I spent years feeling mildly angry. Not in an explosive way. Not the kind of anger that lands you in trouble. More of a low-level background irritation that coloured everything, like a slightly wrong filter on every photograph. Meetings annoyed me. Traffic annoyed me. Certain kinds of people annoyed me. I did not particularly enjoy it, but I had come to think of it as a reasonable response to a world that contained a fairly large amount to be annoyed about.
Then I came across the Three Principles, and I started to see something I had not seen before. The anger was not a response to the world. The world had not changed particularly between good days and bad days. What had changed was my thinking, and the feeling was following the thinking, not the other way around. I was not irritable because things were annoying me. I was annoyed by things because I was in an irritable state. The causation ran completely opposite to how I had always assumed it worked.
This distinction is genuinely life-changing if you sit with it long enough. We tend to treat our moods as the effect of circumstances. I am angry because of what just happened. I am anxious because of what is coming. I am frustrated because of how that person is behaving. And from inside that story, the logical response is to try and change the circumstances, manage the person, or avoid the situation. But the feeling is not coming from any of those things. The feeling is coming from thought, shaped by the state of mind you are in, responding to something that thought has already interpreted before you were even aware of it.
Anger in leaders is a particularly interesting case. Highly capable, highly driven people often carry significant anger, and most of them have learned to contain it well enough that the people around them may not fully see it. But it costs them. It narrows their thinking. It makes certain conversations harder. It generates a kind of vigilance, a constant scanning for the thing that is going to push them past their tolerance. And it tends to create cultures that carry some version of the same contraction, because people in organisations feel the emotional weather of their leaders more acutely than most leaders realise.
NLP did not help me with the anger. I was a practitioner for a while, which is genuinely ironic in retrospect. The reframing techniques would work briefly, and then the same edge would return because the underlying misunderstanding, that the anger was caused by things happening rather than by thought, had not shifted. You cannot fix a wrongly calibrated instrument by repeatedly resetting the display. You have to understand what is generating the reading.
What changed things for me was not a technique. It was a seeing. A noticing that on quieter days, the same drivers, the same difficult people, the same frustrating systems, did not land the same way. When my mind was less full, when thinking was slower and clearer, I had access to something that looked a lot more like equanimity. Not because I was suppressing anything. Because there was nothing there to suppress. The anger was downstream of noisy thinking, and when the thinking settled, the anger settled with it.
This does not mean anger is always wrong or that it is always created by misunderstanding. Sometimes anger is appropriate. Sometimes it is pointing at something real that genuinely needs addressing. The skill is learning to tell the difference. Anger arising from a clear, quiet mind about something that actually requires your attention is useful information. Anger arising from an overloaded, contracted mind about something that does not actually require your engagement right now is just noise. And the trouble is, from inside the noisy state, they feel identical.
The first question, before acting on any strong feeling, is a simple one: what is the state of my thinking right now? Not the content of the thinking. The state of it. Busy or quiet. Contracted or open. Because the content will look very different depending on which of those is true.
If the anger you carry is not actually a response to what is happening but a symptom of noisy thought, what might become possible for you and for the people around you when the noise quietens?
If this resonates, and you’d like to explore what’s underneath your own version of the noise, I’d be glad to have that conversation. You can book a free 30-minute call here: