WRITTEN TRANSCRIPTION OF THE PODCAST:

Hello and welcome to a new episode of My Life and Other Funny Stories, the podcast. I am Dagmar Tomášková and I am an English tutor, and I created this podcast for intermediate and upper intermediate students of English who want to get better in their oral comprehension. I speak here about different topics and stories in slower English and with clear pronunciation.

 Find the transcription, vocabulary, and comprehension quiz in the notes of the podcast episode. And now let’s talk about today’s topic. Today’s topic is anger management. 

 Do you ever feel angry? Do you ever feel very furious, raging, fuming, livid, or infuriated? These are all synonyms for being angry, so do you? And how do you deal with it? I know some people are very calm. And never really get angry. Are you one of those people? Because I am not.

Last weekend I went on a walk with my dog, as I often do, I am walking through nature with lakes on the right side and fields and forests on the left side.

I love this route. And my dog, Ary as well. She also knows it very well. So if there are no people in sight, which means that there are no people around, I let her off of her leash. A leash is a rope you lead your dog on.

 I am walking and it is quite a nice walk, I must say, but then it starts raining and it is raining more and more, but I keep on walking. Suddenly I hear that I got a message on my phone. I take my phone out of my pocket. I look at it, and I want to respond. The rain is falling down on my phone, so I am quick, but when I look back up, I cannot see Ary.

I shout „Ary“ . She knows this calling. She knows she has to come when I call her, but she isn’t coming. I look around and I know very well what happened while I was looking down at my phone. She must have spotted a rabbit or a deer and ran away to the forest. She has white fur, so I can see her quite well when she’s close, but

I could see no white fur anywhere. This is not the first time it happened. She ran away maybe five times already. One would say that I would be able to know what to do. But apparently not. I stood there and screamed her name. The rain was getting stronger, and all I could hear was the sound of the water drops falling down on the trees.

 As I said, it was not the first  time she did this and she always came back, but every time I get so scared that this time she will not be able to find her way back. I start crying and I get very, very angry. Angry at myself. Angry at her and angry at the world. I am so angry that it is really hard to calm myself down and be rational about it

Now it was around 10 minutes that I was standing there screaming her name and getting more and more scared and furious. Finally, I could see her. She is coming back. She is walking very slowly towards me because she knows that she did something she wasn’t supposed to do, even though I am so relieved that she came back, it is very frustrating with dogs because they cannot understand my words when I am angry, so I just angrily put her on the leash and we head back home. On our way back I am giving her the silent treatment. The silent treatment is when you don’t speak to someone because you want to punish them, but I don’t think she really cared about the fact that I was not talking to her.

In the silence, I am thinking about anger. Why do we get angry and how can we deal with it? So I Googled it. I found out that anger tells us that we need to take action to put something right and it gives us strength and energy and motivates us to act. So it motivates us to do some action.  Interesting.

In one survey, they found out that 32% of people said they had a close friend or family member who had trouble controlling their anger, and 28% of people said that they are worried about how angry they sometimes feel. That is a lot of people. So I also found some tips to control your anger. Number one, count to 10. 1, 2, 3, and so on.

Could it help? Maybe. Number two, breathe slowly. Inhale. Exhale. Number three. Exercise can help with anger, huh? In that case, I don’t want to know what my anger would look like if I didn’t exercise almost every day. Number four, get creative and talk about how you feel. All right.  Good idea. Here we are. I got creative and talked about how I felt on this podcast.

Did it help? Maybe.

Do you get angry? How do you deal with it? I think that anger is one of the most difficult emotions. But what do you think?

  Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and as always, find the full transcription with the vocabulary list and comprehension quiz in the notes of the episode. If you tell one person, you know, about this podcast I would be very grateful. Give it five stars on any platform you are listening to this podcast because otherwise it is very hard for me to get any feedback and I spent a lot of time creating this podcast.

So thank you if you do that, and I will see you very soon. Bye-bye.