Unfortunately, there are some people that seem to have two emotions. Friendly and normal, and fired up and emotional.
It’s unfortunate because all of these emotions that I just listed can be positive, but the kind of people who have these two drastic emotions seem to not display that latter very well. Being fired up can be a great thing. Ever see a football or basketball coach who looks like he’s going to burst out ketchup he’s so red? Sometimes those are the best kind of coaches.
People with this kind of personality I think can be some of the best kind of people. People who really exhort other people to do better than they thought they could. It’s often perceived as rudeness or lack of caring, but sometimes it’s the biggest kind of caring because they push people so hard past what the limits they thought were possible were. What’s crazy about these people though, is they’re oftentimes the same person who goes back home and is the calmest, coolest dad ever. His relationship with his wife and kids is completely different from the players he’s coaching.
So that’s a good example of this personality playing out. The problem is, more often than not, this fired up and emotional energy comes from a place of anger and wanting to misplace blame. They want someone to pay for why they feel bad, and they’ll often take that out on anyone they can.
As an account manager, I often am able to avoid these conversations because our support team bears the brunt of it, but today, as I was trying to mitigate a conversation between an upset customer and one of the most hard-working people I’ve ever met who works on our support team, I struggled with fumes of anger.
This person was an example of what I mention here. Someone who seems to have two personalities. One that is probably a decent normal human being, and the other that completely overflows with fire and emotion. It was hard being part of this conversation knowing that what this person was saying was absolutely not how we saw things on our side but not being able to communicate that due to the interrupting nature of this person.
No matter how many times we communicate that we’re sorry and there was a miscommunication and how can we help, there wasn’t one bit of grace from the other side. Only a lack of understanding and a desire to bully someone into feeling bad. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter who was in the wrong or right, all that mattered to this person was that they gt upset at someone because they were in a high-stress situation.
There’s no real action item from these thoughts, but I’m always fascinated as I learn more about humans and the way different ones are wired.
Some you can barely wait to spend an evening with once a week, and others, you realize that they were the reason the “end call” button was created.