When I googled what patience is, it said:
“The ability to accept or tolerate delays, problems, or suffering without becoming angry or upset.”
I have always tried my best to be patient in my life. Although I know that when I can be patient, I always get better results. Being patient is a pretty simple concept, but for some reason it can be so difficult to put into practice.
Practicing patience will help you better cope with the challenges life throws at you. Patience also brings peace, optimism, hope and confidence into your life.
“Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles disappear.” — John Quincy Adams
The key message is very clear - when you practice patience, you are more likely to lead a successful and happy life.
In this article, you'll learn why patience is good for you and how to practice patience so you can take better control of your life.
What is patience?
He who is patient is better than the brave, and he who controls himself is better than the conqueror of a city.
Proverbs of Solomon, 16:32
Patience in life manifests itself as the ability to persevere through various adversities , wait for the most opportune moment and prioritize the long term over the short term . When a person is able to endure various difficulties with fortitude, he can not only keep the direction of his path unchanged, but also gets the opportunity to build right relationships. After all, any relationship requires patience.
Waiting for the right moment allows you to get the greatest results . If we plant seeds ahead of schedule, they may not sprout. If we strive to achieve something for which we are not ready, we may fail. Patience in life is important as taking action at the most favorable moment. This applies not only to professional activities, but also to relationships. Patience is certainly a virtue that everyone needs, but it should be explained why this quality is sometimes considered a sign of weakness.
It seems that patience contradicts such qualities as courage, determination, pride, determination, and so on. After all, outwardly, patience in life looks like passivity, refusal to act, sometimes unreasonable. But in fact it turns out that it does not contradict, but rather complements such active qualities. Patience can lead a person to those circumstances where acting actively is most effective.
The right choice of time for active action can give more than continuous action, which will very soon make you run out of steam and give up on the goal, simply because there is no strength or results. The reasonable use of patience for active people will be a factor of restraint, accumulation and concentration of forces for one precise, decisive action. One large, rapid flow of water can do much more harm than many small fluctuations. Likewise, a person, acting decisively and possessing strength, is able to achieve more.
For less active people, patience manifests itself as the flow of a small river that, day after day, grinds out a huge stone. “And if you repeat the blows often, even though the ax is small, it will cut down a mighty oak.” Such patience manifests itself as constant influence, an accumulation of results that will accumulate day after day.
The difference between these two patience is that some people are more inclined to be active, but their constant desire to be active weakens them so much that they cannot do anything serious while remaining in place. Other people tend to act every day, but little by little, and they do not always have the desire to rush somewhere, overcome something and achieve something. This patience means that you should approach the task like growing a garden, gradually and methodically. However, nothing prohibits combining these two methods. For example, an athlete, in order to achieve the best result, is forced to keep in shape constantly, but actively train and reach the peak of his abilities only before competitions.
Impatience as a cause of illness
I keep trying to show you on this blog that negative thoughts and emotions lead to physical illness and mental imbalance.
And it is precisely the lack of patience that gives rise to a flurry of all kinds of bad thoughts and emotions, which means that sooner or later you will get sick.
Everything is interconnected. You can't expect improvements in your life because you're unhappy with what you have now. You can't stand in line because people annoy you and you're always in a hurry. You cannot be patient with your children and your loved one, which means you are angry with them and demand that their behavior correspond to your ideas. That is, there is an interdependent process here.
The presence within you of incorrect attitudes and negative manifestations of the psyche gives rise to impatience. But the very lack of patience entails a new flurry of bad thoughts and emotions. All this drains our strength and leads to an imbalance in the psycho-emotional sphere. Here you have nervous exhaustion, depression, neuroses, as well as all kinds of body diseases. So if you want to be healthy, learn to be patient.
Attitude towards patience
The negative attitude towards patience as a quality of the weak is dictated by the everyday observation that the weak usually tolerates the actions of the strong , while in the minds of society the image of the strong as a hot-tempered, proud and vindictive person who will not tolerate anything is strengthened. This cult of brute force creates false ideas. After all, only the strong can truly endure ; the weak are simply not capable of this. The patience of the strong lies in the choice: to endure or not to endure . But the weak often have no such choice. True patience comes from strength, from the ability to make volitional choices.
