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Make Pain and Anger Your Strongest Motivator (The Secret to Using Negativity for Good)
Don't forget about your dark side
Howie Chan
May 26, 2024
It was a turbulent time.
As a child, she watched the Ku Klux Klan march in front of her house in Montgomery, Alabama while her grandfather stood in the doorway with a shotgun. Everywhere she looked, there was segregation and violence. She had to fight for her rights and the rights of others every step of the way.
It took her three tries to get registered to vote as a young adult and she worked hard to get justice for black women who had been raped.
At a church service in late November 1955, she and her husband heard a shocking news - two men were set free after killing a black man for flirting with a white woman. They were found not guilty and acquitted.
She was angry. She was fed up.
A few days later on December 1, 1955, she paid her bus fare and sat in the colored section in the back. As more white passengers filled the bus, the white section became full. The bus driver removed the section sign and told her and three other black passengers to give up their seats to the white folks.
The other three passengers reluctantly did so, but she didn’t move. She was done giving in, done giving up.
She was promptly arrested and it sparked the famous bus boycott that lasted 381 days, crippling the bus system financially and set the stage for an unknown minister and newcomer to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association - Martin Luther King Jr.
Her name? None other than Rosa Parks.
Image Credit: Forbes
"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me being old than. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
Rosa Parks’ anger fueled her actions, motivated her defiance, despite what everyone else was doing.
All of us feel anger and frustration in our lives but conventional wisdom says to focus on the good things in life, manage those feelings away. I think when you do that, you miss out on the powerful emotions that can bring us to greater heights.
In my own life, my biggest pivots and changes had been the result of deep frustrations and being fed up with something that I could no longer accept.
Angry about doing terribly in school - I studied for 3 straight months for 16 hours a day, getting straight As in my exams.
Fedup about not having the time to exercise - I started waking up at 4 a.m. more than 5 years ago.
Have you experienced the same thing?
I say don’t push them away, instead harness those powerful feelings.
In a series of different experiments, researchers at Texas A&M explored how anger influences goal achievement in over 1,000 participants and analyzing survey data from more than 1,400 respondents. Participants were induced to feel emotions like anger, amusement, desire, sadness, or neutrality, then given challenging tasks.
Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the findings were clear. In one experiment, participants viewed emotion-provoking images before solving word puzzles.
The results showed that anger consistently enhanced performance, leading to higher scores or faster response times in challenging tasks compared to a neutral state.
The dark side is strong (Darth Vader knew this 😅.) The key though? It’s not to be dwelling in negative emotions and anger all the time. Think 80/20. 80 percent in the light and 20 percent in the dark. Leverage your anger, but don’t let that be over 20% of your existence.
(Watch a short 4 min video where Tom Bilyeu explains this)
BASE PRINCIPLE
Use the darkside for good, but spend 80% of the time in the light and 20% of the time in the dark.
WHAT IF?
What if instead of suppressing your anger, you used it? What if you could achieve more than you ever thought you could? What if you could harness your pain and make it work for you?
“For a long time, there was this idea that being positive all the time was a life well lived, and that’s what we should strive for, but there’s more and more evidence that it’s actually a life that’s balanced by a mix of emotions that seems to be more satisfying and positive long-term.”
Four ideas to harness your anger and frustrations:
EMBRACE ANGER
When you feel angry, don’t push it away. Know that negative emotions are just emotions. We’ve evolved to experience it and it’s a natural part of life, in fact experts are saying that being always positive can harm us.
Tell yourself that anger is ok. The trick is to put it to use.
“Anger is meant to be acted upon, not acted out.”
MAP ANGER
After you’ve recognize that you are angry and you are letting those feelings wash over you, time to map it out. Where is all the anger coming from? It’s pointing to something, uncover what that is.
Ask yourself: What am I feeling? What is this really about? Are we being threatened? Is there an obstacle? Is it shame, humiliation? The better you can understand what’s at the root of it, the more you can use it to help you.
USE ANGER
Once you’ve identified and acknowledged what this is all about, set out to do something. Take action upon it.
One way is actually to use that anger for self-talk. It’s found that cursing and letting it out can actually help people go through pain and perform at higher levels (think endurance athletes).
The other way is a longer-term plan. If you’re angry because someone is treating you unfairly, like being passed over for promotion at work, what can you do to negate that unfair treatment? What can you do so that you’re guaranteed a promotion the next cycle?
Remember to use anger in a constructive and purposeful way (80/20 rule!)
MANUFACTURE ANGER
If you haven’t watched The Last Dance, the documentary about the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan, you are missing out on one of the most explosive and intimate look at the icon and the unforgettable era in basketball.
Jordan reveals how he imagined insults and blow minor incidents to extraordinary proportions in his mind to manufacture a will and laser like motivation to destroy his opponents.
(Watch a 30 second video about Jordan talking about misconceptions of his success. “Pain was my motivation”)
I’m not saying this is right or this is wrong, healthy or unhealthy… all I’m saying is that it works.
Use your anger, harness your frustrations for 20% of your focus and watch your motivation rise and your results soar.
See you next Sunday.
Live your legend 🤘🏽,
Howie Chan
Creator of Legend Letters
Sources:
Hopps, Jamie, The Untold Story of Rosa Parks, The Daily Jeffersonian, February 28, 2017 - LINK
Chugh, Dolly, The Truth About Rosa Parks And Why It Matters To Your Diversity Initiative, Forbes, February 4, 2019 - LINK
Bilyeu, Tom, How to Use Pain in Your Life to Your Advantage, YouTube, Impact Theory - LINK
Lench, Heather C., et. al., Anger Has Benefits for Attaining Goals, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023 - LINK
Bergland, Christopher, When Angry Self-Talk is Better Than Happy Self-Talk, Psychology Today, November 3, 2023 - LINK
Caron, Christina, Don’t Shut Down Your Anger. Channel It., The New York Times, November 2, 2023 - LINK
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