"BPM"s Can Prevent Road Rage
While driving on the freeway during heavy traffic, a new model pickup came past me driving on the right shoulder of the freeway. The driver pulled in my lane immediately in front of me. I had to hit my brakes to avoid a collision. My first impulse was to blast my horn at him and
race ahead of him and cut him off, while giving him some choice vocabulary words I had saved for just such a time as this. Then it hit me! Why have two people on the road acting like idiots! One is enough!
At that moment my BPM, or Best Possible Motive was born. Once I made the decision to
not retaliate, I said, “Wait a minute, I know nothing about this man.” Then I thought, “He
might be the father of a young girl who was injured on the school playground and he is trying to get to her. Or maybe he is trying to get his wife to the hospital before her baby is born. Or maybe his daughter has appendicitis and must get to the hospital immediately.” Considering those possible motives, I didn’t want revenge. I was calmed and that prevented me from retaliating in anger and possibly creating a road rage incident.
It seems that when someone does something that offends us, we automatically assign the
worst possible motive and want to give him a piece of our minds or punch him. By assigning
the Best Possible Motive we can think of, we take a lot of stress away from ourselves,
preventing our getting angry and avoiding our making a bad situation worse. It is actually
freeing us from being controlled by our anger.
Best Possible Motives can be used whenever someone does something that irritates or seem stupid to us. For example: there are some parents who use anger to control their children. This works temporarily but then it becomes a lose/lose situation.
Let’s look at how impulsive anger works in a parent/child relationship. (For this example the child is a boy 7 years old.)
Boy: Tearing out pages of his sister’s coloring book to make paper airplanes.
Parent: “STOP THAT! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? CANT YOU SEE YOU ARE
DESTROYING HER COLORING BOOK? DON’T YOU EVER USE YOUR HEAD?"
Result: (parent’s point of view) Boy stops. It worked. Because it worked the parent will continue to use it.
Result: (boy’s perspective) “My parents hate me. I don’t see what the problem is. She never uses the coloring book any more. Why am I always the one who gets yelled at?” Without expressing it to anyone, the boy starts questioning his self worth and his self esteem.
NOTE - Each time the parent uses anger and yelling to stop the child’s bad action, it must be louder and angrier the next time, to get the same results because the boy learns to ignore the parent. By teenage years the boy has learned to yell back and power struggles become common.
Power struggles and arguments with kids are lose/lose situations. Even if the parent wins the argument, he or she loses much more in terms of having a positive relationship and guiding the child’s future decisions. In the example above, the boy loses self esteem.
When the boy’s self-worth is attacked over and over he feels like he hasn’t anything to lose
so he begins to fight back and a disagreeable teenager is born. Also some classic phrases are born such as, “As long as you live in this house, you’ll do what I say!”
Where could this parent have used a BPM and prevented anger?
The parent could have chosen a BPM instead of yelling at the boy when he was tearing out the pages of the coloring book. The parent could have assumed by the boy’s actions, this BPM: “He didn’t know that he shouldn’t tear the book apart”. Then the parent could have used the boy’s bad action as a teaching moment, teaching a more appropriate action instead of correcting the boy by using anger and yelling at him for his bad action. By assigning the Best Possible Motive the parent corrects the bad action while creating a win/win situation for both of them.
If you find yourself wanting to yell at your child to correct a bad behavior, stop and try
calmly using a BPM. You will be pleased with the results for you and your child.
Since that incident with the driver of the pickup on the freeway, I began to share the idea of
using BPMs. Many of the people I talked to have came to me later and said, “Thank you, for
telling me about BPMs. I tried it and it works. I didn’t get upset. It was fun.”
Because of this positive feedback, I decided to share the idea of using BPMs with each of you in the hopes that you will find the idea helpful when you feel like getting angry at someone. Perhaps you can change some angry feelings for some more pleasant ones. Possibly, instead of having a bad day, you can have a good day.
