Photo by Артемий Савинков on Unsplash​

A person who has never had to wait for anything in their life has never had the opportunity to exercise their patience. When a time comes where this person requires patience, they will struggle.

These days we have Amazon Prime, Netflix and Just Eat. Next day delivery, food at your doorstep and advert free TV shows. We are almost at a stage of having everything we want and need at our fingertips, with almost no waiting time.

That’s pretty great, but it comes at the cost of underdeveloped patience. Since everything is becoming so easy to access, we hate being patient even more.

If a movie buffers for a few seconds, it’s irritating.
When a delivery gets delayed, it’s annoying.
If our food delivery takes longer than we expected, we get agitated.

In all scenarios, we lack one simple thing - patience.

The problem isn’t so much with these trivial issues, it’s more of an issue when we face bigger problems in life. If you lack patience in these small instances, how will you cope when you REALLY need to be patient?

Sadly, the answer is, you won’t…unless you start practising patience.

Just like you train a muscle and it begins to grow, your ability to be patient can grow too if you practice.

When we feel impatient, it usually transforms into another negative emotion - anger, sadness, stress, anxiety.
The way to stop this is to become more aware of how you’re feeling. If you’re aware of impatience arising, you can shut it down before it manifests into something worse.

I do this by regularly checking in with my feelings whether I’m happy, sad, anxious, angry or any other emotion. The more you do this, the more in-tune you become with your own feelings.

Of all things to be aware of, your emotions are of the most importance.

To practice being patient you have to control your emotions and stop them from progressing into something worse.

Remember, being patient is not about eradicating the whole feeling of impatience, that’s near impossible. Rather, we want to catch the impatience early and stop it from turning into something worse.

You stop the negativity in its tracks.

Before I go, I’ll leave you with this beautiful quote that sparked the idea for this post. Some food for thought.