One of my favorite sayings for years was: “I have 2 seconds of patience”. And it was pretty darn accurate. Patience was one of the lowest priorities in my life. I was frustrated most of the time, anxious much of the time and pretty witchy all of the time. Not having any patience not only made my life miserable but also the lives of everyone around me were affected negatively.
Today, I promise you that I won´t win any Oscars for patience but I have come a long ways to being more patient. I now see that having patience with myself first has helped me to have more patience in every area of my life, including my precious relationship with others.
How did I go from being the Queen of Impatience to where I am today? Here are a couple of suggestions that may help you if impatience is on your list of things to work on.
First of all, I started to recognize what I could change in my life and what I couldn´t. For example, I couldn´t change the terrible traffic on the highway but I could change the time of day that I traveled on it. I couldn´t change the horrible service at the discount grocery store but I could shop at a different store. Just making different choices helped me to have more patience because I felt more in control of my life and more accepting of what was out of my realm. At the end of the day, there really wasn´t much that was out of my ability to change.
Second of all, I stopped saying that I had 2 seconds of patience and started focusing on the abilities and attributes that I wanted to enhance. Impatience was not one of them! I started affirming the positive in my personality and although at first I had to look deep and hard for good things to say and think about myself, they came more readily the more I focused on them.
Thirdly, I focused on keeping my environment positive. I eliminated things that stressed me and made me impatient. I instead surrounded myself with people and things that made me feel happy, peaceful and loved. As those qualities in my environment were enhanced, then my impatience seemed grossly out of place in my life.
Fourth, I saw my impatience for what it truly was – selfishness, a lack of organization in my life and horrible judgment of others in their lives. None of these made me feel good about myself. It definitely made it easier to say good-bye to the impatience that brought these qualities to the forefront.
Moving out of a place of impatience and into a state of grace is an important part of creating your amazing life with less stress and more fun.
The next time you are finding that impatience is running the show in your life, just see it for what it is and then decide how you can best move it out of your life.
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Hi Jan,
Patience is important and it’s in short supply for most people.
I guess it comes with age for some and never for others.
The lucky few have it seemingly naturally.
There are a few uses for impatience but largely it is a self defeating mechanism that wastes energy and irritates the hell out of everybody.
I can be very patient with some things and people while very impatient with others. The balance is still eluding me for the most part.
All your points make sense and are valid but impatience is deep seated and one needs to practice patience patiently.
I like your saying that you used to be the queen of impatience.
It reminds me of a lady we visited in Victoria who said of herself that she was the queen of kindness but also the queen of rudeness.
It was very funny but it can sometimes be true of most of us I think.
We can be kings and queens of kindness and kings and queens of rudeness at different times.
It would hold true for patience and impatience as well I imagine.
Vance