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Only then does true virtue emerge when there is a choice. When a person realizes the voluntariness of his patience, consciously acting from a position of patience, this is a virtue that can change a person for the better. When a person endures unwittingly, accumulating dissatisfaction in his heart, this is simply suffering. Involuntary patience does not come from will, but from fear and generates hatred in a person’s heart.
Just as warm clothes protect against cold, endurance protects against resentment. Increase patience and calmness of spirit, and resentment, no matter how bitter, will not touch you.
Leonardo da Vinci
However, everyone has a choice to tolerate or not and the only difference is whether we are able to maintain inner dignity and not succumb to hatred and anger or not. When an elder tolerates a younger one out of mercy, this is patience. When a younger person tolerates an older one out of true humility, that is patience. But when the elder’s patience is dictated by the fear of being left alone or the threat of a bad attitude, this is simple self-interest. In the same way, when a younger person tolerates an older person for some specific purpose, in order to get something, this is also simple self-interest, which is not a true virtue.
A person develops a negative attitude towards patience when he sees that only the weak endure. And not wanting to try on the role of the weak, a person cultivates impatience in himself from childhood. When he finds himself in the real world, where he has to endure a lot, the pride nurtured within does not allow him to act calmly, constantly bumping into various manifestations of forced patience. The problem also lies in the fact that true patience is very difficult to understand, since it does not clearly manifest itself. Suppose a father teaches his son and he patiently explains and shows him over and over again how to do something correctly. Impatience will be obvious when the father indignantly waves his hand and leaves his son, but patience will not be obvious, because it will manifest itself in continuing activities that are something natural. The son will remember not his father’s patience, but his own efforts and training.
The patience of the strong is not noticeable, but the patience of the weak manifests itself very clearly. It is because of this association that an attitude is developed towards patience as a negative quality. But in reality, only a truly strong person can voluntarily show patience in life. Constantly doing something at the right time, not responding to insults and misbehavior of others, being consistent - these and other manifestations of patience can be either voluntary or forced. When a person suffers insults because he cannot respond, this is humiliation; when a person does not respond to insults because he can answer, this is dignity. After all, who in their right mind would bark back at a dog or argue with a fool?
Once, even after receiving a kick, Socrates endured it, and when someone was surprised, he replied: “If a donkey kicked me, would I sue him?”
Forced patience can easily turn into voluntary, and weakness can become a virtue. This is possible when such patience does not result in anger, hatred, resentment, desire for revenge or to somehow respond to insults. Inner dignity becomes a virtue and looking at the offender as suffering in one's heart becomes the reason for the disappearance of fear. No happy person will simply test the patience of others. Such a humble view of others can make the weak strong, and transform the vice of hatred into the virtue of compassion.
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How to be more patient
Below are 3 practical methods you can implement in your life right now that will help you be more patient and take charge of your life.
Understand what makes you feel impatient
The opposite of patience is impatience. Everyone has experienced a feeling of impatience more than once in their life - after all, there is no escape from it!
To help you become more patient, it is important to understand what makes you feel impatient. What do you think or feel before you lose it? Once you know what's triggering you, you can use calming exercises to help you better cope with those feelings of impatience when they start to build up.
Making yourself wait before reacting and doing deep breathing exercises are great techniques to help you cope with feelings of impatience. Counting to 100 under your breath is another technique that will help you WAIT before reacting.
Stop doing unimportant things
We can easily become distracted and stressed when we are doing things that are not very important and take up a lot of time. One way to relieve stress is to stop doing things that create more stress for you.
Take a few minutes at the end of the day and think about the tasks you have completed. Write down these tasks, and then write down the tasks you need to complete tomorrow.
Patience means having a more positive and reflective outlook on life, so look at each of these tasks and decide which ones are the top priorities for tomorrow and which tasks can wait a few days. Then do the important things. If you practice this technique consistently, you will gradually regain control of your life.
Work on changing your attitude
A patient person is able to assess a situation from a more positive perspective. They tend to accept a difficult situation as it is and will not fight it or avoid it. They will work through it and try to find a solution that will allow them to move forward.
