Rice Fractured

Beset by Frustration
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 979-8-31783378-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 220 Seiten

Reihe: Fractured

Fractured explores one of the most common-and most misunderstood-human experiences: frustration. Drawing on decades of law enforcement, leadership, and behavioral insight, Kevin Rice examines how unmanaged frustration quietly builds over time and how, left unaddressed, it can cause good people to make poor decisions in both their personal and professional lives. Rather than treating frustration as a weakness or flaw, Fractured reframes it as a signal-an early warning system that something meaningful is out of alignment. Through real-world examples from high-stress professions and everyday life, Rice shows how frustration develops, why it escalates, and how it can be redirected before it leads to burnout, conflict, or regret. At the heart of the book is the FRACTURE Method, a practical, easy-to-apply framework designed to help readers pause, reflect, and respond intentionally instead of reacting emotionally. From workplace stress and relationship tension to daily irritations like traffic and unmet expectations, Fractured provides tools to regain control, build emotional resilience, and make better decisions under pressure. This book is for anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed, stuck, or on the edge-and wants a healthier way forward.

Kevin Rice is a veteran municipal and federal law enforcement officer whose career spans decades of protective operations, behavioral threat assessment, and security leadership. A former Secret Service special agent, police officer, security director, and consultant, Kevin has built his career around one central mission: protecting people-not just physically, but emotionally and psychologically as well. Describing himself as a 'protector by trade, educator at heart,' Kevin specializes in workplace violence prevention, emotional regulation, and decision-making under stress. Drawing from thousands of real-world encounters and more than a decade of focused research into human behavior, he has become a respected instructor and keynote speaker, teaching professionals how frustration, expectation, and perceived loss of control shape human behavior in high-pressure environments. Kevin brings the FRACTURE Method to his readers, a practical framework designed to help individuals shift from reactive frustration to intentional resilience. His work bridges the worlds of public safety, psychology, leadership, and personal development-making complex emotional concepts accessible and actionable for everyday life. A graduate of the University of Central Florida, Troy University, and Northwestern University's School of Police Staff and Command, Kevin continues to teach, consult, and speak nationally. He lives in Virginia with his wife, where he remains committed to helping individuals and organizations build healthier workplaces, stronger relationships, and safer communities. Fractured represents the culmination of a lifetime spent studying people in their most difficult moments-and offers readers practical tools to transform frustration from a breaking point into a breakthrough.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rice, Kevin

Leseproben

Introduction

Picture that you are driving alone in your car, listening to your favorite podcast. You are healthy, you make a decent living, and by all accounts you consider yourself fortunate. You have close friends, and a loving family. You are ten minutes away from home where your spouse has ordered takeout food from your favorite restaurant, and it is sitting on the dining room table waiting for you.

Life is good.

You approach a large intersection, and you make your way into the left turn lane. You are quite familiar with this intersection because you navigate this road every day going to your kid’s school, your workplace, and to your favorite grocery store. You love where you live, but this particular intersection is the bane of your otherwise idyllic existence. That’s because you know the green arrow for the left turn lane is notoriously short in duration, resulting in you having to wait through multiple light cycles to make it home. But on this day, you smile because you have lucked out, you are the third car in the left turn lane. You take some satisfaction that you will defeat the traffic gods for once. In fact, you look at the car in front of you and you see the driver is a young twenty-something driving a 1970s muscle car, yellow with black stripes. The car is bellowing blue-black smoke, and its dual mufflers are only partially successful in suppressing the noise emanating from the large V8 engine under the hood.

In your mind, you envision that the young driver in front of you will accelerate quickly off the line, probably burning rubber as he lurches away from the intersection. You take some delight in the fact that you will be home in mere seconds.

The red arrow turns green, and the first car in line speeds off and leads the way for the rest of the cars behind them. However, the second car at this traffic light, the young adult with the hot rod, who should be in a hurry, does not follow suit. You can see that the twenty-year-old driver in the fifty-year-old car is currently using twenty-first century technology. The hot rod driver is busy looking at his phone and appears to be texting. You give him a little bit of grace because you are not a road rager and you strive to follow the unwritten rules of the social contract. After what seems like an eternity, but in fact is only mere seconds, you give a short toot of your horn to alert the driver about the current color status of that mercurial arrow.

At the sound of your horn, the driver in front of you appears startled and you see him look up from his phone, he immediately scans his rearview mirror and then he examines the traffic light. The green arrow transforms to a yellow arrow as the young driver does so. The driver of the second car fumbles with the gear shift of his five-speed manual transmission. Flustered from your horn as well as from the guilt of texting while driving (while still on Mom and Dad’s car insurance), he pops the clutch, and the muscle car dies. As the yellow arrow turns to a red arrow, the kid quickly restarts the car, finds first gear, and burns rubber as he turns left under a very fresh red light.

