Patience – Tom's Blog on Life

The irreducible essence of it is that the person who is the most patient is the one who understands the most.

So the simple, if hard, path to improving your patience is to improve your understanding.

Most people are not prepared to do this. So they suffer through their impatience.

If you are still with me, well done. Stop and think about it. Frustration comes about as a result of not recognising the existence of factors that apply to the scenario and trying to accomplish a result that does not take all factors into account.

Example 1: You want to change a washer in a tap but when you go the box with your plumbing supplies in it there is no washer there. You forgot you used the last one on the previous tap repair. You become frustrated.

You think about the extra time this is going to take and how that will make you late for something else. Your frustration mounts.

Example 2: True confessions time. This one is real and it was mine.

Many years ago I had an argument with my late wife. I was exceedingly frustrated with her. So much so that I went upstairs to take a time out.

While sitting there I happened to look at a green door. It was to me, an ugly green, a blue-green sort of a green that did not at all appeal to me.

After a few seconds the similarity hit me between the eyes with a force of a Mack truck. Me being upset at Julie for being Julie was as stupid as me being upset at the door for being green.

My upset at Julie stemmed from the fact that I expected something different from her than where Julie was at.

Who was wrong? Julie for being Julie or me for expecting something different from what she was?

Quite obviously I was in the wrong. Humbling realisation.

At that point one of the bigger jigsaw puzzle pieces of life settled neatly and firmly into place.

Any time I was frustrated was because I had an expectation that did not match reality.

It did not cure me of wishing things were different or having a desire to improve things but it did make me a lot more aware that my frustration stemmed from my lack of communication with the various factors in a given scenario.

OK, so how can we immediately improve our patience while on the long road to infinite understanding?

Body Basics
One aspect of existence to which many (most?) people pay too little attention is the effect on our attitude that being underslept or improperly nourished has.

I went through male menopause in my 50s. Nowhere near as bad as many ladies suffer but some nights I racked up little more than 4 hours sleep.

Come mid-afternoon I would sometimes be thinking dark thoughts. After a while I learned when that happened to stop and observe the obvious, that I was suffering from a poor attitude, then ask, “OK, how much sleep did I have last night?”

When the recollection returned something like ‘4 hours’, recognising that trying to compute optimal solutions with a bad attitude was an exercise in futility. So I would say to myself, “OK. Don’t think, just do.” and get busy and productive doing something manual.

I mention this as being hungry or underslept significantly lowers the frustration trigger point to where patience vanishes like early morning dew on a hot morning.

So I have a basic requirement of myself to get adequate sleep and arrange my eating and exercise routine and quality of dietary intake to be as physically optimum as possible.

Contingency Planning – Utilising Waiting Time
One technique you can apply is to sit down and make a list of situations you find challenging and activities that will make the time more productive.

If you have something you can do while waiting it means you are still being productive and therefore less likely to be frustrated with the time waiting.

My time with Woolworths as a supermarket trainee then manager taught me the value of having a pad and pen on me at all times so I could make notes of things to later add to my daily ‘to do list’. You can do that or make notes on your phone.

Expectation Colliding With Reality
The first thing we do when we want to create something, be it a physical or digital product or a relationship is we imagine it in our mind. When you do that it is created in your universe. Each of us has our own universe where we create. Then there is the physical universe. That universe is the universe of agreement.

When you want to create something in the physical universe and somebody else wants to create something else in the same space the two of you do not have agreement, you have disagreement over completely different realities.

This happens from time to time. A lot actually.

So to harbour the expectation that just because you imagine something in your own universe that you will be able to create it uncontested in the physical universe without first obtaining agreement from others is at least wildly optimistic if not downright unreal.

So to get frustrated at someone else’s desire to create something different is allowing a collision between your expectations and reality to upset your equilibrium. Something to be avoided.

The truth is that it often takes far more communication than we predict to attain consensus.

Life Is Short. Enjoy The Trip And Be Kind!

Compassion
I read that there are two sorts of people, the constructive (about 75%) and the destructive (about 25%).

For the constructive majority, the ability to put yourself in the other person’s shoes will often rapidly dissolve frustration.

Be Kind

You may have seen the quote commonly attributed to Brad Meltzer, “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.”

On the post where I saw that one comment rang true with my experience. Rex Perry’s following caveat is at least as important as the prior post:

“It’s a very kind comment. One also has to be aware that a small minority of people are fighting a battle they don’t even consciously know they are fighting and that everyone around them is a part of that battle and must be taken down at all cost. It’s very important to be able to spot those and to know the difference. It’s still a very kind comment, but the caveat is vital to understand if one is going to survive in this world.”

The destructive 25% delight in conflict and chaos, so for you to buy into that conflict with frustration at their insanity only quickly or slowly erases your patience.

Having compassion does not mean you have to tolerate everything. When you are invited to lose your patience by a destructive person who delights in conflict, it pays to remind yourself of the old saying, “What’s the sense of wrestling with a pig? You both get all over muddy and the pig likes it.”

