Watch this video [2:43] to learn what’s happening on the inside with an angry student. Polly’s insights and practical techniques have changed teachers’ lives.

Underneath anger, we’ve got these emotions: hurt, want, fear, and care. Anger drives a lot of behavior.

If you think about the last time you were angry – was it about something that hurt you? Something that you wanted? That you feared you were not going to get? Something you wanted to happen? Or fear of something happening?

The only reason we get angry is because we care. And so do children. It is impossible to experience emotional anger if you don’t care. As soon as a child says to me, “I don’t care,” it sets off a red flag that they really do care about something. They just don’t know how to get it out and deal with it.

But once you can get your head around the actual causal factor for anger, once you can say, “It’s because I want something and it really hurts my feelings that that’s not happening,” you may now have better tools to make it happen.

But if you stay angry, then you have that wall. This happens lots of times with all of us in different situations. Someone tells us we have to do something differently and we get angry. And then we just stay there in the anger, instead of saying to ourselves, “In order to get that want met, what’s a technique that I can use?

That’s a skill that we have to teach.

Click on my video above for more.