Patience Comes Through Practice
By: Michael Ham
Tags: Patience, Self-awareness, Self Improvement, Change, Learning

Patience Comes Through Practice

Patience is not a gift but a skill; skills require practice.

Photo by Little John on Unsplash

Patience is important, but like any skill it must be learned, so impatience is common (and can have serious consequences).

Impatience differs from impulsiveness. In impulsive behavior, the issue of patience does not arise: a person who habitually acts on impulse does so not because they are impatient but because they have poor impulse control. Controlling impulses is important, and developing that skill may require patience, but the two things — impulsiveness and impatience — are different. Impatience is a feeling (a kind of frustration), and impulsiveness is a habit of action (one worth breaking).

You can be impatient with others as well as with yourself. In either case, the feeling seems to arise from frustration at not having control over what you want to happen — either no control of another or no control of yourself. That feeling of frustration is what we call “impatience.” We are frustrated that we cannot make happen what we want to happen as fast as we want it.

A person can deal with impatience by taking two steps: first, understand better what is involved in the process at hand; and second, understand better how to work the process.

Better understand what the process is

If you develop a better understanding of the process at hand, you know the rate of progress to expect and also become able to see the signs of progress — to see that things are indeed happening. By knowing what to expect, you can understand what must happen and why it takes the time it does.

Example: Suppose you want to stifle some particular bad habit you’ve noticed in yourself. Without understanding the process of behavior change, you might well be impatient, so that the first couple of failures makes you impatient with yourself.

But if you understand how a change in behavior progresses, you will be more patient regarding the process — and also see progress that you might otherwise not notice. Initially, you don’t notice the undesired behavior at all; then you become conscious of the behavior after the fact; then you become aware of the behavior right after you did it (the “doh!” moment); then you become aware of the behavior even as you’re doing it; and, finally, you become aware of the behavior just before you do it, and at that point you can interrupt the cycle. From that point, by avoiding the behavior, you extinguish the habit.

Understanding these stages helps you be more patient with yourself — you understand the sequence (and its necessity), and you can see your progress by noticing where you are in the sequence. Rather than being dejected by a “failure,” you can see that you begin recognizing the “failures” sooner and sooner after the moment they occur and thus see you are getting closer to success. (And it’s better to view those early efforts as “practice” rather than “failure.”)

Impatience in this area arises when people don’t understand that the speed of growth/change is much slower than the speed of insight. Insight is instantaneous: you might realize in a flash “I must get stronger,” or “I must change my eating (spending, study, etc.) habits,” or “I must stop saying ‘You know?’ so often.” Those realizations occur with the speed of insight, but actually making the change (as opposed to seeing its necessity or desirability) occurs much more slowly, with the speed of growth. Having realistic expectations reduces impatience. If you decide to (say) change your handwriting and learn how to write italic, you should understand that the skill (unlike the pen) will not arrive via two-day delivery.

Mastering (or even getting good at) a skill — cooking, playing a musical instrument, learning a language, performing a card or coin trick — will take time. If you expect expert performance within a few days, you are likely to become discouraged and quit. But if you focus, not on your performance, but on your progress, you can see the skill’s growth — and seeing that something is happening will reduce impatience.

As you learn skills and observe your process of learning, you also learn how you acquire skills, the steps that you go through. You will see the stages of development, and how errors wither with patient practice.

Human learning, whether the knowledge is abstract or concrete, theoretical or practical, is much like training a neural net: patient correction of missteps by noticing the error and repeating slowly and more carefully the correct response until it is second nature. The process of human learning is like training a neural net because it is training a neural net, the original neural net: your brain.

The book Changing for Good, by James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Carlo Diclemente, is an excellent guide to changing one’s behaviors. (There are other books with the same title, so note the authors.) The authors studied groups of people who wanted to make changes (such as quitting smoking), and looked at the differences between those who were successful and those who were not. They learned that such change is a process that has six stages, and at each stage one must accomplish some key tasks to move successfully to the next stage.

In summary: understanding the nature and signs of progress can help with impatience. You avoid the feeling that “nothing’s happening” because you better perceive what is happening.

Better understand how to work the process

The second way of dealing with impatience is to get a better understanding of what you should be doing to move the process along and then do those things, which gives you things to do and thus fills the time so that it does not feel like empty waiting.

My Go teacher once told me that I was moving too quickly, and said that I must learn to move more slowly. He did not mean that I should simply look at a watch and wait for (say) two minutes to pass before I made my move. He meant that there were things I needed to be doing before I moved, and if I did those, then one sign of that would be that I would not be moving so quickly. (Another sign, presumably, would be that my moves would be better.)

For example, I should take time to look for immediate threats and judge how serious they are and how to respond — and whether they could be turned to my advantage. I should think about what I could gain from different moves I might make. I should make sure to look over the entire board and not focus too narrowly on the local fight underway — it may be that a move elsewhere would gain more than a good response in the local fight.

This study and judgment of possible moves takes time. One reason beginning Go players play quickly is that they focus on one small part of the board and ignore (or don’t notice) the larger picture. Whole-board awareness, vital for success, requires time — time to learn and time to execute.

Another example: in making a big decision, one can readily become impatient and simply make the damn decision, but if you understand the process — as laid out in, say, Decision Traps and/or Winning Decisions, then you understand the steps the process requires. You know what must be done, and you can tell by what you’ve done how much progress you’ve achieved toward making the decision and what still remains to be done to ensure the optimal decision. Knowing what you must do in the process (and doing it) keeps you from feeling impatient: time is not spent in waiting but in doing.

The same holds true in negotiation. Novices are impatient to begin negotiating because they do not yet understand what preparation involves. Because they don’t grasp what preparation entails, they don’t know what they should be doing, and so the time before the face-to-face negotiation begins is for them merely waiting, and that empty time results in impatience.

Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Project on Negotiation describe the process of negotiation and the tasks it requires in their book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In. The time prior to negotiating in person, rather than being empty, is filled with urgent and important tasks to accomplish.

Knowing a process (what it involves and requires) minimizes impatience because (a) you are busy accomplishing the key tasks the process requires to move along, and (b) you can see the signs that show that you are making progress. Feeling impatient indicates a lack of understanding of the process you (or others) are undertaking.

In summary, impatience often comes from not seeing or not understanding what is involved, with the result that it feels as though the time is empty and there is nothing one can do. A deeper understanding will provide plenty to do, and one’s attention and energies, fully occupied, leaves no “empty” time: impatience is squeezed out of existence.