You didn’t make the light. Now you sit as the first car in the turn lane and you will have to sit through another fresh cycle of signals. Without even thinking, you involuntarily scream an expletive, probably starting with the letter “F,” and you pound your steering wheel, unleashing emotion verbally and physically.

Congratulations, you are officially frustrated! Even though everything else in your life is going well and in reality, you have very little to be emotional about. You are now experiencing frustration.

Why should we worry about the emotion of frustration over all of the other emotions out there in the workplace and in relationships? Well, if you are to believe statistics, here are some compelling reasons.

The American Psychological Association says that workplace frustration causes 60 percent of employees to lose motivation (Association, Stress in America, 2008).

An AI search for frustration studies also reported that people experiencing frustration during problem solving tasks showed significant drops in working memory and logical reasoning, impairing decision-making and focus. An artificial intelligence query also reported that most people recognize frustration as a major trigger for regrettable, reactive behavior, such as quitting a job, yelling, or making poor financial decisions.

I routinely present classes on frustration to criminal justice professionals. When I teach those courses, I cite a separate set of statistics to reinforce the importance of learning about frustration, how to know when they are experiencing it, and how to navigate through it to a satisfactory outcome. Even though the next set of bullet points involve the profession of policing, it is not much of a stretch to exchange your stressful job for theirs in the following bullet points.

• About one in five police officers nationally (21 percent) say their job nearly always or often makes them feel angry and frustrated—feelings that are linked to more negative views toward the public. (Morin, 2017)
• According to a 2021 Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) report, most officers experience frequent frustration related to bureaucracy, understaffing, and public perception.

Anecdotally, I have also heard but have not been able to independently confirm the following statistics:

• A Department of Justice study linked high-stress situations and emotional dysregulation—including frustration—with increased likelihood of force escalation. Frustration is a contributing factor in 30 percent of reported use-of-force incidents.
• More than 40 percent of officers say frustration impacts their decision-making on the job.
• A study published in Police Quarterly found that chronic workplace frustration plays a major role in emotional exhaustion and early retirement decisions.
• Frustration with the justice system is reported by 66 percent of officers.
• Training in emotional regulation can reduce frustration-driven errors by up to 35 percent. Departments implementing mindfulness, resilience, or emotional intelligence training have seen measurable drops in complaints and internal disciplinary actions.

Numbers like those above coupled with my own observations of people making irrevocable and consequential decisions in the heat of frustration drove me to research the topic for over ten years and to ultimately write this book. Throughout my professional life, I held assignments where I trained others. When people ask me what I do for a living, I half-jokingly tell them that I am a protector by trade, but I am a trainer at heart.

With this book, I wanted to take my background in teaching the adult learner (I have been an adjunct instructor on five college campuses as well as at the world’s largest police academy) and educate folks on this unique emotion, how to better understand it and how to conquer it before it negatively impacts them.

Frustration always arrives in your life uninvited, unwanted, unexpectedly, and ready to shatter some fine China. It rears its ugly head in your marriage, at the workplace or in the drive thru of your local fast-food joint. But the emotion of frustration always makes an immediate impact when it shows up. Like the old saying about good restaurants, frustration shows up where you least expect it.

Sometimes frustration arrives in ballerina shoes and quietly makes itself known, or it can burst onto the scene like a whirling dervish. Like Kramer, the character played by Michael Richards in Seinfeld, frustration’s appearance can be immediate and loud, or it can be subtle and simmering like Newman of the same sitcom.

Frustration shows up in your life often dressed in the camouflage of disappointment, anger, or sadness. Frustration is a master of disguise, but one thing is for certain, its presence can quickly turn into rage, despair, or dejection. The very feeling of “being frustrated” changes our response to stimuli and alters our normal personalities, such as when a normally even keeled person acts out aggressively when frustrated.

We, as human beings, in an effort to be a good friend, a loyal spouse or a positive coworker are in a continuous search to identify and conquer the emotions we feel. We listen to motivational speakers, we buy self-help books, we take yoga classes, and we seek medications, all in an effort to understand what we are feeling, how to navigate that emotion, and proceed in life as a better person. To be someone who is not a slave to our involuntary emotions.

These feelings that all human beings experience can run the gamut from elation to profound misery. The grief of a widow pining for the love she had for forty years. The sadness of a nurse in a burn unit, watching a person writhe in pain. The depression of someone at the high school reunion regretting a series of poor life choices. The euphoria and glee experienced by young lovers in the early stages of courtship. Those emotions and so many more are experienced routinely by every human walking the earth. For millennia, this has been our lot in life, as we are at the top of the food chain, with our opposable thumbs and our fully functioning amygdala and our amazing limbic system.

But frustration, as an emotion, hasn’t really gotten the attention that it deserves. We usually don’t recognize it as a free-standing emotion as it happens. Instead, we identify that feeling as anger or self-loathing or...