“Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.”– Saadi
We are always taught different life lessons while growing up starting from how to tie our shoelaces to how to be a nice person. We all turn out to be pretty decent human beings. But when it comes to certain virtues like patience, we all seem to be lacking and struggle with. We always grow impatient in situations that we cannot control. Waiting always gets us worked up. Impatience always sets in when waiting in long lines, being put on hold, or interacting with disagreeable people. We also grow impatient on our road to change from bad habits or behaviour or recovering from illness or addictions.
So, What causes impatience?
Impatience is lack of patience,eager desire for relief or change; restlessness and intolerance of anything that thwarts, delays, or hinders. Technology and an increased access to information also has contributed to our impatience. In a world where we can access any information and order what we want within few seconds, patience can be hard to come by. We are so saturated and conditioned to having everything we need right at our fingertips with immediacy that we are no longer used to waiting. Pressure is always on us to attain certain goals, and with that comes the need to get things done in short amount of time. This instantaneous, the rapid, the quick, the get-it-done-right now kind of mindset makes us impatient.
Impatience can also be rooted back to certain underlying beliefs that we have about ourselves and the world around. Impatience can be caused by,
• Subconscious belief that you are not good enough or other self-limiting beliefs about yourself.
• Your inherent unhappiness with yourself and belief that you had to get to somewhere before you could be happy.
• Certain fixation with future on reaching a certain end goal or to achieve bigger visions, and accomplish more goals.
• Feelings of anger and frustration when things do not go as plan or your way.
• A great sense of urgency to get things over with and to move on to the next thing or task.
• Lack of present moment awareness and dwelling on future.
• Thoughts like “why is this slow?” or “what’s next.” would lead you to being impatient.
• When things get delayed or moving at slower pace than you want or the mindset of wanting everything right now.
Your expectations for immediate attention can negatively impact your productivity, patience and well-being. Studies reveal that higher levels of impatience cause major health conditions over time. Sometimes the urge to achieve your goals manifests into impatience causing annoyance at things standing in your way and gives rise to tension and fear-based emotions. Even though the negative effects of impatience cannot be observed immediately, but they slowly compound over time. It is only when you learn to be more patient that you can know the difference.
What is patience?
Patience is the capability to accept or tolerate delay or difficulties without getting angry or upset. It is a state of endurance under difficult circumstances.
Being patient gives you a feeling of equanimity, a calmness of mind that makes it easier to go through life’s ups and downs.
Why develop patience?
Sometimes the challenges make us vulnerable, possibly afraid, and we have knee-jerk responses to protect ourselves. These responses make an already stressful and unpleasant situation worse. You should learn to make a conscious effort to respond to such situations differently. Patience is the process of turning inwards towards your inner strength. It is strength to stay still with the vulnerable feelings and the restlessness rather than giving into the emotional urge to do something in reaction to what has triggered you.
It is important to develop patience as it increases feelings of happiness as well as reduces stress and anxiety. It also improves productivity because it creates a better and clear state of mind. Here is why you should develop patience.
With patience you can be persistent and stay on your goals for the long run. You don’t have to cut corners or do things in hurry, instead you can patiently work things out, do what needs to be done, and make things happen. You can commit to stay with what is right to achieve your goals.
Self-control
To change yourself from bad habits, anger, and frustration, it takes time and if you have the patience, you can wait for yourself to get there. You build self-control to put up with situations that involve difficulties. It develops the capacity to tolerate annoyance, or pain, or irritation.
Clarity
Sometimes you are met with certain obstacles. Such times, you don’t see things clearly because of impatience as it causes the feelings of self-doubt and decreases your confidence. Instead by being patient, you can gain clear vision of why something happened when it did.
Better decision-making.
Impatience makes you end up making poor decisions in order to get you to your desired goal quickly which can affect your health and your happiness. Whereas by not being stressed and anxious about something, you gain time to get clarity and can come to the best possible solution.
Being patient helps you to connect and engage with your feelings or emotions. Your acceptance of how you feel about a given situation and what you can realistically do about it grows. Your acceptance of self help you overcome negative emotions and behaviour.
How to practice patience?
To practice patience, external approaches like enforcing affirmations and regulation of breathing can be helpful. But to create a permanent change, you need to address the root cause by reflecting on your beliefs, thoughts and behaviour.
Here are some strategies to overcome impatience and to practice patience.
Identify impatient thought patterns
Notice when you are feeling rushed and stressed. This may be due to your unreasonable expectations or beliefs of needing everything now. Start by observing your patterns of impatience arising in your thoughts. Identify the triggers for such patterns like being put on hold, facing a long wait, figuring out a solution for a problem. By recognising the impatient mental patterns, you will be better able to accept them and can make a conscious effort to overcome such patterns by responding to them in a different way.
Keep your expectations realistic
Our expectations are often not realistic. For instance, while attempting to learn a new skill, we get impatient by thinking that we should be able to master new skill quickly. Keeping your expectations realistic and knowing them can help you build patience to achieve your desired goals. Understand that not everyone and everything runs on your schedule and other people and situations need not conform to your expectations. Be patient with situations that are not in your control.
Maintain a proper perspective
Practice the habit of maintaining a positive perspective, instead of dwelling on things that are making you impatient. shift your perspective to positive thoughts, affirmations and outcomes. The ability to reframe a situation by looking at it from a different and positive point of view makes any situation more tolerable and it provides you with the needed patience.
Practice slowing down
Because of impatience, you might resort to making poor decisions even though the odds are against your long-term success of achieving your goals. Slowing down can help you in making better decisions that are more likely to give you better results. Practice being mindful in your activities like walking slow, eating mindfully, incorporating a day of rest in your schedule as this can allow you to reflect and you can develop an attitude of gratitude.
Cultivate compassion
Being compassionate helps you to see the circumstance for what it really is, and not how it appears to be or feels. Think of how you can be more compassionate in an impatient situation, or how you can transform the frustration into something useful for someone. This lets you see small things you otherwise would have taken for granted. This way you can focus onto something much more productive or useful for everybody.
Finally, Be mindful. Make conscious choice to pay attention to that which is going on in your field of awareness. Being mindful allows you to respond, not in anger, but instead with patience and it also helps in accepting things as they are. Being aware of your thoughts in the moment, you can remind yourself to be patient.
Conclusion
Patience is an important virtue to cultivate. You can build healthy mind, body, and healthy relationships. You experience less stress by learning to be patient with yourself. Remember that anything worth your while takes time and effort. So, don’t be discouraged or anxious if your progress is slow, remember that change is supposed to take time. Try to build the above mentioned strategies in your daily activities to grow more patient with yourself and with those around you.
“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Patience is certainly a very much needed virtue of a successful professional and personal life.
Mindfulness & positive thoughts are certainly the mantra to improve on patience.
Well written & structured article. Thank you … SSCascades