How To Deal With Hostile People Who Have Explosive Behavior

However, some behaviour is so extreme that it fails to fit one of your categories. The sort of hostile behaviour that takes your breath away is the adult tantrum.

These people behave just like a child. They produce a tantrum that is a fearsome attack filled with rage that seems almost out of control. Provocation or resistance, no matter whether it is intended or not, can create an even greater blast. In this situation things are thrown, blows are struck or unforgivable and never to be forgotten things are said.

When these people feel both frustrated and psychologically threatened, they suddenly produce an adult tantrum. Often, the victim of this explosion is unaware of having said or done anything wrong and is likely to feel surprised and bewildered at the situation which is suddenly become very noisy.

The adult tantrum is an older version of the early defensive tactics used by children to cope with fear help business and frustration The adult tantrum is a grown up version of the early defensive tactics used by children to cope with fear, helplessness and frustration. For a frightened child, a tantrum brings adults to their level. It gives real power to the powerless. The adult version is not much different.

These unstable people can be very effective at disrupting the normal behaviour of other people. As a result, they create the greatest reactions of anger and uncooperative behaviour. At worst, they may induce tantrums in other people. Most people are not motivated at all to understand this type of behaviour, mainly because of the emotional damage it causes.

Handling this sort of behaviour centres around helping them to regain self-control. During the tantrum they have lost total control. When they have lost control they cannot or will not hear you. Give them time to run out of steam. These people will sometimes cut their tantrum short when they realise what you're doing. Sometimes you have to interrupt them loudly. Some phrases that work are, "Stop, stop," "Wait a minute," Right, right," or "Yes, yes." The repetition plus volume is sometimes heard.

You have to show your intentions. Once you have made contact with them and achieved a level of attention, you can say, "I can see that this is very important to you. It is also very important to me as well. I want to discuss it with you, but not like this." You may have to repeat this "threat reducing" phrase more than once to have an effect.

If these techniques don't work, you need to get yourself some breathing space. One way of doing it is to say, "Let's go and have a coffee." This will buy some time for both of you to compose yourselves and allows the hostile person to regain self-control. It will also break up the immediate interaction and allow a fresh start. The physical act of moving to a different place will achieve a cooling down effect. Once you are there, you can continue the discussion in a less heated fashion.

Peter Mitchell is a business consultant who has helped many businesses to lift their labor productivity in the workplace at little or low cost. His practical guide The Key To Productivity should be on every manager's desk and used to install your productivity improvement program. To find out more go to www.thekeytoproductivity.com.