I have a lot of good qualities. I have been called sweet, funny, friendly. But one quality I know I possess is impatience. Red light too long? Swear. Grab for a piece of paper twice and miss? Swear. Get too many pre-recorded phone calls at work in X-amount of time? Swear.
I don’t like this quality about me. At all. My fear is that one day soon, I will say something inappropriate with one of my bosses, or og forbid a client, in hearing range. I am a professional, and this behavior is not acceptable.
Please share with me how I might change this about me. Deep breathing doesn’t work.
Don’t have the willpower to exercise patience on your own? Put yourself in a position that will force you to exercise patience.
Getting a summer job as a camp counselor did the trick for me. I can now tolerate about 10 minutes of getting sand kicked in my face. I learned the hard way that if a kid kicks sand in your face and you get upset, more kids will kick more sand in your face. Throwing sand back at them is also a bad idea (parents can get really hostile.) So I had to learn to pretend it didn’t bother me, and soon it stopped bothering me. Once the kids saw that their tactics could on longer torment me, they stopped.
That is one way of dealing with it.
Another would be to change the way you think about events that upset you. You should realize that anger is the most uneffiecent way of dealing with almost any situation. Anger takes over you and your control of the situation. Others can easily exploit this.
The next time you respond with anger, stop and think about why you are getting angry. Realize that anger is absolutely unnecessary in dealing with the situation and doesn’t help you at all. Maybe after a while it will no long make sense for you to lose your cool and you’ll stop doing it.
ETA: This might also motivate you: impatience is incredibly unattractive. It is one of the few personality traits that can make a physically attractive female seem unattractive to me.
It’s a choice. I was hopelessly addicted to cigarettes for years, and despite wanting to quit, I just couldn’t. No method would work; pills, patches, gums, lozenges, etc. All useless. Then one day I just . . . decided to stop. It’s not impossible. Millions of people have done it. It’s not going to kill me. It has countless benefits and no drawbacks, why don’t I just do it? Worked like a charm.
If you need something that hits closer to home: I used to have borderline road rage. I would fight for position between every red light, swing around people in any convenient direction on the freeway, curse anyone who dared do less than 20mph over the speed limit . . . it’s a wonder I never got in a wreck and only got 1 ticket in 10+ years of driving like this (I’d say I’m a great driver but it was probably luck.) I eventually realized this was a problem that could get me in big trouble, and provided virtually no benefit. It stressed the hell out of me (I literally had caluses on my hands from gripping the steering wheel) and never got me anywhere more than a couple minutes before I would’ve gotten there following the rules of the road. One day I just decided to . . . stop. Now I coast to stoplights, drive almost exclusively in the right lane on the freeway, and I’m not frantically darting my head around looking for cops all the time.
Willpower is unnecessary, and methods just get in the way, when you use logic.
Working with little kids did the trick for me too. I don’t consider myself especially patient, but I’ve been called it by several people who have seen me work with kids, or adults who act like children. At first it’s hard not to get mad, but you’ll cope with it, and eventually you’ll be slower to get mad at all. At least at the kids. The adults who are acting childish are another story.
So volunteer to work with some kids whose behavior will test you because you can’t predict it…I sugest that you call your local community action office and ask them if they use volunteers to read to kids at monthly wic clinics. If they’re involved with America Reads and RIF, they probably do. In big enough cities they hold night clinics too. And big enough means “as big as Portsmouth, NH” so the bar is pretty low. When I did America Reads we had a couple of people who volunteered every month, and they found it rewarding.
Practice eating lunch by yourself outside, relax and enjoy it.
Be certain that you’re doing the best you can with your time, so you’re not wasting it. And I mean that to say that you already are doing the best with your time that you can (most likely). Cursing isn’t going to make the light change faster, so all you’re accomplishing is to annoy yourself by fussing over it.
Realize that being stressed never helps you to make the best decisions. You’re likely smart enough to recognize when the crunch is on, so you don’t really need mother nature’s paws in there riding you.
Ask yourself, “what’s at stake here?” Impatience is usually because you feel that you’re being thwarted in some way – how important is whatever it is that isn’t happening as fast as you’d like it to?
I was going to say something along these lines too. When I get impatient, it’s because some unexpected roadblock is keeping me from accomplishing what I need to get done. It’s frustrating, but I try to remember the other times when something like that has happened and see that I still got everything done that was important to get done.
So maybe the light is red for a long time. And that means dinner gets on the table a bit later. OK. So? Yeah, maybe the kid’s screaming or your husband/SO is impatient for food, but they’ll survive the extra 2 minutes. Or maybe, as is my case, absolutely nothing bad comes from getting home 2 minutes later and getting dinner ready 2 minutes later. I have to keep telling it to myself over and over, but Nothing Bad Happens because of that red light.
Or at work, I remind myself that it’s better to do something slowly and correctly the first time than to have to redo it. Take an extra couple minutes to grab that piece of paper slowly so you get it on the first try or to write an email with thought and care instead of dashing it off in a hurry, possibly with spelling errors or not saying exactly what you meant. What would the consequences be of slowing down? Maybe a couple minutes extra at work each day. Yeah, that sucks, but a whole lot less than getting angry in front of a client or your boss.
I’m not saying it’s easy at all and I have to remind myself of these things frequently. But there’s nothing gained from being impatient. It really doesn’t generate extra minutes in the day to get extra stuff done. It just makes you frustrated and possibly makes others uncomfortable around you. No upside and all down side. If you can step back and think about it logically like that when you feel yourself getting upset, maybe it can help you let things go.
Everything you said makes perfect sense, but this is exactly why I posted this. Yesterday not five seconds after a client left our (very small), I cut loose with the F-bomb. That scared me enough to slow down and think through this issue.
Actually I think everything EVERYbody has said makes perfect sense. Thanks!
Best saying I ever learned from a children’s book: “Make haste slowly.”
Apparently it’s a Latin proverb, but I read it in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet. One of the characters is trying to quickly undo a knot in a soaking wet rope. It’s a moment of danger, but the only way to do it quickly is to slow down and concentrate. I repeat this phrase whenever I’m getting frustrated that I can’t do something fast enough.
