An ancient sage once said, “A soft answer turns away anger.

When your conversation partner is getting angry, the single best thing you can do in most circumstances is to stop whatever else you're doing and listen. It's very difficult to remain angry with someone who is patiently and earnestly listening, and if you break the cycle of frustrating dialogue early by switching to listening and learning, you can halt a great deal of your partner's mounting anger before it starts.

When your conversation partner is getting angry, the single best thing you can do in most circumstances is to stop whatever else you're doing and listen. It's very difficult to remain angry with someone who is patiently and earnestly listening, and if you break the cycle of frustrating dialogue early by switching to listening and learning, you can halt a great deal of your partner's mounting anger before it starts.

In processing anger toward someone with whom you have a relationship, two questions are paramount: 1. Is my response positive — does it have the potential for dealing with the wrong and healing the relationship? 2. Is my response loving — is it designed for the benefit of the person at whom I am angry?

If you do not know how to take care of yourself, and the violence in you, then you will not be able to take care of others. You must have love and patience before you can truly listen to your partner or child. If you are irritated you cannot listen. You have to know how to breath mindfully, embrace your irritation and transform it. Offer ONLY understand and compassion to your partner or child - This is the true practice of love.

A soft answer turns away anger.

If a man’s heart is rankling with discord and ill feeling toward you, you can’t win him to your way of thinking with all the logic in Christendom. Scolding parents and domineering bosses and husbands and nagging wives ought to realize that people don’t want to change their minds. They can’t be forced or driven to agree with you or me. But they may possibly be led to, if we are gentle and friendly, ever so gentle and ever so friendly.

STATE model to communicate without provoking anger or defensiveness: 1. Share your facts — Facts are less controversial, more persuasive, and less insulting than conclusions, so lead with them first. 2. Tell your story — Explain the situation from your point of view, taking care to avoid insulting or judging, which makes the other person feel less safe. 3. Ask for others’ paths — Ask for the other person’s side of the situation, what they intended, and what they want. 4. Talk tentatively — Avoid conclusions, judgments, and ultimatums. 5. Encourage testing — Make suggestions, ask for input, and discuss until you reach a productive and mutually satisfactory course of action.

Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and failure to listen, I am committed to cultivating loving speech and compassionate listening to relieve suffering and promote reconciliation and peace in myself and among other people, ethnic and religious groups, and nations. Knowing that words can create happiness or suffering, I am committed to speaking truthfully using words that inspire confidence, joy, and hope. I am determined not to speak when anger manifests in me. I will practice mindful breathing and walking to recognize and look deeply into my anger. I know that the roots of anger can be found in my wrong perceptions and lack of understanding of the suffering in myself and the other person. I will speak and listen in such a way as to help myself and the other person to transform suffering and see the way out of difficult situations. I am determined not to spread news that I do not know to be certain and not to utter words that can cause division or discord. I will practice diligently with joy and skillfulness so as to nourish my capacity for understanding, love, and inclusiveness, gradually transforming the anger, violence, and fear that lie deep in my consciousness.

James offers a different way: Hush up, listen carefully, ask questions, don’t jump to conclusions, and put a lid on your anger so you don’t ruin the moment and, perhaps, the relationship.

So be authentic when you feel angry toward your lover or your beloved. Be authentic while you are in anger, and then with no repression, when the moment of love will come, when the mind will move to the other extreme, you will have a spontaneous flow. So with mind, take fighting as part of it. It is the very dynamism of the mind to work in polar opposites. So be authentic in your anger, be authentic in your fight; then you will be authentic in your love also.

If your wife gets upset with you, wait a while and then say to her, “No matter what you say to me and no matter how upset you get with me, I miss you when you are not around!” Tell your wife that you don’t like being separated from her. Just go ahead and say this ‘Guru Mantra’ (words that give results).

Be calm in arguing: for fierceness makes
Error a fault, and truth discourtesy.
Why should I feel another man's mistakes
More, than his sickness or poverty?
In love I should: but anger is not love,
Nor wisdom neither: therefore gently move.

Never let anger, or outrage, or fear affect you. That is easy advice to give, but hard to follow. Men will bait you, they will laugh at you, they will jeer. But it is just noise, Kiall. They will hurt the people you love. They will do anything to make you angry or emotional. But the only way you can make them suffer is to win. And to do that you must remain cool.