Improve your patience: The Whys and Hows to Improve Patience

What is patience? How can you improve your patience?

Patience is the ability to stay calm while you’re waiting for an outcome that you need or want. Patience is the ability or willingness to suppress restlessness or annoyance when confronted with delay. And patience is the quiet steady perseverance to work through challenges in life.

Overall, patience makes us better people. It helps us when we must tolerate delay. It implies having self-control and forbearance as opposed to want what we want and when we want it. By being patient, we can stay calm, cool, and collected and keep on the path to achieving our goals.

Before we jump into the whys and hows to improve your patience, let’s first take a look at the three different types of patience.

Three Types of Patience

In 2012, Dr. Sarah Schnitker published an article in “The Journal of Positive Psychology” that describes three different types of patience.

1. Interpersonal patience
2. Life Hardship patience
3. Daily hassles patience

Interpersonal Patience: (settling a conflict, dealing with co-workers and managers, struggling with a spouse, friend, child, or parent)

Interpersonal patience deals with other people, their demands, needs, and feelings. It doesn’t involve waiting, but simply having understanding, empathy and compassion when dealing with others. This type of patience is essential when you are working with people and having to deal with difficult co-workers and managers.

Life Hardship Patience: (medical treatment, chronic illness, disabilities, setbacks, not getting a promotion, losing a job)

Life hardship patience deals with waiting out life’s hardships without frustration or despair. It’s having the patience to overcome serious setbacks in life (both personal setbacks and professional setbacks).

Daily Hassles Patience: (Stuck in traffic, flight delays, spills, tangled necklaces, lines at the grocery store)

Daily hassles patience deal with the day to day tasks that don’t necessarily contribute to your personal goals. It’s the patience needed when dealing with daily circumstances that are beyond our control. It’s having self-discipline and giving any job the attention that it required to be completed.

Just because you tend to be patient in one of these categories, it doesn’t mean that you are patient in them all. The goal is to recognize where your strength and weakness lie and build up those areas that you are the weakest.

Benefits of Patience (The Whys)

• Helps Focus on Achieving Goals: Patience helps us set and achieve our goals. The road to achievement is a long one, and those without patience (those who want immediate results) may not be willing to work for it. With patience, you take the time to plan, work things out, do what needs to be done, and then make it happen.

• Better Mental Health: Patient people tend to worry less. They are able to cope better in upsetting and stressful situations. Patient people tend to experience less depression, stress, anxiety and overall negative emotions.

• Better Physical Health: Stress can lead to things such as heart disease, ulcers, high blood pressure and stomach issues. If patience reduces stress, then it will also reduce the damaging health effects caused by stress. Patient people were also less likely to report health problems such as headaches, acne flair-ups, pneumonia and diarrhea.

• Helps build Stronger and More Positive Relationships: Patient people tended to be less lonely, because making and keeping friends require patience. Patience helps us to develop understanding, empathy and compassion. When you express patience towards others, it shows them that you are caring and supportive of them.

• Helps us Become Better Decision Makers. When you are patient, you take the time to assess the situation, see the big picture and weigh any pros and cons. Chances of making big mistakes lessen because you avoid making it in haste.

Ten Ways to Help Build Patience (The Hows)

We are all faced with situations that try our patience on a daily basis. When times are hard, it’s even more difficult to persevere with a good attitude. We have a choice on how we act when faced with these decisions. You cannot always control the situation, but you can control how you respond to the situation.

Patience is an exercise in self-Control. Self-Control is a skill and just like any skill, you can practice and improve on this skill. Here are some everyday ways to help you build patience.

1. Reframe the situation: Patience is not just an automatic emotional response. It involves conscious thoughts and beliefs. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.

2. Make yourself wait: The best way to practice patience is to make yourself wait. Start with the small things and then work up to the bigger things. The more you practice, the more you will gain. In the long run, waiting will actually make you happier.

3. Relax and Take a Deep Breath: Taking slow deep breaths can help calm the mind and body. Take a walk to refocus on what is important.

4. Practice gratitude: People who feel grateful are better able to wait for gratification. When we are grateful for what we have today, we are not desperate for more stuff or have the need for immediate gratification.

5. Stop doing Things that are not important: When we stop doing things that are not important, we are taking away some stress in our lives. Learn to say “No” to things especially if it is going to cause stress or make us impatient.

6. Slow down: People try to do too many things at once. They jump from task to task without taking the time to finish one task first. This leads to feeling frustrated when we are not making progress. Slow down and focus on one talk at a time.

7. Think with your end goal in mind: When we focus with our end goal in mind, we can remind ourselves why we are doing something. Break down your end goals into smaller attainable goals so that you can see the progress you are making to reach your ultimate goal.

8. Think before you speak: Pause and go over what you want to say before you say it. This can help avoid hurting and offending others.

9. Don’t rush thing: Things will happen when the timing is right. Many of the things we want to hurry up cannot be hurried up. You can’t create a plan to start a business and have a successful business the next day or week or month. It just doesn’t work that way. Patience allows you to do all the things that need to be don in order to create something great. Don’t skip over important detail because of your impatience.

10. Practice Acceptance: The only thing you can change is yourself. You cannot change or control other people or situations. The only thing you can control is how you react to these situations.

Motivational Quotes

Exercising patience is not always easy. There are days you may want to act rash or give up. It is times like these that we need to remind ourselves the importance of being patient. Here are a few motivational quotes to remind you why it is important to be patient.

“One moment of patience may ward off great disaster. One moment of impatience may ruin a whole life.” Chinese Proverb

“Two things define you: Your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.” George Bernard Shaw

“To lose patience is to lose the battle.” Mahatma Gandhi

“Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness, and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success.” Brian Adams

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” Leo Tolstoy

“Patience, persistence, and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.” Napoleon Hill

“Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.” Plautus