Before you move on to this article to know how you can become a person with an abundance of patience. You should ask yourself first why in the first place you need patience? What change would it bring into your life and the people around you? Do you want it to be a good partner in a relationship or something else? Just ask yourself this simple question. The reason behind your wanting to have more patience is crucial because it would help you understand these ideas and develop a better peaceful mind. Or you must check out this article to know why we get impatient in the first place.
Start Listening & Understanding
A good conversation can turn into a bad one, or a lousy discussion can turn into a good one. It all depends on how we listen to a person what he/she is saying. In most of the conversations, whether it’s with our partner or colleague, we listen to reply rather than understand, which further becomes an argument from a casual talk. And it becomes even worse when our attitude & winning factor takes part in it. We then take our argument to a fight and then fight into hatred towards that person. Therefore, if you want to improve your level of patience & want to keep a good conversation crystal, then start understanding what the other person is saying.
And to achieve that, you can apply a technique mentioned in the book by Marshall Goldsmith, i.e., counting up to 50 in your mind without a single thought. Here what you’ll do is eliminate your inner thoughts. Because whenever we’re talking to another person, what distracts us most is our inner talking. And if you’re not able to calm your inner talking while counting up to 50, then how could you suppose that you’ll understand what others have to say.
Therefore, have 3 sets of counting up to 50 or 60 in mind closing your eyes, 4 to 5 times a day. And slowly, you’ll start to build your patience’s level to understand.
Be present & get used to that situation
You may have heard that practice makes a person perfect. We can’t agree with the fact perfect, but we do believe that practice makes you better. Furthermore, this scenario is also applicable when you want to improve your level of patience. How? By putting yourself in a situation where your level of tolerance could get tested. And to do that, traffic signals and long checkout queues at shopping malls are one of the best places. What happens when you stand at checkout queues or stop your vehicle at traffic signals, is that, that you break the cycle of the habit of doing things faster. This further helps you develop a new habit to accept things that are going slow, which also improves inner calm and patience.
If you remember the story about the turtle and rabbit, then we’d like to tell you something new. The turtle wasn’t slow; instead, it was calm and patient. It was enjoying the journey and placid to reach its destination. While on the other hand, the rabbit was impatient and eager to reach its destination. Which further led it to exhaust and then finally lose the race.
Make distance from the online world
The fast and easy solution to your problems, turning you into a machine. Therefore, to have patience in this non-stopping world, you have to keep your distance from the digital realm with fundamentality. However, don’t be rigorous when you start out; just go easy; otherwise, you’d end up being more impatient and exhausted. How can you do that? It’s very simple.
If you order grocery products or other household items from amazon.com, then don’t do that, else visit a store or a shopping mall. And if you aren’t competent to go out, then choose no-rush delivery. In this way, you’ll save money and would increase patience as well. Avoid ordering food online, instead visit a nearby restaurant. Read books more than audiobooks. Though listening to audiobooks would improve your listening skills and a couple more benefits, but reading books would help you decrease your impatience.
Instead of calling or texting someone, meet that guy in person, and have a real conversation, or you could join a meetup group. Don’t binge Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, alternatively go to a cinema with or without a company. The whole point of sharing these ideas is to make an effort to go out— making the distance from the online world. There are many other things you can do, but if you do these, then you’re stepping yourself out from very dominating services of the internet to make progress in elevating your level of patience.
Think before you say
There are mainly five types of patience- listening, doing, reacting, saying, and accepting.
And if you do as mentioned in the above three points, you’ll be able to improve your patience of listening, doing, and reacting. The below point would help you to improve your patience of acceptance. Now, for the patience of saying, what you need to do is, improve your patience of listening first. Because both are directly proportional to each other.
In a relationship, we lose our patience while having a conversation because we don’t listen. We are merely eager to say and don’t think about what we are saying because of our attitude and winning factor. And at that moment, our tongue slips, and such words might come out that can hurt the other person. But if you listen to the person next to you carefully without any clutter, there’s space for thinking. And when you can think better, you can reply better. Thus improving your overall patience of mind.
There are a couple of things you can do to improve your thinking before saying such as,
- Guided meditation from Headspace application.
- If you’re a person with a shitmouth, then every time you find yourself in a conversation, which is essential and can turn worse, say nothing. What you need to do is, close the fist of both your hands. And keep listening to the other person as long as he/she is speaking. Try not to open your fists. Once the speaker has finished, don’t reply other than “Give me a moment,” then find a piece of paper and write everything the other person had said. And respond to those on the paper, what’s reliable to reply and what is not. By doing so, you’ll be able to decide the right words to respond with because writing always involves thinking.
- Join a sports club to deal with your aggression because sometimes we’re not able to think before saying due to our aggression. By joining a sports academy, you set a new habit to show your aggression, not other than during your time of play. However, it won’t wholly lower your habit of showing aggression in a conversation, but it does help you improve your patience.
Leave, change, and accept
Echart Tolle, in his bestselling book, “The Power of Now,” gave three ideas to deal with or react in a situation to make your present better. The ideas are Leave, Change, and Accept.
He mentioned in the book that no matter what kind of situation you are in, the first thing you need to do is try to accept the situation. And if you can’t or aren’t able to accept the circumstances, then Change it. And when you’re not even able to change the situation, then Leave it.
However, in the case of patience, you only need to do two things from above, Accept and Leave. By accepting a situation, you’re practicing your endurance and improving the level of it. And by leaving the situation, you’re not giving impatience a chance to rise. Nevertheless, if you choose to change the situation and you are not good with the patience of listening, doing, or other, then you might indulge yourself in changing the situation in such a way that it would lead to something wrong.
What gives impatience value?
The only thing that gives impatience value is how we react in a particular situation. And if you haven’t practiced any of the points mentioned above, then you’d probably react in a way that might be not helpful to you and for those around. Therefore, try to practice the ideas we’ve shared in this blog post to boost your level of patience. And if you liked this post, then please share it with your friends, associates, and family members because you never know who needs it the most.
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Nathawat Brothers