When you are sure of yourself, you feel less angry at others

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner (Q): Sir, there are certain reactions within that I can see but cannot control. For example, whenever my wife speaks anything about business, I just go mad. I’ve tried to look at it also and at times, I see that and I relate that to the feeling that she thinks I am incompetent but somehow I am not able to help it. That reaction is so instant that the moment she says something about business and I just shout, I just scream.

Acharya Prashant (AP): When you feel more sure of yourself, then this tendency will reduce.

If I really really know that I am beautiful, you cannot make me feel ugly but I must then be in total sureness. I cannot be in total sureness if I am worrying a lot about my business, if it means a lot to me, because in worrying a lot about the state of my business, I am actually worrying a lot about my capacity to handle my business, which means I am not very sure of my own capacity to live with the business, to manage it, to come out unharmed, untouched by it.

I take business now as a challenge, as something that can really overpower me or dominate me. It now becomes something very meaningful. Now, I have given it a place that it does not deserve. Now, I have made it some kind of an equivalent of Truth and when something becomes an equivalent of Truth, you become too small in front of it.

That is called living in an inferiority complex.

When you are feeling inferior, then even an innocuous touch can hurt you. The other one had no intention to rub you the wrong way but you find that you have been bruised for no reason. It has nothing to do with the intention of the other person. It has much more to do with your own self-concept.

At the risk of sounding impractical, let me suggest that one must treat all business with a little contempt. All business! Even the business of life and death. When you can treat all business with a little contempt, then the business is not bigger than you, then the business is not your God or Truth. Now you are bigger, and bigger you indeed are.