How to Deal With a Choleric at Home and at Work

How many times have you said "would you please calm down" in the middle of an argument? And how many times did it work?

That sentence is one of the most reliable ways to take a choleric up a notch. What they hear in it is not what you are saying: not "I am here with you" but "your reaction is over the top and I am judging you". Anyone who lives or works with an explosive person usually discovers that half the fires at home and in the office start not with the first spark but with the attempt to put it out.

What is actually going on inside a choleric

According to Hans Eysenck, who in the 1960s connected the old Hippocratic names to two measurable axes, the choleric is an unstable extravert. In his 1967 work he linked this to how quickly the body's alarm response fires in a person. Simplified: some nervous systems switch on sooner and more sharply than others, and the owner of such a system is not deciding whether to react. They are already reacting.

Anyone who is close to such a person knows the practical consequence. The onset is fierce but short. A choleric goes off within two sentences and twenty minutes later it is over for them, because the tension has drained away. The person standing opposite, though, walks away with a bruise they are still nursing three days later.

Most of the misunderstanding around the choleric character comes from here. A choleric does not consider their outburst a conflict but a way of getting the matter off the table; an unresolved thing burns them more than a sharp exchange of views. When they then behave the next day as though nothing had happened, it is not hypocrisy and not manipulation. For them nothing really did happen.

It is worth knowing how long that wave lasts. The body needs roughly twenty to thirty minutes to come back from an alarm, and during that time argument is beside the point, because attention is running in low-power mode. Anything clever you say in the first three minutes will not be remembered by the other side anyway. So it pays to move the content past that boundary and in the acute moment deal only with what happens next.

The second thing people around them often miss: under sustained pressure a choleric has a shorter fuse. A trifle they would let pass without blinking in a calm week sets them off, so an argument about a badly parked car may not be about the car at all but about three months of flat-out work. That excuses nothing, but it changes what the conversation should actually be about.

Try to recall this: of the outbursts that hit you in the past month, how many still mattered a week later? With a choleric the answer tends to be uncomfortably low, and that is exactly the clue for not giving their sharp sentences more weight than they carry.

What reliably makes it worse

Escalation is the first dead end. Answer a raised voice with a raised voice and the choleric switches into the mode they know best, and there they are at home; few people manage to outlast them on their own turf.

The second trap is the opposite. Giving way every time and in every direction looks like peace, but it does the opposite of what you expect. In time a choleric stops seeing a person who never says no as somebody worth negotiating with. Counterintuitive but repeatedly confirmed in practice: a choleric gives more room to somebody who stands their ground factually and without shouting than to somebody who always steps aside.

And then there are the phrasings that simply do not belong in a burning moment:

• "Calm down." It amplifies the feeling that the other side is not taking the issue seriously.
• Diagnosing their character mid-dispute along the lines of "you're just a choleric" turns the topic from the problem to the person.
• Dragging up old sins. A choleric is dealing with one thing; the moment you lay five in front of them, they start fighting all of them.
• Silence as an answer. They take it as contempt, not as a pause, unless you tell them when you are coming back.

What does work

Let the wave run its course. The first few minutes are physiology, not argument, so a factual answer will not land anyway. It is enough to stay put, not look away and not comment on the tone.

Then move to substance. A choleric responds to content and to specific numbers better than to a description of how you feel, at least in the first minute. Instead of "don't talk to me like that", try "the deadline is Friday, we're not going to finish the prep today, I need to decide what we drop". You have given them a task, and that is their natural environment.

State your limit calmly and once. "I'm not having this conversation like this, I'll come back in half an hour" is a sentence that works, provided you really do leave and really do come back in half an hour. A limit with no consequence is just a complaint.

Deal with unpleasant matters once it has passed. Ideally the next day and all at once, not in drips. And leave them the last word whenever you can. Presenting a choleric with a done deal means they will go against it on principle, even when they would otherwise have agreed.

Most of what you can do, in fact, fits into one rephrased sentence. The difference between the pairs below looks cosmetic and in practice it decides whether the conversation continues or turns into another round.

One more thing helps more than you would expect: knowing how you react yourself. A melancholic replays a sharp word for a week, a phlegmatic withdraws into silence and another choleric adds fuel. Our temperament test has 24 questions and takes about four minutes; recognizing your own typical reaction tends to be more useful than continuing to study the other person.

The choleric as boss, partner and parent

The boss who raises his voice in a meeting

Ryan leads a team of ten and on Tuesday morning he learns that a client has moved the deadline a week earlier. Within a minute he declares that this is no way to work and names the colleague who submitted her materials on Friday evening. Half the people in the meeting are studying the tabletop.

What works at such a moment: let him get to the end of the sentence and then ask about the next step. "What do we push back so it's done by Friday?" A question about a solution gives him direction and at the same time takes the subject off individuals. Save the feedback about tone for the afternoon and give it one to one, specifically and without generalizing: not "you're always shouting at us", but "when Jenny's name came up, she stopped asking questions, and we'll be missing that on Friday".

A choleric boss also usually cannot stand long introductions. Start with the conclusion, add two sentences of context and say what you want from him. How the four types settle into daily working life is covered in the piece on temperament at work.

The partner who blows up at dinner

At home the main problem is the asymmetric recovery. He is fine in twenty minutes, you are not. What works is an agreement made in a calm period, not in the middle of a dispute: whoever needs a pause says so out loud along with the time they will be back, and the other one respects it.

It also helps to name what happens to you after an argument, in one sentence and without reproach. "You're done straight away, I carry it until morning." A choleric often has no idea about this, because they judge by their own experience. More about which pairings grind where is in the article on temperaments in relationships.

The parent who snaps over homework

A choleric parent usually does not want to intimidate the child, they want it finished. But the child does not hear "let's get this done", the child hears the volume, and with a more sensitive child that is the end of the evening. It helps to agree in advance who supervises homework, and at the moment the voice starts rising, to step into another room for three minutes.

The second thing is the apology. A choleric tends to skip it, because in their head the matter is already closed. A short sentence like "I overdid it, you handled that math well" does more for the relationship than a promise that it will never happen again.

Where temperament ends and a problem begins

This is a boundary that is not negotiable. A fierce reaction, a loud delivery or impatience are descriptions of character. Humiliation in front of others, threats, broken objects, fear of coming home or of the Monday meeting belong in a completely different category and have no excuse in temperament.

The sentence "that's just how I am" describes a tendency, not a fate. The tendency to flare up is innate and can be worked with, but what a person does in those five seconds between the impulse and the word is their responsibility. How far character can be changed at all is covered in the separate piece on whether temperament can change.

If at home or at work you are around somebody whose reactions you use to gauge what you are allowed to say, this has stopped being two temperaments living side by side. You can tell a sharp person from a dangerous person by what happens when you say no to them. Where the answer is fear, the right move is to turn to a professional, not to look for a better communication technique. A detailed description of this character along with its strengths is in the portrait of the choleric.