The situation
A colleague keeps talking over me in meetings and brushing off my ideas in front of the team. I’m furious, and I want to call it out in front of everyone at tomorrow’s meeting.
Your situation, reframed
AI interpretationBeing talked over again and again in front of your team is genuinely galling, and it is understandable that part of you wants the satisfaction of putting them in their place in public. The question is not whether you were slighted, but what you want to happen next — and whether acting in the heat of tomorrow’s meeting will get you there. Your anger is real information, but it is a poor adviser.
The dichotomy of control
AI interpretationYours to act on
- Whether you respond tomorrow or after a day’s reflection
- How you make your point in meetings, calmly and clearly
- Whether you raise it privately with your colleague or your manager first
- The judgement you form about your colleague’s motives
Not yours
- How your colleague behaves in meetings
- How the rest of the team saw it at the time
- Your colleague’s character and motives
- Whether everyone agrees with your version of events
The Stoics said
Verbatim from the source · full citationsEpictetus, Enchiridion 20
Remember that it is not he who reviles you or strikes you, who insults you, but it is your opinion about these things as being insulting. When then a man irritates you, you must know that it is your own opinion which has irritated you. Therefore especially try not to be carried away by the appearance. For if you once gain time and delay, you will more easily master yourself.
Seneca, On Anger 3.12
… No one will postpone his anger: yet delay is the best remedy for it, because it allows its first glow to subside, and gives time for the cloud which darkens the mind either to disperse or at any rate to become less dense. Of these wrongs which drive you frantic, some will grow lighter after an interval, not of a day, but even of an hour: some will vanish altogether. Even if you gain nothing by your adjournment, still what you do after it will appear to be the result of mature deliberation, not of anger. If you want to find out the truth about anything, commit the task to time: nothing can be accurately discerned at a time of disturbance. …
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. …
What this means here
AI interpretationEpictetus, Enchiridion 20
Epictetus locates the injury not in the act itself but in the judgement you add to it. This does not mean your colleague behaved well. It means the part that is burning right now — the sense of being insulted and diminished — is something your own mind is doing, and so something you can work on. The final sentence offers the method: buy yourself time, and self-mastery becomes easier.
Seneca, On Anger 3.12
Seneca treats delay as the most reliable cure for anger, and the reasoning suits office life well. A day’s wait costs you almost nothing, and whatever you do afterwards will look, and be, considered rather than reactive. The full passage also asks you to weigh the other person’s intention and circumstances, and to remember the times you have done something similar yourself.
Translation note: The story of Plato and his slave reflects the slave-owning society Seneca lived in; he tells it to show that even someone with authority should not act while angry.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1
This is a morning exercise: before the day begins, expect to meet difficult people, the arrogant and the deceitful among them. The point is not to think the worst of your colleagues but to stop being ambushed by them; behaviour you have already anticipated loses much of its power to knock you off balance. Marcus then widens the view: people are made to cooperate, and he counts staying vexed and turning away from someone as a way of working against each other. That does not mean saying nothing; it means not letting the feud become the point.
Translation note: Thyself is simply yourself; a busybody is a meddler, and unsocial describes someone who will not play their part alongside others.
Letting the matter drop is not what these passages ask. They ask you to separate two things: the facts (your ideas were brushed aside in front of others) and the fury (the judgement that you have been humiliated and must strike back now). The facts deserve a clear, calm response. The fury is better left to cool overnight, because decisions made in anger tend to cost the angry person most, especially in front of a team.
One action for today
AI interpretationDelay before responding in anger
Don’t confront them in tomorrow’s meeting. If you are talked over, it is enough to say calmly that you would like to finish your point. Tonight, write down exactly what has happened and what you wanted to say, then wait a full day. If it still matters, ask your colleague for a private conversation and bring two or three specific examples rather than an accusation. If the pattern continues after that, raise it with your manager.
A line to carry
“Anger often comes to us, but we often go to it.”
— Seneca, On Anger 3.12