You need to control your emotions.

You know why?

Dealing with emotions in a mature way is part of being an adult.

Letting your emotions get the best of you and control you in an argument or conflict is the sign of a child.

It is the sign of someone who is not a master of themselves.

Let me encourage you: Don’t be like that.

Writer Robert Greene speaks to this in his book, The 48 Laws of Power (Amazon):

“To show your frustration is to show that you have lost your power to shape events; it is the helpless action of the child who resorts to a hysterical fit to get his way. The powerful never reveal this kind of weakness.”

Greene goes on in the same discussion to tell a fantastic story about Napoleon and his foreign minister, Charles Telleyrand.

Shortly after the Spanish wars, Napoleon made it back to Paris and confronted Telleyrand for conspiring against him.

In doing so, Napoleon let his emotions get the best of him and completely lost all his composure in front of Telleyrand, and the rest of the court.

Through it all, however, Telleyrand was an example of perfect propriety.

Green continues:

“For the first time people had seen the great emperor lose his cool under fire. A feeling spread that he was on the way down. As Talleyrand later said, “This is the beginning of the end.””

And it was. Napoleon would be defeated at Waterloo a mere 6 years later.

This is all so true.

And the older I get the more I see it.

People who lose their temper are simply childishly undisciplined with no self-control.

If possible, no animosity should be felt for anyone…. To speak angrily to a person, to show your hatred by what you say or by the way you look, is an unnecessary proceeding-dangerous, foolish, ridiculous, and vulgar. Anger or hatred should never be shown otherwise than in what you do; and feelings will be all the more effective in action in so far as you avoid the exhibition of them in any other way. It is only the cold-blooded animals whose bite is poisonous.”

-Arthur Schopenhaue