“Eh, you’d piss on your mother’s grave.”
My father shouted that at me over Thanksgiving dinner one year, and it knocked the wind out of me.
Morty and I were down visiting my family in Florida, and we wanted to get away, just the two of us, while my parents watched six-year-old Blake for one night. When I told my dad the plan, he got so angry and said those words about pissing on my mother’s grave.
But why?
When we discussed this he said he thought it was wrong of us to skip out on the shopping and cooking for Thanksgiving dinner. In his mind this meant, “Shelly doesn’t care about her mother.”
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. We had always intended to be back in time to help.
After I explained the facts, he apologized. Plenty. My dad adored me and told me so often. He also spoke without thinking sometimes and said things he didn’t mean.
I’ve come to see that pattern everywhere in the thirty years since. The size of a reaction is rarely explained by the size of the trigger. It’s explained by the meaning underneath it.
The same pattern shows up at work
I tell this story because I hear a version of it almost every week. Except the person isn’t shouting at a daughter over a holiday trip. They’re yelling at a coworker, snapping at an employee, seething through a meeting with a business partner.
Most of them think the anger is just who they are. A personality trait. Something to manage, not something to eliminate.
My client Terry came to me believing exactly that.
Terry’s anger was keeping him out of leadership at his company. He knew it. His boss knew it. Every time someone on his team missed a deadline or didn’t do things his way, something in him would flare, and he’d snap in a meeting or fire off a sharp email. People started avoiding him. Nobody wants to promote someone people avoid.
Terry thought his anger was just a short fuse. Nothing more to look at than that.
What was actually driving it
We started where I always start. We looked for the beliefs behind the behavior, not the behavior itself.
Terry’s anger had several sources.
One was “I’m not important.” When people didn’t listen to him, that belief turned it into a personal insult, and the insult turned into anger.
Another was “I’m powerless.” Anytime a situation felt out of his control, this belief made him feel small, and getting loud was the fastest way to feel big again.
A third was “the way to get what you want is to yell.” He’d learned somewhere along the way that raising his voice got results. And for a while, it probably did.
The last one was the belief that when people don’t do what he asks, they don’t respect him. So a missed deadline wasn’t just a missed deadline. It was a verdict on his worth.
These aren’t character flaws. They’re beliefs Terry formed somewhere in his life, long before he ever managed a team, and they’d been driving his behavior on autopilot ever since.
Eliminating the belief, not managing the behavior
Once we found the beliefs, we eliminated them one at a time using the Lefkoe Belief Process.
Terry didn’t spend weeks practicing anger-management techniques. He eliminated the beliefs that were generating the anger, and once those were gone, there was simply less anger left to manage.
His boss called me not long after. He said, “Terry is much friendlier, smiles more, and is a lot more patient. I’ll be referring others to you as soon as the need arises.”
I love that phrase, “a lot more patient.” Patience isn’t something Terry gritted his teeth to find. It’s what was left once the beliefs stopped generating a reaction that was never really about the missed deadline at all.
Why this matters if you’re the one who gets angry
If you’ve been told you’re “too intense” or “hard to work with,” I’d invite you to ask yourself a question before you accept that as who you are.
What beliefs would you have to hold, about yourself or about other people, to react the way you do?
Maybe one of them is “I’m not important,” like Terry. Maybe there are several, the way there were for him. But there’s almost always at least one belief underneath it, quietly doing the work.
I’ve watched this pattern in one-on-one sessions for over 30 years now, in leaders, in parents, in people who just wanted to stop being someone others tiptoed around. Anger like that is almost always protecting one or more beliefs underneath it.
I never did find out which beliefs my father’s anger was protecting that Thanksgiving. He’s gone now, and some questions stay unanswered. But I think about it every time I sit across from someone like Terry, someone convinced their anger is simply who they are. It rarely is. There’s almost always a belief, or a few of them, worth looking at underneath it.
Next steps
If you recognize yourself or someone you lead in Terry’s story, you can start looking at your own beliefs today with our free belief-elimination program. It walks you through the exact process I used with Terry, at no cost: www.recreateyourlife.com/free
And if you’d like to talk through what might be getting in the way of your own goals, whether that’s leadership, a relationship, or something else entirely, I invite you to book a free strategy session with me. We’ll talk about what you want, what’s standing in the way, and whether working together makes sense. www.mortylefkoe.com/application
