Energy > anger

In March of 1930, a 60-year-old man in India began a peaceful protest by walking toward the coast. It would be a journey of roughly 240 miles over 24 days, in protest of British colonial rule that had gone too far.

At that point, India had lived under British control for nearly 200 years. One of the most humiliating laws imposed by the British was the salt tax. Salt was something essential and freely available to Indians for generations. The poorest depended on it, and yet Indians were forbidden from collecting their own salt. They were forced to buy it from the British government, taxed.

So Mahatma Gandhi chose salt as his line in the sand. He decided to walk the 240 miles to the coast to protest. Each evening of the walk, crowds would gather and he spoke to them with calm precision, void of fury. This was the heart of his strategy. He refused anger as fuel.

“I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson: to conserve my anger.” - Gandhi

When he finally reached the sea in April of 1930, Gandhi bent down to pick up a small lump of salty mud, and broke the law.

That was the ignition for a push for independence, but it also symbolized that power does not require rage and dignity can still be disruptive. His calm mobilized the masses.

What followed was extraordinary. Across India, salt laws were broken peacefully. Tens of thousands willingly accepted arrest. Eventually more than 60,000 people were imprisoned, including Gandhi himself, who was arrested in May of 1930, nearly a month after the march ended.

The British expected his arrest to spark outrage. But the discipline of the masses held. Protests continued and, at one demonstration at a salt factory, unarmed protestors marched toward armed police. The British police chose violence, but the protestors didn’t strike back or raise their fists. As batons fell and bodies collapsed, the next line stepped forward.

A journalist on the scene documented it all and the story travelled around the world. Public opinion about British rule shifted quickly and the authority of the British Empire began to fracture.

The Salt March marked the moment India realized independence would not be granted through negotiation alone, but built through steady, collective, disciplined resistance.

It would take another 17 years, but in 1947 India finally gained independence from British rule.

“I’m glad I lost my temper” - no one.

The modern world feels faster, louder and more reactive than ever. We navigate high stress, constant urgency, and an endless stream of rage bait designed to provoke us. It’s understandable that losing our temper often feels justified. Sometimes it even feels appropriate!

But taking a leaf out of Gandhi’s book, perhaps there is an opportunity to feel the pain without letting it choose our behaviour.

In other words, we can get energized, but we don’t need to get angry.

Because while anger feels powerful, it’s unreliable. It burns hot and spreads fast. It might create motion, but rarely chooses direction, which often leaves damage that we never intended. We’re rarely happy that we lost our cool.

Energy without anger.

We’re not trying to mute the emotion, but rather seek to upgrade it. Here are some ways to navigate chaos while still staying grounded.

1. Pause. Before responding, whether it’s online or in real life, we should try to pause long enough to ask ourselves what the real outcome we actually want is. It’s true for business and also in life. We get that email and want to snap back because anger usually looks for a release. However, when we’re resilient, we look for what we want to create. There’s a huge difference here, and one that generates real power.

2. Heat becomes purpose. Channeling angry energy is a powerful tool, if we can turn it into something useful. The expression of that energy can be pushed into volunteering instead of venting, or supporting instead of shouting. Ultimately it’s a question of whether we want to build something or burn something. Building is better.

3. Be careful of the crowd. Crowds amplify emotion, especially fear and rage. Gandhi deliberately separated himself from mob energy by choosing to walk slowly instead of rushing, or speaking softly while others yelled. It’s so easy these days to be swept up in the gossip or even the collective blame game, but let’s take a second to ask whether our reaction is coming from within or is it a product of the atmosphere around us? Resilience resists emotional contagion.

4. The long game. Admittedly, this is probably the hardest these days, as the world around us is designed for instant gratification. Gandhi’s march took weeks, but these days we want immediate results. It’s valuable to ask whether our actions will help in a week from now, or perhaps even a year. People will wonder whether we can wait that long, but real (and prolonged) change doesn’t tend to happen instantly.

5. Protect inner authority. The moment someone can make us explode on demand, they control us. Gandhi’s calm was a refusal to let the oppressor dictate his inner state. It was the same with Viktor Frankl in the horrors of Auschwitz, and it’s the same in the modern day boardrooms. If we can manage to control our emotions, that control is perhaps the deepest form of protest there is.

The world needs always needs our resilience. Resilience that creates, sustains and doesn’t allow us to eat ourselves alive. It’s ok to feel the pain around us, but we want to resist letting it consume us enough to dictate our behaviour.

History is so often riddled with mess, brutality, and pain. And so is life. But resilience is never really about clean endings like we see in the movies. Instead, it’s about choosing who we are inside that mess and finding a way to stay composed and keep moving forward.

Until next time friends, stay resilient.

Carré at Resilient Minds

PS - In today’s workplace, pressure seems to be creating stress and emotions that often flows undetected. This is exactly the work I do with leaders and teams, helping people meet challenge with clarity, composure, and purpose rather than reaction. Hit reply if you’d like to know more.