Do you have a bad temper that you wish you didn’t have? Can you imagine the damage such a temper can do to you and others? It can leave lifelong scars that are often difficult to heal.
Bad temper is a persisting angry mood that any of us can have. It is merely a way to remove or displace your frustration, but only few think about what happens after that.
Nothing good really happens when you have a bad temper. Not only does the person at the receiving end suffer both mentally and physically, but you also make a dent in your persona.
A person with such an ill temper will affect others around him by making things unpleasant. It can cause stress, which leads to many health problems.
“We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority.” ~ Alfred Adler
Let me take you through a story, which is an excerpt from what I read somewhere that inspired today’s post. It’s about a little boy who had a bad temper and what it resulted in. So, here we go.
What a Bad Temper Can Lead to
Once there was an extremely bright and talented boy. But sadly, he possessed a bad habit; he had a very bad temper.
Whenever he was angry, he did and said things that often hurt people because he had little regard for those around him.
Though he would sometimes realize and accept his mistakes, but still he had very few friends to call his own.
This made him sad as he could not understand the reason why people stopped being his friend. He decided to seek his parents help
His parents also remained worried about his irritable nature and temper. Finally, one day the father had an idea.
He asked his son to try out a little exercise. He gave him a bag of nails and a hammer.
He told him that, “Whenever you lose your temper I want you to really let it out. Just take a nail and drive it into the old fence with the oak boards in the backyard. And hit the nail as hard as you can.”
It wasn’t easy for the son to drive the nails into the weathered oak boards in the old fence because they were tough as iron. More so, the hammer was pretty heavy.
However, by the end of the first day, the boy had driven 39 nails into the fence! Wasn’t he really one angry young man!
Gradually, within a few weeks, the number of nails on the fence dwindled down. Guess what? Yeah, keeping his bad temper in control was easier than driving nails into the fence!
Finally, the day came when there was no nail on the fence because the boy didn’t lose his temper. He felt proud of himself as he shared his achievements with his parents.
The boy’s father told him that, “as a sign of your success, you will now pull out one nail, and do that each day when you don’t lose your temper even once.”
It took a lot of efforts for the boy to control his temper, but one day he was able to report proudly to his father that all the nails were gone.
“Never do anything when you are in a temper, for you will do everything wrong.” ~ Baltasar Gracian
Lesson Learnt About Bad Temper
The father appreciated his son’s efforts as he walked along with him and took a look at the fence. But there’s a lesson that each one of us can learn from what the father told his son about bad temper.
The father said, “ You’ve done well, but I want you to notice the holes you have left in the fence. Whatever happens now, this fence will never remain the same.”
He carried on saying, “When we say or do hurtful things in a bad temper or anger, it produces the same kind of result. It leaves such holes and scars.”
“It doesn’t matter how many times you say you are sorry, or how many years pass, the scars remain. And a verbal wound is as bad as a physical one, often worse.”
“Similarly, people are more valuable than an old fence. They make us smile. Some even become our friends and support us, share our joys and sorrows.”
“And if these people trust us, then we need to treat them with love and respect. We need to prevent as many of those scars as we can. If we don’t then people will not like to be our friends.”
“Keep your temper. A decision made in anger is never sound.” ~ Ford Frick
Moral
Wasn’t that a beautiful story with a valuable lesson? Isn’t it a reminder most us need from time to time?
Everyone gets angry sometime or the other and some of us even have a bad temper, and that’s alright. But remember, once the scars are formed, they take a long time to heal.
Therefore, the real test is what we do with that temper and how we handle things.
Over to you –
Do you have a bad temper? If you do, how do you deal with your temper? Did you leave any scars behind? Share your comments below.
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