Impatience has plagued me most of my life. I jokingly say there’s a flower named after me: The Impatient. All kidding aside, those like me who suffer from impatience fail to make a distinction between hustle and impatience, so let me do that now: Impatience often leads to hustle, but hustle doesn’t always lead to impatience. While hustle gets things done, impatience ruins relationships and compromises your health.
Hustle is about being efficient and having a sense of urgency — great traits for entrepreneurs, founders and business owners. Impatience, on the other hand is the experience that time is running out and that someone or something is the obstacle to forward movement. It’s the slow line at the grocery store, the backed-up traffic, the person on their cell phone at the bottom of an escalator — all frustrating experiences for the person with a mission or a deadline.
Some people are just naturally more impatient than others. Scientist Andrew Huberman says that part of what’s going on is that your internal metronome is going so fast that it isn’t matching the reality of time at the moment. Here are some ways to take control of the internal metronome and overcome the most misunderstood experience of impatience.
Recognize your patterns
All progress starts by telling yourself the truth. What triggers your impatience? For me, it was anything that slowed me down or my judgments about how others behaved. With higher awareness, I realized something surprising: Even when I didn’t have a deadline, I still felt frustration toward people when they took more time than I thought they should.
Bottom Line: Impatience is about you, not the situation or other people.
Stop exaggerating
Notice how often you make a big deal over two or three minutes, having to wait your turn or having to listen to someone long-winded. Impatient people exaggerate all the time, and I was no different. I’d say, “It took forever for them to get back to me,” and “The line was wrapped around the building.” That’s really how it felt. One day, while in a long line, I tried an experiment. I put a 10-minute timer on my watch. To my surprise, my wait time was only two or three minutes, not the 45 minutes I would have claimed it was.
Bottom Line: Knowing your feelings won’t change the facts, but knowing the facts can change your feelings.
Get over yourself
As much as I hate to admit it, impatience towards others often means you think you are more important than them. Your schedule is more important. Your objectives are more important. Your time is more important. When you see others as an obstacle it means you aren’t respecting them or the reality that their goals are just as important to them.
Bottom Line: Check your sense of self-importance, and you’ll have more respect and empathy for others.
Pad, plan and adapt
Very often, when I felt impatient, it was because I had unrealistic expectations and didn’t allow any leeway for surprises. I didn’t expect a long line or a traffic jam. I didn’t expect a moderator to go on and on, leaving very little time to deliver a presentation. What I’ve learned is to pad the calendar five or ten minutes in travel, have a plan B for delays and adapt to the situation by changing expectations.
Bottom Line: Rarely does anything go as planned. When you pad, plan and adapt, you aren’t impatient, you aren’t attached and you aren’t angry.
Shift your narrative
There’s something you’re telling yourself that makes you experience impatience. There’s also something you’re telling yourself that allows you to feel justified in the way you show your irritation, disappointment or frustration. In narrative coaching, I learned a helpful concept: Your story is the source of your suffering. You can blame others or circumstances for your experience, but there’s no power in blame. The lack of power elevates your impatience. Shift your narrative. Instead of talking about what others are doing or not doing, focus on what choices are available to you. Take responsibility for your experience, and your experience will transform.
Bottom Line: Change the interpretation, and you change the experience.
While there are more technologies to save time, most of us experience time slipping away. We’re drowning in a sea of choice; the skills we learned a year ago lose relevance just as quickly. Email inboxes keep us busy for hours, and social media is a time-wasting distraction. The environment we live and work in contributes to the speed of the internal metronome. In the end, circumstances and people can trigger impatience or trigger a reminder that overcoming impatience is a choice and a practice.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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