Patience is about perspective and how you look at situations. If you miss the bus or are late for an appointment and are stuck in traffic, you have a choice of how to react. A patient person will work to put a positive spin on the situation and try to reduce the tension that could potentially build up.
A more impatient outlook on life will not serve you well. Impatience will prevent you from living a life where you are in control.
Techniques you could use to help you look at life more positively:
- Visualization. Try to get ahead of the problem. Visualize how you faced a problem and how you dealt with it and achieved positive results.
- Be active and choose activities that will help you relieve the stress and tension you are experiencing. You can do many things like yoga, walking, breathing exercises, meditation, etc. Choose activities that bring you peace of mind and make a commitment to do them on a regular basis.
Patience in life is a manifestation of strength when it is voluntary
When a person is waiting for a verdict in court or is serving a sentence for a crime, this cannot be considered virtuous patience. When a person waits for the right moment not only in big matters, but also in everyday life and in relationships voluntarily, this is a virtue. Patience in life gives a feeling of freedom and will. But patience should be exercised moderately and adequately. When a person lives by patience alone and refuses to do anything, this cannot be considered correct behavior. When a person waits for the perfect moment all his life or lets everything take its course, this can only worsen life, and not make it more perfect.
Thus, patience should be exercised appropriately when it has specific reasons. For example, patience shown when a person is insulted is appropriate, but is it appropriate to tolerate when loved ones are insulted? Is it appropriate to tolerate when injustice is committed that we can influence? Is it appropriate to have patience with one's own faults and shortcomings? To succeed in patience means to learn to apply it correctly, not to make it a dogma, but to live with this quality in harmony, realizing its facets. Such understanding can only be achieved by consciously practicing patience, with everyone at once, and not just with selected people.
Patience should be consistent and constant, but should not overshadow everything else. Patience in life should not come from vicious or selfish intentions, otherwise it will only poison a person’s heart. He who patiently keeps evil in his heart commits evil every day, wanting revenge. Patience in life should be combined with humility and compassion so that it does not become the cause of fall and delusion.
Interesting experiment
In the 1960s, a professor at Stanford University began a modest experiment to study the willpower of four-year-old children. He placed a large marshmallow in front of the children and then told them they could eat it right away. But if they wait 15 minutes, they get two marshmallows.
Then he left the children alone and watched what was happening through a special mirror. Some children ate the marshmallows right away; some endured for several minutes, but still gave in to temptation. And only 30 percent were able to wait.
It was an uninteresting experiment, and the professor moved on to other studies, because, in his own words, “there’s not much you can do with children trying not to eat marshmallows.” But as time passed, the professor, observing these older children, began to notice an interesting correlation: children who could not wait later experienced difficulties in life and had more behavior problems, while those who waited turned out to be more confident and motivated, received higher grades and income, and had healthier relationships.
What began as a simple experiment with children and marshmallows has become a major study suggesting that learning to wait and be patient reveals a key character trait that promises success later in life.
Patience in spiritual life
Patience is most clearly demonstrated when it comes to spiritual life . When turning to God, many people expect to see an immediate and expected result, but God's plan is not always compared with man's plan. A person is inclined to ask God according to need, and not out of necessity, and God, out of His mercy, often sends difficult but necessary lessons, the awareness of which gives happiness and deliverance from shortcomings. Patience in spiritual life is surrendering oneself to the will of God, without selfish thoughts about how such a will should manifest itself. This is a kind of surrender to the Almighty, a willingness to endure any deprivation, always maintaining faith, even going through very difficult lessons. Patience in spiritual life is a sincere renunciation of all expectations from God. This is the realization that everything is in the hands of the Supreme Lord and if a person does not have something now, then he does not need it now. Such patience does not imply renunciation of activity, but only tears a person away from the passionate desire to acquire something through divine intervention; such devotion frees the heart from passions and makes it possible to go to God not for the sake of worldly things, but out of love and devotion.
No need to endure through force
And now I will tell you exactly the opposite. There is no need to endure through force. If you use willpower to be patient and endure something by gritting your teeth, then you will also earn yourself physical illnesses and mental problems. Why such a contradiction?
