How to Have More Patience

The first step to developing more patience comes through mindful self-awareness. This involves becoming aware of your reactions and responses to people, events and circumstances. Impatience at first of course often manifests as a slight discomfort and agitation you feel in the pit of your stomach. Instead of being present and mindful of the situation, your mind begins to wander and think ahead of itself. This causes you to feel a little anxious, and frustration eventually ensues. During these early moments, it’s important that you stay mindful of your thoughts and reactions. Just observe and be there within the moment.

At this stage it’s important that you don’t allow your emotions to get out of control. You need to essentially reel in any frustrations you might be feeling with this person or situation. The moment you allow your frustrations to get out of hand is the moment you lose control of yourself in this particular situation. In order to avoid this scenario, just settle yourself within the moment and focus all your attention on your breath. Just breathe in and out for several counts without worrying about anything else. Just be still and present within that moment — fully absorbed in the movement of your breath.

Having settled your emotions, you now have greater clarity-of-mind and can therefore see things more objectively. It’s time now to quickly assess the situation and figure out what exactly caused you to feel impatient. Question why you are feeling impatient about this person or situation. Also reflect on what might have triggered these feelings. What specifically happened? What did the other person do? Or, what didn’t they do that made you feel this way? Identifying these triggers will allow you to better assess the situation, which can then potentially help you figure out how to view it in a more helpful way.

If the trigger for your impatience involves another person then empathy is something that can be of tremendous value. Empathy is essentially an awareness you have of another person’s feelings and emotions. It’s an ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking, feeling and going through in that particular moment. In other words, you are essentially putting yourself into the other person’s shoes and trying to experience this situation from their vantage point. This is of course extremely valuable. Seeing the circumstances from their perspective will encourage you to question whether impatience is the right response in this situation.

Now that you are more open-minded about things, it’s time to question whether or not impatience is actually the right response in this particular situation and at this particular time. You of course feel a certain way about things because of the stories you have been telling yourself. Change those stories, and you immediately change your view of the situation. Possibly there is value in showing patience in this moment. If there is, then it’s now time to look for that value and embrace this new perspective. How you handle yourself in this situation could very well present you with some valuable life lessons.

Having fully explored your feelings and looked at various views and perspectives of the situation, it’s now time to decide how you will respond. Every situation will of course be different. Your impatience might very well be tied to time sensitive factors that are somewhat out of your hands. In such instances, you might decide to act to resolve your feelings and embrace impatience as a motivating force that pushes you forward. Alternatively, you could choose to just be there in the moment and wait it out until the situation resolves itself. Or finally, you could just decide to observe and learn from your experience.