Practicing Patience Can Be Challenging
Practicing patience is positive, empowering, and worth the effort.
Let me be honest here. I’m not the most patient person there is. In fact, I’m frequently impatient. However, life has taught me the importance of practicing patience. This is a choice, a decision, that you apply frequently.
When you’re inherently impatient, like I am, this is extra challenging. Waiting for shit to happen can be infuriating, especially when the wait defies all logic, rhyme, or reason.
Still, learning to practice patience is incredibly empowering. It teaches you to be more disciplined, to center and balance, and to build strength to endure. This is a part of mindfulness because patience requires active conscious awareness. You see the challenge/issue/problem/opportunity, then see a solution – but need to allow time. There might be many small steps to get from point A to point B that require patience.
Patience can also be sorely tested by your needs, wants, and desires. It can also be challenged by outside influences, expectations of people close and removed, and other factors utterly beyond your control.
Is practicing patience worth it? In my experience, yes. I have an excellent example of a practical application for you.
Recovery takes time
On November 30, 1999, I left my apartment to walk to the post office to mail out my bills. A week later, I came out of heavy sedation in the hospital with a massively broken right leg, shattered right clavicle, and severe nerve damage to my right arm, making it almost useless. I was hit by a car crossing a busy street, survived, and now faced a long road to recovery.
The prognosis was that I would probably make a full recovery. However, I’d most likely walk with a limp for the rest of my life, and the return of the full function of my right arm was an unknown. They told me it would likely take 1-3 years for me to be walking again unaided.
I knew that recovery would take time. Also, I had very little patience at this time in my life. Was there a middle ground that would let me recover faster and more fully than expected while appeasing my impatience?
Turns out the answer was yes. Accept that recovery takes time, but fight through it. When they pushed for 10 reps of something in physical therapy, I pushed for 12-15. If they challenged me to stand for 2 minutes, I stood for 5. When not in a therapy session, I still practiced things to get stronger, to push hard with all the good things that would speed my recovery. I also never accepted anything regarding my recovery as impossible.
In less than a year, I was walking unaided. My arm recovered so that I lost no use of it. And I walk without a limp.
Yes, I had amazing doctors, therapists, and nurses. But I also learned a way to practice patience that would forever reshape my life.
When I allow it to.
Practicing patience can be challenging
Habits are things that you do by rote and routine. Most are incredibly mundane and largely uninspiring. Brushing your teeth, making your bed, how you drink your coffee or tea, posture, and the like. Some are bigger and more involved, like quitting smoking, making time to read more regularly, spending less time on social media, eating better, and exercising regularly.
Practicing patience can be habitual, but patience itself is not. That’s because patience is frequently situational. You need it because of something that doesn’t originate from or with you.
For example, teaching a skill to a slow learner. I once was the only one in my job who could train one of our employees because nobody else had the patience to work with her and get her through her inabilities. Over the years, I’ve taught hugely unathletic people to become competent fencers that nobody else had the patience to work with. I have zero control over people buying my books and must remain patient as I write more and work on new marketing ideas.
The instant gratification elements of our society make patience extra challenging. Everyone wants it not now, but yesterday. What’s taking so damned long, anyhow? Why haven’t I lost all the weight in weeks, gotten 6-pack abs in a month, or gone viral on social media with my cat’s shenanigans? Impatience is everywhere.
Choosing patience takes effort and time. Also, it can only be done via active conscious awareness, here and now.
It’s all about choosing and deciding
For me, I must do a lot of work to be more patient. Impatience is my default setting. However, meditation, active mindfulness practice, and making choices and decisions to employ patience have made me more patient.
Don’t get me wrong, I still struggle with patience. My wife gets an earful about this topic often. But I know that patience is a choice, and I can make it at any time.
That’s the beauty of patience being a choice. You might start out impatient or become impatient when a thing takes too long. But you can choose to apply patience. You can decide to be more patient.
What does that look like? First, recognize that patience is needed. The thing you desire to make manifest, to get done, to see to completion, might take an amount of time you have almost zero control over. Second, acknowledge that patience is needed. Recognition without acknowledgment is akin to noting the elephant in the room, then bumping into it (or getting trampled by it) because you recognized it but then ignored it. Acknowledgement makes space to adjust to it being there and avoiding it, working with it, or otherwise dealing with it.
Third, make choices and decisions about it. Give yourself grace, practice deep breathing, meditate, do something to work with the situation. I knew my recovery was going to take time, but I did everything in my power to help it along.
Lastly, accept it. Resisting the need for patience created more impatience. That helps you not at all.
To sum up, choosing and deciding on patience takes 4 steps:
- Recognition
- Acknowledgement
- Choice
- Acceptance
Knowing this, you can face the challenge of practicing patience, even as an inherently impatient person.
Facing the challenges of practicing patience isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing active conscious awareness (mindfulness) of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and the positivity or negativity of your approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge that a circumstance or situation needs patience, you can make choices and decisions to take steps to build patience and work with the time and effort required. Knowing that patience is a choice/decision you can make at any time, even when you’re mostly impatient, you can take the 4 steps to face any situation with patience here and now.
This empowers you. When you’re empowered, that can, in turn, empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity — from the vast cylinder that exists between them — shifts life in ways that open you to more potential, possibility, and the like. From there, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you in the here and now.
The better aware you are of yourself, here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you and empower them, too. That is an amazing conduit to help reason overcome fear in the collective consciousness.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the six-hundred-thirty-first (631) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, reblog, and spread the positivity.
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