You often hear advice that you need to be patient, endure and everything will be fine. But here two opposing concepts are confused, and many psychologists do not understand the essence of the matter.
If you wait for something through force, use willpower, try very hard to be patient, then this is not the patience that a person needs and which saves him from many of the problems that I spoke about. Let's say you're standing in line, you start getting angry, you lose your temper. But then you remember that this is not right, that you need to be more tolerant. You begin to restrain your anger, trying with all your might to hold it back. This is where you make a big mistake. By not allowing anger to manifest itself outward, you are thereby driving it inside, where it will begin to localize in the body and cause illness.
You create unnecessary tension, which leads first to an energetic and then a physical block.
But how does real patience, which is a sign of wisdom and which we need, differ from the patience when we squeeze emotions and drive them inside.
I'll tell you now.
Patience in life
Patience is a quality that makes it possible to bear both expectation and irritation in your heart. True patience comes from the voluntariness and character of a person, and not from circumstances, and is manifested constantly, consistently and to all people. A correct understanding of patience comes with time and makes it possible to feel freedom from expectations and overcome dependence on external circumstances, maintaining dignity within oneself, regardless of external manifestations. Patience can purify the heart, make the weak strong and give the best results.
Cultivate the garden, pull out the weeds. Plow the land, reap the harvest. The easy way is always a sweet lie. What you sow is what you reap.
Where is it used and who needs it?
The ability to endure is useful where circumstances do not depend on will and desire. It will preserve strength in trying to overcome obstacles and save you from rash actions. Who needs it?
- To parents. This group needs a lot of it. Raising the younger generation is not an easy task. There is often a clash of interests, which can result in quarrels, disputes and resentments. Here adults simply have to be patient. Firstly, because they are responsible for the child, and secondly, because they set an example of dialogue for their children. They want to raise patient children.
- For students. Different categories of students need patience in order to sit until the end of the lesson, finish the homework they started, finish reading a book, finish studying a play, and finish much more.
- Bosses, chiefs and the like. Patience is what will help the boss explain the task to the end, listen to the subordinate and argue intelligently at meetings.
- Subordinates. It is needed for high-quality completion of tasks and instructions, communication with superiors, and with other employees in the office.
- For children. You need patience to wait for your mother in kindergarten, to finish your porridge and to draw a cactus.
Patience is an internal resource that everyone needs, regardless of social and property status, age and gender.
Fill in waiting time
Time is very valuable. The patience of many people threatens to burst in those moments when they have to wait. Waiting seems like a waste of time and a reason why other things don't get done. The more importance a person attaches to time, the more likely it is to lose patience. This can infuriate one person and drive another to despair. In any of these cases, the quality of life deteriorates, the mood tends to zero, and hopes are lost.
But there is a way out. To ensure that having to wait does not become a challenge, you need to effectively fill the waiting time. So the “waiter” will turn from a victim into a ruler over time. You can read a book while waiting in line, write poetry during a long drive, do visualization while waiting for a traffic jam to clear, or exercise while walking with your child.
What does impatience lead to?
They say impatience is the best way to waste time. And indeed it is. Lack of patience leads to the fact that the work started is not completed and there is a need to start all over again every time. This applies to absolutely any business. If we talk about your own business, then if abandoned halfway, it will also result in a loss of money.
Impatience can poison the life of someone for whom “delay is like death.” Basically, these are people aimed at immediate and undoubted results, who want a quick return on their activities.
The inability to tolerate spoils relationships between people in any area of life, leading to divorce, dismissal, stress, illness, and accidents. Impatient people are more likely to suffer from cardiovascular disease and hypertension. For those who are especially uncontrollable, traffic jams, queues in stores, or raising children become torment.
Counting to 10
This method mainly refers to that aspect of patience, which is defined as endurance, self-control. Before you lose patience and give vent to your feelings, you need to count to 10 in your head. During these ten seconds, the initial emotions will give way to reason or at least lose a little of their fervor. Of course, particularly impatient subjects count very quickly. But still, the first five seconds will help. Gradually the count will become slower, and with each unit it will be easier to mobilize patience. An intelligent person will immediately feel the difference.
