“What Patience Gives You”
Have you heard the popular phrase “slowing down to speed up?” What might this reaction process mean within your professional and personal life?
“Patience is not the ability to wait but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.”
~ Joyce Meyer
Inside of you is the capacity to accept when you must slow down. The power of patience is held within your mind. Mindfulness is a practice that you can become more aware of by working to notice your inner thoughts, emotions, and body sensations. Mindfulness fosters resilience. It’s a foundational psychological tool that empowers us to feel effective and capable. You can release anger or distress with composure.
Patience is a daily practice that includes slowing down the mind so that you can become more aware of your thoughts and reactions. According to Hal Green, Ph.D., “A major study in 2002 found a correlation between having a sense of time urgency and impatience (TUI) and an increased probability of developing hypertension or high blood pressure… hypertension has been termed ‘the silent killer’.”
People skilled with expressing patience collaborate and communicate logically and are often successful in achieving their goals.
When you begin to notice your thoughts, you open yourself to many gifts! You will likely notice new ways of evaluating your opinion. Your support to others will become more intentional. With patience your replies will include the actions that YOU really want to take for the highest good of the situation. When you begin to embrace the downtime within your mind, barriers of thought actually open up into possibilities.
What does patience currently give YOU?
Like any new personal practice, it can be uncomfortable, but the benefits of mindfulness toward patience are real and substantial.
1. Your listening and speaking skills will expand to new levels.
2. The joy you feel within your life grows stronger because of your improved actions and dissipated stress.
3. Opportunities emerge more often before you because you can notice them more frequently.
4. Challenges that you encounter continually are re-evaluated within you more quickly than in the past.
5. Respect for yourself grows.
Practice the Pause! Pausing when speaking, slowing down your verbal feedback, and waiting until a situation can pass is known to bring a reframing of thought which is often less likely to bring a reaction of a poor decision, guilt and regret. Literally Practice the Pause!
Peter Economy, The Leadership Guy writes, “having more patience can calm your mind and make you feel more gratitude, more connection to mankind and to the universe, and a greater sense of abundance.”
Change continues to be at the forefront in 2023. Business and organizations are creatively looking at various hybrid options to respond to staffing needs, talent shortages, supply-chain barriers, inflation, and daily circumstances which require many to drastically increase levels of performance and productivity. Our world is moving too fast and so are we.
Despite the marvels of the digital age, we must often step back… listen with curiosity more intently to your intuition and regroup. Your intuition is your inner compass!
Patience is a gift when given or received.
Do you wish for a more fulfilling life? How would your attitude change if you were more patient with others? Slowing down and becoming more patient helps you to reframe life decisions.
An Activity to Try
Here’s a wonderful exercise from Web MD to implement and share:
“The Bell Exercise. A simple practice you can do to build patience is the bell exercise. First, make a sustained tone using a bell, guitar string, or something similar. Then, focus on the tone until you hear the sound stop entirely.
Repeat as many times as you need, ringing the bell a little louder to sustain the note longer. This introductory patience exercise can open the door to breathing meditation, guided meditation, and long-form mindfulness training.
Sources
1. 25 Patience Quotes That Inspire Peaceful Persistence
