Tips for better patience, and YES, you will need to practice.
Do life’s small and large annoyances make you feel like blowing your top? OK, but you do know the annoyances aren’t going away. So maybe it’s time to cultivate more patience.
Contrary to what you may believe, patience isn’t solely the domain of kindergarten teachers and saints. It’s a skill that everyone can develop and strengthen.
When we want to read a particular book, listen to a certain song, or watch a popular TV show, most of the time, those things are only a few clicks away. So many things are available to us instantly, It’s increasingly common that we get things delivered to us quickly. And that’s bad news when it comes to our ability to wait patiently. Our expectations go up, and then our level of patience goes down.
So how can you strengthen your patience muscles? The first step – Let’s just admit up front that it won’t be much fun at first.
If we’re going to grow patience, it’s going to come from doing slightly uncomfortable things.
It helps to think about patience on a spectrum: Patience is the ability to be calm in the face of adversity, frustration, or suffering, and in any given situation, you’ll respond with some amount of patience (or lack of it). Either you respond with patience (right in the middle of the spectrum); with a deficiency of patience (the type of impatience where you have no ability to be calm, which leads you to an overreaction); or with an abundance of patience (the type of impatience where you stay so calm you become disengaged from the situation or stop caring. Neither type of “impatience” is necessarily productive. There are situations in life where it’s not good to be overly patient and being on the anger, frustration, anxiety and inability-to-control-your-actions end of the spectrum can have deleterious effects, too.
If you recognize that you’re more irritable, reactive, and irascible than you’d like to be, you can change to become better at responding patiently. But you have to want to change. What’s important to remember is that life is full of myriad variables and obstacles, and there’s no way anyone can avoid any situation that might potentially trigger impatience, but you can control your response.
Here’s what I suggest you do if want to become a more patient person:
1. Practice mindfulness. Be in the present moment without judging. Simply sit quietly and notice your breath. Notice what distracts you from your breath, then ease yourself back into awareness of your breath.
2. Practice accepting your current circumstances. This may mean being stuck in traffic. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to change things if you need to. It only means accepting your experience in the moment for exactly what it is — even if it’s unpleasant.
3. Actively build a tolerance for being a bit uncomfortable.
4. When you’re feeling rushed, consciously slow down. You don’t have to feel like a hamster on a wheel all the time. Know that you can choose slow.
5. Practice being a good listener. Listen carefully to what colleagues or other business partners have to say. Focus on understanding rather than on formulating your response.
6. Identify when you are impatient and what emotion you are feeling. Recognize that you’re starting to feel activated and identify what emotion is at the heart of that response, causing you to get heated.
7. Reframe how you think about the situation. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. (My co-worker isn’t purposely trying to miss his deadlines; he has a lot on his plate.) Remember, whatever’s triggering your impatience many times isn’t about you.
No one says increasing your patience is easy. But, with daily practise, you may find you’re calmer, less frazzled, and more willing to give others the benefit of the doubt — and maybe even give yourself a break once in a while, as well.