Impatience, My Nemesis
Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash
I am not a patient person. I tend to move fast, be action-oriented, and eager to jump into solving the next shiny problem. This can make me anxious and overwhelmed as I commit to too many things. I logically know that I’d like more patience in my life; and I simultaneously struggle with it. I’ve learned that I often need to run head-long at the struggle and in moving through it, truly internalize the value of patience. I’m sharing what I’ve learned through working with my coaches, and also while experiencing coronavirus and shelter-in-place. It is a work in progress.
Have you heard the old Zen story of a woman who speaks to a Master, to ask about enlightenment?
Woman: Master, I want to reach enlightenment. How long will it take me?
Master: It will take you 10 years of studying, praying, meditating, reflecting…
Woman: But Master, I will study, pray, meditate and reflect harder than anyone you have ever met. How long will it take me to reach enlightenment?
Master: Well, then it will take you 20 years!
The first time my business coach shared this Zen story with me, I wanted to scream in frustration. Why can’t I work harder to make things happen faster? My bull-headed approach, is to work harder and faster, to put in more hours and more effort because I believe it will pay off. And after a couple of minutes, I laughed and laughed at the Zen paradox and begrudgingly accepted that I could see the perspective of the Master. Perhaps the working extra hard was not doing me any good.
Slowing down and being patient is a mindset that I am continually cultivating. This is what has worked for me.
1. Slow Down to Speed Up
Slow Down to Speed Up feels like the essence of patience for me, and it’s also liberally stolen from Rich Litvin. It’s a mindset that I aspire towards. It’s focusing on the long-term vision. It’s the recognition that it will take time to build any good and long-lasting thing.
I learned this when I moved from the design agency world where we would spend 8–12 weeks in an innovative field, such as the connected home. We would dream up the future of the connected home— create a product brand, understand the customer, and bring this future home to life with end-to-end stories, nifty interfaces and industrial design of useful devices. This was green field, making a new vision from nothing. Yet after doing this repeatedly for 5 years and rarely seeing any of the products make it to market, it started to feel fluffy and frivolous. In contrast, working deeply on a system for years, whether it’s a data visualization enterprise product or Facebook ads or the new Facebook Watch video platform had a completely different rhythm. Yes, there is the initial dreaming up a north star vision and bringing it to life with a concept video. But it felt so much more satisfying to release an MVP and then continue to iterate month over month. The iteration involves putting the products out into the world and having real people use it (sometimes to their own bad actor nefarious ends) and then evolving the product based on the learnings. And if the initial vision didn’t quite match people’s needs— that Facebook videos could be content that people bonded over socially— you could work over months and years towards creating meaningful social interactions around video. It requires patience to take this long view. It requires grit and perseverance to continue to experiment, iterate, and launch over and over again while keeping the North Star vision in mind.
I’ve learned that the long-term, the marathon no the sprint is what satisfies and fulfills my urge to create meaningful products and processes.
2a. Mind Tools: Reflection & Gratitude
If Slow Down to Speed Up is the mindset, two mind tools help when I’m in the midst of impatience. The first is the gift of reflection. I’m able to look back over my life and find instances where slowing down and taking the long view worked out better and gave me more fulfilled outcomes. Taking that long-term perspective only feels possible when I’m now in my 40s and have more professional experiences.
The second is the gift of gratitude. I’ve recently started a gratitude practice with my 9 yo daughter to help her get to sleep. As we snuggle in bed, we take turns talking about what we’re grateful for from the day. As we get beyond 5 things, they start to get a little more outlandish and creative— “I’m grateful that when our cat went poop outside of the litter box, he went in the hardwood hallway and not on the rug.” We keep going until each of us is out. Yes, we’re both slightly competitive which also stretches our imagination.
Some research behind gratitude practices and how it affects your brain comes from psychologists who write that gratitude improves happiness, relationships, health and ultimately changes the neurostructures in our brain. A UC Berkeley research study, shows lasting positive effects of gratitude on the brain, and, in another vote for patience, that these take effect over the long-term.
2b. Body Tools: Physical Exercise
We hold anxiety and tension in our bodies. I hold impatience within my body. My throat and core clenches. My shoulders feel tight. My whole body bounces up and down with nervous, anticipatory energy, all-wound-up with nowhere to release it. It’s a familiar body pattern for me.
Physical movement releases that energy and impatience. I like variety so I typically do 3 types of exercises:
Reflection. I go on gentle ambling walks around the neighborhood simply to get moving. As I walk, I notice details of the houses, landscaping, and streets. Next, I occasionally do yoga vinyasa flows and stretches. They help me move without pushing me so that I have to flow between poses and notice what’s happening.
Discipline. I strength train to reach weight goals and to build up muscle mass. It’s another source of patience as I’m adopting the long-view of taking care of my body. It requires mono-focus to do the reps on a front squat while exquisitely paying attention to form.
Expressive / adrenaline. I can’t get myself to run, or do most forms of cardio. However, dance raises my heart-beat, activates my brain to follow the routine, lets me be goofy, and also relate back to my dance-obsessed self in college. I’ll also go hiking, typically up mountains, as the other other way to raise my heart-rate.
Reflection+Discipline+Adrenaline: My ultimate physical love affair is with surfing. It gets me outside, spending lots of quiet time floating on the ocean. There is the discipline of maintaining physical fitness, especially upper body to make it out past the break, especially at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. And finally, the adrenaline of being pounded by the waves or the sheer joy of being up and riding.
When dealing with my impatience, depending on the moment in time, different forms of these physical movements work for me. Consistently, I know that I need to be in the water and surfing at least once a week and I have a planned trainer workout (now remote) twice a week.
3. Create Whitespace
Finally, if Slow Down to Speed Up is mindset and the Mind & Body Tools are strategies to mitigate symptoms, the biggest payoff and inspiration for me is creating whitespace. When I’m impatient and my mind is whirring, I watch for busy-work, for activities that I may be good at, but don’t necessarily have much impact— it simply makes me feel good to do them. When I notice myself doing that, I make whitespace in my schedule.
Whitespace in my schedule is similar to whitespace in a design layout. It is the unplanned, no to-do list time, to be open and breathe. It’s typically a block of 2–3 hours to think. It helps me connect to my longer life vision of what really matters. And it helps me contextualize the goal that I’m impatient with. If I want to build my leadership coaching business faster, and I have the luxury of time, I can open a sketchbook and capture all the experiments I could play with to grow. I can ideate what fun things I’d love to do.
Alternately, if I don’t feel like being too directed within my whitespace, I first establish an intention in my — e.g. take a long-term creative view of growing my business— and leave it there while doing something completely different. I might chat with a friend, play boardgames with my daughters, or bake a rainbow layer cake. Inevitably, I find that my mind will keep working on the intention and something unexpected comes up.
Whitespace is magical. We often don’t have enough of it in our lives. We are too busy to step away from the daily weeds. It makes us think strategically and long-term, and opens up untapped creativity.
Bottom-Line
Impatience is my nemesis. It’s something I’ll keep working on for the rest of my life. I’ve found that three things help mitigate the impatience: 1. Switching my mindset to Slow Down to Speed Up, 2. Using mind and body tools to manage the impatience, and 3. Creating whitespace to dream.