Jim’s Gems: The Power of Patience

Do you ever wish you were born with more patience? Are you embroiled in the daily pressure cooker of life made worse from the feeling being impatient?  Impatience exacerbates work-life stress.  It helps destroy our inner peace and calm with anger and frustration.  You might be thinking that your life is doomed to be captive to the burning fires of impatience but that doesn’t have to continue to be the case.  

Many experts now are inclined to believe that patience is an acquired skill which becomes a valuable trait and not an inherent trait as once thought.  It allows us to persevere and remain focused.

Even with this realization, practicing patience can be difficult with life moving at a rapid pace with constant stress and pressure in our personal and professional lives. Yet, the good news is that everyday life presents us with many opportunities to practice and build our patience and, as the old adage goes, “practice makes perfect”.

Patience is a profoundly powerful and useful thing to have. It can bring real value into your life in almost any situation.  Patience can create feelings of peace and calm, as opposed to anger and frustration.

With patience, we can achieve a thousand times more than what we could achieve without it. With patience, we can listen, learn, work and prosper instead of lashing out at every frustration.

Patience enables us to see and to experience rich treasures that we otherwise would have missed completely. Patience gives us the ability to forge deep and meaningful connections with others.

Patience is a very powerful ally.  Patience helps us avoid costly, careless mistakes. It keeps us calm so that our reasoning powers remain intact which allows us to make decisions not influenced by anger and frustration.  

For most of us, it will take time and effort to develop patience but it is certainly doable.  Being patient means having the ability of self-control, restraint and delayed gratification.  There will be no end to our journey of becoming patient but there is no time constraint either.  In “War and Peace” Leo Tolstoy wrote, “The strongest of all warriors are … time and patience.” They are complementary of each other.

Practice patience and you will have the persistence to create great things.  Apply patience and frustration falls away and anger cools.   This permits us to accomplish unbelievable things.

Think about it.  But don’t wait too long before you start practicing patience.