You have certainly experienced, or at least witnessed, a scene like this: In a well-lit boardroom, a boss abruptly slams a thick weekly report onto the table, points at an unfortunate manager, and barks: “You can’t even get this basic task right?! What exactly is the company paying you for!” Or at home: tutoring a child’s homework. After explaining basic addition and subtraction three times without success, the parent suddenly erupts like an active volcano, reducing the child to tears.
The person losing their temper always has ten thousand excuses: the employees are inept, the child is slow, the client is too demanding. “They forced me into it; I usually have a great temper.”
Is that really the case? Through the lenses of Kendo and business decision-making, I want to present you with a brutal truth:
Anger is usually just a fig leaf you use to cover up extreme panic. The louder you roar, the more others can smell the profound frailty at your core.
The System Crash Indicator: 居着き (Itsuki)
In 2017, a dashcam video lasting only a few minutes went viral. The protagonist was Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber—then at its absolute zenith—and the tyrannical CEO of the world’s highest-valued unicorn.
At the time, he was sitting in the back seat of an Uber Black. Frustrated by the issue of fare cuts, the driver couldn’t help but complain to him. As a result, the head of a multi-billion-dollar empire suddenly jumped up like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, pointed at the driver’s face, and lashed out: “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit! They blame everything in their life on somebody else!”
The public saw the “arrogance” of an aloof CEO. But to an insider, it revealed extreme “weakness.”
During that period, Uber was navigating an unprecedented disaster. Hundreds of thousands of users launched the “#DeleteUber” campaign online, uninstalling the app overnight; a former female engineer’s 3,000-word essay completely exposed the highly toxic internal culture that enabled sexual harassment; an autonomous driving trade-secret theft case was under investigation; executives were fleeing like refugees.
That $70 billion behemoth was simultaneously disintegrating from within in every direction. Kalanick could not process this massive weight crushing down from all sides. He felt everything spinning out of control, and he was terrified.
So, faced with a complaint from a grassroots ride-hailing driver, he completely broke down. Instead of listening like a mature entrepreneur, he reverted to base instinct: using extreme aggression to mask a state of absolute mental gridlock.
In Kendo, this fatal flaw is known as 居着き (Itsuki, mental stagnation).
Literally, it means “getting stuck in place.” It does not mean your body is physically restrained by ropes; it means your “mind” has crashed. Much like an old computer encountering a complex task it cannot process, displaying that infinitely spinning, unresponsive hourglass on the screen.
What Looks Like Ferocity is Pure Vulnerability
In a live Kendo match, if a competitor’s psychological defenses are crushed and their mind falls into an “Itsuki” (crashed) state, they usually do not turn and run. Instead, they exhibit hyper-aroused aggression.
You will see them with bloodshot eyes, gripping the bamboo sword tightly, swinging harder than anyone else, letting out deafening roars, and blindly launching round after round of illogical, furious attacks. Outsiders think: “Wow, this person is so fierce, so full of momentum!”
But a true master only finds them pathetic. A master sees through it at a glance: all the aggressive posturing and throat-tearing shouts serve only one functional purpose—they are generating massive noise to conceal the extreme internal panic of “I’m doomed and I don’t know what to do.”
Because they are at a loss, they can only swing wildly. Because they have lost control, they can only raise their volume.
Map this scenario onto your office or your home. Isn’t it strikingly similar?
Is the boss throwing folders in the boardroom really doing so because a subordinate’s mistake is objectively unforgivable? No. It is because his cash flow is drying up, or an investor’s performance benchmark is about to expire. He doesn’t know how to solve this massive systemic problem, so he tries to claw back a pathetic scrap of control by “destroying a manager who messed up a weekly report.”
Is the parent breaking down over tutoring doing so because the child is truly hopeless? No. It is because your own work anxiety, your sense of losing control over the future, and the pressure of your mortgage have been ignited in this exact moment by a math problem. Unable to process the crushing weight of life, you simply unleash your firepower onto the weakest target available.
In the workplace and in life, every roaring emotional outburst—stripped of the grand facade of “I’m just holding people to high standards”—shares the exact same baseline: your mind has crashed.
The more you fear losing control, the more you raise your volume; the more incapable you are of processing complex, multi-dimensional stress, the more instinctively you raise the shield of “anger.”
If You Can’t Break “Itsuki”, You Can’t Take the Helm
Whether you are the CEO of a hundred-billion-dollar unicorn, a department head managing three people, or the breadwinner of a small family, the rule is ironclad.
Once the mind falls into “Itsuki,” it triggers an irreversible perceptual degradation. It instantly strips away your ability to view the chessboard from a high altitude, degenerating you into a street thug throwing blind haymakers with your eyes closed.
At this point, all your execution becomes distorted. You begin to micromanage, needing to monitor everything yourself, reducing top-tier talent into mindless execution machines; You become deaf to dissenting opinions, using table-pounding to suppress any rational discussion.
Because Kalanick was unable to break his own “crashed” state, he was ultimately, ruthlessly ousted by the very board of directors he helped create. It was an exceptionally expensive lesson.
Next time you are in the office, at the conference table, or by the dinner table, and you feel the urge to explode—the urge to use your loudest voice to prove you are absolutely right. Try shutting your mouth and taking a one-second deep breath. Ask yourself silently:
“What specific powerlessness is my current bravado actually trying to hide?”
Acknowledging your own weakness is the prerequisite to regaining control of the broader system. In this truly brutal hunting ground, if “losing your temper” and “roaring” are your only remaining weapons, your hand has long been exposed. What about you? When the next massive storm of lost control hits, will you continue to hold up that flimsy paper mask?
One actionable exercise for this week: The next time you feel the urge to lose your temper and raise your voice in the office, take a deep breath first and ask yourself silently: “What specific powerlessness is my current bravado trying to hide?”
