How aggressive are you?

This blog is inspired by an event that happened during a review meeting that I was a part of at office. The Managing Director of the company was very vociferously reprimanding the sales team (read: breathing fire and spitting venom) for the decline in sales and fall in market share during the just ended quarter. The Operations director explained to her that he had appointed a new Sales head to improve the situation, which was met with another litre of venom and a comment “How can you give that responsibility to him? He is not aggressive enough!” 

‘Not aggressive enough’. The word Aggression was coined somewhere in the early 17^th century from the Latin word Aggressio which in turn lends its origin to the word Aggredi which means ‘to attack’. That way, English is a very tolerant language with words adapted from various other languages like Ginger from the old French Gingivre, Juggernaut from the Hindi Jagannath, Anaconda from the Sinhalese Henakandaya or Sugar from the Arabic Sukkar.  Anyways, though the word aggression was initially used to represent an overt behaviour with intent to inflict harm or unpleasantness upon another, these days it is used indiscriminately irrespective of context.

‘Polish minister says Russia preparing aggression against NATO’.

‘Liverpool manager Klopp wants a new type of aggression in the Merseyside derby’.

‘The mother bison aggressively defended her calves from a grizzly’.

‘The new CEO of ABC Pvt Ltd is not aggressive enough to push through the merger with XYZ Ltd.’

Let us try and understand the above four quoted sentences. The first one talks about an outright attack or physical aggression and takes the form of the primary definition of the word. The second sentence talks about a goal oriented or instrumental aggression. The football team’s manager wants the team to perform better and hence his need for his players to be more efficient on the field. The third sentence refers to a defensive behaviour on the part of the mother bison triggered by maternal instincts which doesn’t exactly fall within the definition of aggression. If it did, then all mothers would be called aggressors and that would sound really weird. The fourth sentence shouldn’t have been in this discussion at all because the word assertive should replace aggressive in the said sentence. The poor tolerant English language!

Psychologists say that aggression can be physical or mental. They also say that aggression can be goal oriented or reactive/impulsive, though I personally don’t agree to the latter. This is simply because I consider aggression to be a predominantly negative behaviour and a far cry from creative tendencies of a person. Aggression usually sprouts out from a feeling of insecurity, despair, anger or insufficiency. Curiously, the human mind tends to send signals to the sensory organs that reflect the exact opposite of how we feel. If we feel insecure, we behave aggressive and controlling and when we feel confident, we behave calm and composed. That is why wise people sometimes ask us to stop thinking and start feeling so that we behave right in circumstances and take apt decisions.

Therefore, aggressive tendencies need to be curbed and its alter ego assertiveness nurtured.

I summarize by saying aggression is not all about shouting at the top of your voice at everybody in the room, it is about taking tough decisions at the right time in a calm and composed manner!