More often than not the best response to criticism or stupid action is to simply recall that quote, turn and leave the scene, patience intact.

Read Their Emotional State
One thing you can do is to start paying closer attention to the actors in the play of your life. Look for the indicators that tell you whether they are angry, worried, bored, etc.

Accurately gauging how they are feeling gives you some foresight on what will be real to them and how they will communicate with you.

A better understanding of people gives you a leg up on delivering responses appropriate to where they are at in present time.

Test The Waters
My late wife told me of a very accomplished board chairperson who would solicit the opinions of each member individually and canvas support for her position on a subject well prior to a vote being called for it in committee.

This meant two things happened. She very rarely, if ever, backed a losing proposition. And her stature as an opinion leader in her circle was greatly enhanced.

How does this apply to patience? Outright opposition or lack of support for your plans can be frustrating. Prior to making a direct sales pitch for your plan you could ask some questions designed to feel out the other person’s perspective on the topic. Then you are in a position to frame your pitch appropriate to their viewpoint.

Expectation Mapping
What understanding does is it enables us to better predict the future so we don’t get disappointed and frustrated.

Events that are predicted have far less power to shatter your equilibrium. One tactic is to train your imagination to countenance different potential realities and have possible solutions you can implement.

The ability to predict is a skill that can be improved by improving our communication with the factors of the situation. How do we do that? Like we improve anything – with practice.

Here are some questions you can start with.
“What events are due to occur today?”
“What expectations do I have about these events?”
“What factors could I anticipate to impact on those events?”
For each unexpected influence, “If that happens, what is the best response?”

Mental Agility And Flexibility
And then there are all the things that happen differently from what you planned or expected. Of course you cannot predict every possible variation that might occur.

Wise individuals have recognised this and written of it:
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”, a phrase attributed to a 1957 article by Allen Saunders and quoted in the John Lennon song ‘Beautiful Boy’.

Another very useful skill is the ability to stay calm and respond quickly and appropriately to anything unforeseen.

So a willingness to face what is actually there as it happens and not be surprised at unexpected events and ability to handle them helps enormously in maintaining a calm and patient attitude towards life.

So work on improving that willingness and ability.

Breathe and Consider the Relative Weight
In the heat of the moment, when emotions are running hot, it is easy to lose perspective of the relative importance of things.

You normally only hear the term ‘temporary insanity’ as a defence against a murder charge, when someone’s response has been fatal to another. Let’s take a broader view of when that label might accurately apply.

If you look over times in the past when the urge to respond to something that upset or frustrated you resulted in you delivering a response in a tone of antagonism, anger or hate, it was rarely constructive.

When a situation causes you stress several changes occur in your body:
-The autonomic nervous system determines that you are in a fight or flight mode
-Short, shallow breaths replace calm, regular breathing
-Stress boosts your cortisol levels
-Blood flow shifts from the organs and flows to the extremities
-Digestion slows down
-The adrenal glands start working overtime.

Two actions you can take to defuse a situation and prevent a descent into ‘temporary insanity’ are as follows.

1. To counter a rising stress level, stop and compose yourself – take several slow, deep breaths to get some oxygen into your lungs.

2. While you are doing this deep breathing, remind yourself that this is a snapshot in the movie of your life. While snapshots capture scenes or points in time they are nowhere near the whole movie!

One question to ask yourself that adds perspective in present time is, “Will this matter in a month or year?”

While some small things – most especially those relating to character, ethics, integrity and responsibility – are worth drawing a line in the sand over, a great many can be instantly demoted on the scale of things you ‘lose patience over’ by recognising their relative weight in the overall picture.

This demotion can be very therapeutic in reducing your angst level.

‘Selling Yourself’
When you feel your patience dropping, one tactic is to list off reasons why losing your patience is a bad idea and the benefits of staying patient.

Another time this technique is useful is when you start to feel frustrated about a long or boring or tedious job. Easy to do if you focus on the doing, not so easy to fall victim to if you switch focus to the product. For instance I personally do not find the idea of going for a jog or doing dips and pushups with 33 kilos on my back to be uplifting but if I change focus to the product – maintaining my health, strength and mobility for another 20 years – then the reservations fall away.

Gratitude Gear Change
What we choose to think about governs our disposition. When something happens over which you would previously lose patience, one thing you can do is make a list of things for which you feel grateful.

So step one of this is to make a list. Could be your parents, siblings, spouse, kids, grandkids, friends, pets, work, hobbies, abilities, goals, accomplishments, experiences, compliments you have received.

Step two is to have that list on hand at all times.

Step three is to remember, when appropriate, to pull out the list and spend say 30 seconds feeling grateful for one of the items on your list. And another, until you are stably ‘up’.

In Closing
I have listed quite a few techniques here. Don’t try to implement them all at once. Pick the two you feel best fit your personal scenarios and spend two weeks applying them and improving your application of them.

Then come back to this article and reread it. Pick out two more suggestions and, without dropping your first two, implement and master those.

Repeat that process. By the time you have implemented the suggestions that you feel apply in your life you should feel a lot calmer and more at peace with life.

Be Kind