For many years, patience was a virtue.
Then, somehow, patience turned into being lazy and waiting for things to happen.
Poor patience can’t catch a break.
I’ve never been known for having patience. I’ve expanded my capacity with time, but patience will never be a top quality someone names about me.
Last year, in one of his weekly Thursday 3-2-1 emails (which I highly recommend signing up for), James Clear offered his thoughts about patience that finally put a spin on it that changed my perspective. He said:
The most useful form of patience is persistence.
Patience implies waiting for things to improve on their own.
Persistence implies keeping your head down and continuing to work when things take longer than you expect.
This turned around how I think about patience. In the perspective that patience is waiting around, I feel helpless. Powerless. I just have to sit there, twiddling my thumbs, pacing, watching the clock, waiting restlessly for what I want.
But Clear’s framework injects energy into patience, framing it instead as an act of “keep going”, which puts the power right back in my court. To hunker down and keep doing what I’m doing, in service of getting where I want to go. Thinking of patience as focused and committed persistence feels like something I can get my hands around and be in charge of and not at the mercy of.
I notice this “waiting for” energy in a lot of people, from whom I’ll hear things like “I can start my own business once the kids go off to college” or “I can take that trip once I’m retired” or “I’ll finally get some rest once this big project is done.” Clear’s perspective suggests to me that we can shift what we’re waiting for into small things we do, persistently, that can move us toward something we think we can’t have fully right now.
So instead of “I can start my business once the kids go off to college,” maybe the persistence perspective would say “I can take this little step (e.g., do research, take a class, read a book) to move me toward starting my business” – and then it becomes about choosing to use our time and energy to make something happen, instead of waiting, ever so patiently, for the right conditions.
What conditions are you waiting for, ever so patiently, and what could you choose to do that would instead move you closer to what you want?
This Hawaiian kitty is waiting oh-so-patiently for someone to come over and pet him…or put a dish of milk right by his face.