For The Beast To Stay Alive It Has To Feed

Anger, bitterness, resentment; hatred.

You might have cause to feel these emotions from time-to-time, but I hope you come to realize that in choosing to feel these emotions on a regular, daily basis, you choose to allow whatever, or whoever, stirred those emotions in you initially, to win. The sooner you release those feelings, you purge yourself of their power over you, and you regain your control, take back the power and live a better life.

Now that’s it in a nutshell. If you stop reading now, you’ll have the point.

Here’s the thing about anger, bitterness, resentment and downright hatred; sometimes they come into our lives and change us without us being aware we’ve changed. Of course the people around us, especially the ones closest to us, see the change, know it’s not change for the better and are sometimes powerless to help us regain our former selves.

When you carry any of these four with you, the surprising thing is how they change our body language and facial expressions, alerting those with whom we interact that we’re in a bad mood. This often causes us to look unapproachable, best left alone and then it follows that this can build even more resentment as we fail to win employment competitions, find ourselves passed over for promotions or yes, find ourselves removed from employment altogether.

How we then experience the world changes, because of how we interact with the world. One of the healthiest things an angry, resentful, bitter person can do is let go of the hatred; releasing the negativity; healthy yes but hard for many. Change as you know is hard for some people, and change for the better is no different.

Now on the outside; from the objective point-of-view of another person, it might seem easy to let it go. “Stop being so negative!” It’s not that simple though, and does telling someone to stop being negative ever really have the effect of having that other person just say, “Oh alright. Thanks”, and then immediately change happens in a snap? No.

Change; real, lasting change in this case, only occurs when the person holding the anger, bitterness, resentment and hatred let’s it go. In order to let it go, there has to be some motivation to release it, something they realize they want more than they want the negativity. Again, it sounds obvious. Choose not to be so negative and you attract the positive to your everyday life. Yet, not easily done.

Much of the time there’s an element of forgiveness that immediately precedes the release of these four emotions above. The last thing however that an angry person who holds resentment and bitterness towards a hated individual wants to do is turn around and forgive them. No, often these are the very things that feed the feelings. It’s true you know; for the beast to stay alive it has to feed.

So you’ll find looking from the outside in that angry people carry that anger to new situations. They have short fuses and little tolerance for others who they have no reason not to like. At the same time they can want to have fresh beginnings and new starts in new environments yet bring all the anger, bitterness, resentment and hatred with them and when what they experience is the same as earlier poor situations, they mistakenly believe the world has changed for the worse. It hasn’t of course, it’s just how they interact with and experience it.

If this were an easy thing to change, these periods would be short-lived. However, as letting go through forgiveness can be so very hard for some, these four traits can rob a person of a life of happiness. Should that anger, resentment and bitterness spread to others and stir the hatred in them, it can become infectious and linger to become generational.

But for our purpose, let’s keep the mirror with only us in it. Look at a yourself in a mirror – not figuratively but literally – and what strikes you? Do you see defiance, anger, hostility and resentment? How easy or hard is it for you to bring a smile to the face you see and when you do, does that face smiling back at you hold a genuine smile or a sneer of disgust?

While change is hard – even change for the better – it’s possible; possible always. If it’s you holding the grudges and the anger, there’s got to be something occur that becomes the catalyst for change. It’s highly unlikely you just wake up one day and say, “Huh, I think I’ll embrace positivity from now on.” If you’re lucky, you might have others who see the good in you stick by you long enough to be around when you make the change. However, often the catalyst I referred to earlier that precedes real change in the direction of positivity only happens when you lose the ones that mean the most to us. They tire of the anger, frustration, bitterness, resentment, universal hatred and though it hurts them to do it, they move on.

Choosing what to feed – and it is a choice – determines how we shape ourselves and therefore how we experience the world in which we live. It’s therefore not so much what the world is doing to us but rather, what we bring to the world around us. Choose.

“Hate” Is A Job Interview Killer

“Oh I hate it when people are like that; I really do!”
“Okay, well that about does it. Thanks for coming in, we’ll be in touch.” And they never are. What went wrong?

It’s likely that whatever you find annoying in other people that prompted you to make the comment you did cost you a real shot at that job. “Hate” is one of those words that people use more commonly than they really mean. For not only do people use it to describe extreme revulsion, but they also use it in 2014 to describe things they don’t like a little but can easily adapt to. So for example, “I hate this pudding!”, “I hate having to get up early!”

Odds are that pudding flavour or texture is something you don’t find to your taste, but you could just as easily have said, “I prefer vanilla instead thank you, the butterscotch isn’t a flavour I enjoy.” This may not be what you would say if you were hanging out with your trusted girlfriend, but it might be what you’d say if you were having dinner at someone’s house you were just getting to know and wanted to make a good impression.

“Wanted to make a good impression.” Hmmmmm……isn’t that what you’re trying to do at the interview also? Right! You see that interviewer across the table is trying their best to get to know you over a relatively short period of time; even when there’s multiple interviews to go through. And because they don’t know you, anything you say is magnified. They can’t tell if a comment like, “I hate people like that” means you really do hate others or you just find them mildly annoying but can still get along.

People are generally considered the most important asset companies have. Put the right people in place and the company thrives. Hire the wrong people in key positions and the company will flounder and possibly fail. It is for this reason and this reason alone that picking the right candidate(s) from the many who apply for a job takes time and has to be done right – the first time.

So there sits the interviewer. Whether you started off with someone in Human Resources or not, eventually you end up sitting in front of someone who knows not only the job requirements but also the people with whom the successful job applicant will be working with. It’s as if all those people and their various personalities are the individual ingredients in some breathing recipe. Find the missing ingredient in a job applicant and the result is a winning combination. However, make the wrong choice, and you may upset the mix that was so close to what Management was close to achieving, and you’ll be out before the end of probation and the process will start anew.

Okay so that comment, “Oh I hate it when people are like that; I really do!” What the interview has likely done is precede the response the applicant gave with either a question or comment about someone with a strong personality not everyone can work with. Could be, and likely is, that there is someone on the team you would be working with, or in the organization you’d have to deal with who has that very personality, manner, style or trait. And if there isn’t, it’s a test to see how you would deal with an angry customer or someone who rubs you the wrong way.

Being careful, thinking before talking, and coming up with an answer that is honest but ends on a positive rather than on a negative is the key. And you should always be thinking to yourself, “What’s really behind this question? What is it that’s really being probed? If you think it’s a question or comment designed to provoke a response, taking a moment to re-think your automatic response may save the interview and keep yours going. So perhaps you might say, “The great thing about meeting people, whether it’s customers, clients or co-workers is that we’re all so different and yet we find ways to get along, even when our differences sometimes create personal challenges. Whenever I interact with someone who has behaviour I personally don’t appreciate, I can separate their behaviour from the person themselves.”

After making this kind of introductory statement, I’d cite an example from my past where someone has initially rubbed me the wrong way, but I was able to work with them and produce a positive result. You know, kind of, “To illustrate this, it was when I was with such and such company, and I was tasked with working on a project with a person who constantly interrupted my sentences and didn’t appear to be listening. I refrained from saying something that would be hurtful, and asked if we could just pause a moment and talk. I explained how I felt when he interrupted constantly, (which he said he knows he does but is working on) and he said he’d really make an effort not to do that and hear me out because he values my opinion. We then resumed the project and came to a successful conclusion.”

“Hate” is a word you might want to drop altogether anyhow. Save it for extreme situations where it’s required but leave it out of your everyday vocabulary. Dropping it will serve you well.