‘Patience can cook a stone’ African proverb
Patience is a fundamental life skill. Yet, a lot of people are not patient. I am one of them: I am impatient to get things going, see things moving, make progress, achieve instant results! However, life hardly ever works like that. Typically progress takes time. It is incremental with small shifts and leaps occurring over time.
Some situations in life require us to be patient. These situations can teach us a lot. Last year I experienced such a situation and although it was very challenging, I feel I came out of it a lot wiser.
I had a chronic typhoid infection which has affected me over a period of several months. At the different stages I did not know exactly what was happening, whether the medicine was working for good, whether the infection was going to return or whether I would get better at all. I so wanted to have my health back quickly but I had to be patient.
Along the way I kept losing hope. I kept creating worst case scenarios and other unhelpful mental narratives which made me feel worse. In the end, I realised the best thing I could do in addition to getting the right medication, was to accept and be patient with life as it was and not how I wanted it to be. Instead of using up my energy fighting the situation, I started to affirm to myself that I was getting better. This made a big difference to my recovery. It enabled me to be patient, to accept I was doing my best and that beyond this I wasn’t in control of the situation.
Patience means accepting we do not have power over our situation even if we are doing our best. Patience means accepting uncertainty, realising that in fact most of the time we do not know how things will develop. Patience means accepting limitations and seeing them as opportunities. It means positively accepting a situation and making the best of it. When I was ill there were many things I could not do. But I could still read books and so decided it was a great opportunity to have dedicated time for reading.
As leaders we need patience when we want to bring about positive change, particularly when we deal with challenges. Rushing forward to fix problems does not typically give good results! In my experience it is a lot more effective to take a longer term view; approaching situations as a process and thinking about change as a constant continuum with its ups and downs rather than a one off situation which needs to be resolved. When we accept change as constant it is easier to distance ourselves from our frustration, be patient, and keep persevering.
Our relationship with time impacts on our ability to be patient. We tend to dwell on the future, imagining how much better things could be. This can make us continuously impatient with the current situation.
Eckhart Tolle talks about the delusion of time in our mind: “….the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfilment in whatever form. …Life is now.” (Tolle, 2011, P.40/41)
How to develop patience? I wish I had the answer … One way may be to make good use of difficult, protracted situations to practice patience. It is ultimately a matter of encouraging ourselves to surrender to a situation and accepting the ‘now’ exactly the way it is, without jumping with our mind into a desired future. Another way may be to identify what opportunities exist in the challenging ‘now’, without seeing these only as stepping stones for the future.
Impatience can be good …sometimes. It may propel us into action, enable us to voice clear expectations and set boundaries. Yet, continuous impatience may mean continuous lack of satisfaction with a present situation. It may mean constant stressful thoughts. It may mean rushing instead of being deliberate in our steps. A patient leader can work from a calm and composed mind, aware of him or herself, listening and reflecting on the whole picture, fully satisfied in the ‘now’ and carefully strategizing for the future without losing the present moment.
Reference: Tolle, E., (2011), The Power of Now, London, Hodder & Stoughton