really Lianne took over the sales that Amy was trying
to make. I was helping Amy earlier, helping that customer but when I saw that
now Lianne was helping the customer, I knew right there, I was going into a
raging episode. There was no justification for her to just cut into someone
else’s sale like that! And she’s a trainee at that! I mean if she was a
trainee and she looked like she had trouble, the seniors like us could help
her out but not a trainee doing the vice versa. That’s unheard of!!! If she
had done that to me, I would have said something to her right away, but Amy
was just so nonchalant kind of girl, I guess she just let it go although she
felt cheated and hurt by Lianne’s action. But I am not the type to see
injustice like that and just ignore it. I have to say something about it. All
these thoughts in my head was actually making me get more enraged and started
to bring the feelings of personal hate toward this one individual. |
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STEP
2: WITNESS
Becoming consciously aware of these
three elements of my rage episode:
My sensorimotor, cognitive, and
affective behaviors
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Consciously
modify all three elements (sensorimotor, cognitive, affective behaviors) of
my rage |
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DISCUSSION
from
Goleman’s Working with Emotional Intelligence:
Being in control of our mood is
essential to good communications. When I first attempted to talk to Lianne, I
received the reply of
AMYGDALA HIJACK
Amygdala is located in the frontal cortex and it is
related to the emotional memory, that carries the information of our paste
feelings. It also uses these stored memories and scan with the incoming
information. From everything that we see to hear, it can be perceived as
threats and opportunities depending on what our past experiences was regarding
the similar situations.
It is predicted and explained
with the evolutionary theory that amygdala was mostly likely used its memory
templates to answer questions crucial for survival to determine the danger of
encountering with different situations, as in dealing with animals and plants.
So ultimately, amygdala hijack is an automatic response that heightens sensory
acuity, stops complex thought, and triggers automatic reflex in our body.
I
think this probably happened in this particular situation. When I was told
earlier by Kelly, how Lianne stole her customer few days before, already made
me become really aware of her actions. And when I witness her taking the
customer of Amy’s, it really was an automatic response in my body system, that
made my heart beat, hands sweat, and just made me become really alert of the
whole situation. At that moment, I perceived Lianne’s actions as threat to us
(us meaning everyone except her because I didn’t consider her as us, yet). When
she really stole the customer as Kelly had previously described, I took that information
and her actions to be really disturbing to me, and I knew instantly that I
didn’t like what she was doing. I didn’t like the way she was doing things and
from that moment on, it was just automatic reflex where my emotions got out of
control. I approached her and talked to her in a really critical, and
disapproving way, while talking in really loud, and unpleasant way. I wouldn’t
have done this if it wasn’t for the amygdala hijack. My actions were almost
automatic. I just knew I was angry at her for her actions. I only thought about
this situation, and imagined how she was before, when she stole Kelly’s
customer previously. I wasn’t able think complexly. I wasn’t able to think
about the situational factors, I didn’t think from Lianne’s point of view, I
only reacted as a reflex when I first witnessed her behavior, and felt raged by
her actions and just reacted to it.
Resolving conflict-creatively
The problem here was that I was being
too negligent of my own emotions and failed to become more aware of my feelings
and emotions. Being unaware of my own feelings will lead to become insensitive
to other people’s feelings as well and many times this is the reason why people
get into arguments and things like that.
It says in the Goleman’s book, Working with
Emotional Intelligence, there is a section in there that reads, Resolving
conflict-creatively, which deals with how to cool down conflicts:
· First calm down, tune in to your feelings, and
express them.
· Show a willingness to work things out by talking
over the issues rather than escalating it with more aggression
· State your own pint of view in neutral language
rather than an argumentative tone.
·
Try to find equitable ways to
resolve the dispute, working together to find a resolution both sides can
embrace.
SELF-CONTROL
People
with self control
·
can manage their impulsive
feelings and distressing emotions well
·
can stay composed, positive, and
unflappable even in trying moments
·
can think clearly and stay
focused under pressure
This skill of self control manifests largely in the absence of more
obvious emotional fireworks. signs include being unfazed under stress or
handling a hostile person without lashing out in return.
“Also this is taking control of your own state of minds. Moods exert a
powerful pull on thought, memory, and perception. When we are angry, we more
readily remember incidents that support our ire, our thoughts become
preoccupied with the object of our anger and irritability so skews our
worldview that an otherwise benign comment might now strike us hostile.”
(Goleman, 83)
This was
definitely one of the reasons why I acted as how I acted. I lacked this skill
of self-control. I couldn’t control my own mood, feelings. I could’ve been
suffering from another stress and I became vulnerable to be more irritated and
hostile towards Lianne. My mood was affecting how I was acting around the
people I knew and this was causing my raging emotions.
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CONCLUSION
Many of my previous rages that I have suffered from were mainly derived
from work. Either it be my coworkers like the story above, or to my manager, or
even to customers. I have always thought the problems was them, and not me. But
through self-witnessing process I have gained a special understanding to become
conscious of my feelings. When I attuned to my feelings, thoughts, and
behaviors, I was able to better understand what my rages was all about. It is
hard to see at first but by going through my experiences consciously, I was
able to witness my raging episodes and bring some modifications into these areas.
This rage I had for Lianne was
resolved when I was able to calm down my sensorimotor behaviors. Without
modifying my breathings and pacing, facial expressions, it was hard to bring
changes to my other areas. I also realized by doing this that I had a problem
with making faces. I didn’t know how ugly these expressions were! I wanted to
show others I was displeased and upset but that wasn’t doing anything for me.
It just made me look like a fool and hot-tempered person.
when I was able to bring my
sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective behavior under control, I was able to
think more clearer and logically. I became more aware of my surroundings and
the people around me. I also became more careful in choosing the right words to
speak to Lianne so that the problem could be resolved. This should not have
been a big episode. But I realized that I made it into a big rage episode from
my lack of self-control and my lack of conscious awareness of myself.
But after I went through the
self-witnessing observation using the 3-step method, the problem was resolved
because I was able to understand myself and bring my inner feelings, thoughts
and behaviors all under control.
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