I learned how to be patient

How to Be Patient and Take Charge of Your Life

Career Resilience Coach passionate about supporting others to grow and thrive in a complex world. Read full profile

When I googled the meaning of patience, it said:

“the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.”

I have always struggled to be patient in my life. Even though I know that when I am able to be patient, I always get a better result. Being patient is quite a simple concept to apply but for some reason, it can be so difficult to put into practice.

Practising patience helps you to better manage the curveballs that life throws at you. Patience also brings calmness, optimism, hope and confidence to your life.

“Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.” — John Quincy Adams

The key message is quite clear – when you practise patience, you are more likely to lead a successful and happy life.

In this article, you will learn why being patient is good for you, and how to be patient to take better control of your life.

Table of Contents

Why Being Patient Is Good for You

Patience is a great way to exercise self-control. When you are patient you are more likely to take charge of your life.

Here are three key benefits (there are many more) that practising the art of patience can bring to your life:

Better Decision Making

By learning patience, you will become better at making decisions. Patience gives you breathing space and therefore you are more comfortable with taking the time to assess difficult situations and reflect on how you wish to proceed.

You also develop more self- confidence and know that if you rush into making a decision it will not end well for you. The chance of making a big mistake is higher if your decision is made in haste.

A Well Balanced Life

By becoming more patient, you will greatly reduce the stress in your life.

Because you are more self-aware, you have a better understanding of what makes you happy and you will tend to focus on doing the things that bring you joy. The result of this is that you become more aware of how to live your life in balance rather than constantly have to fight fires.

Better Relationships

By becoming more patient, you are more understanding, open and flexible towards others’ mistakes and shortcomings. As a result, you are able to build stronger and longer-lasting relationships.

Patience does not come easily to many of us, especially when we live in a world of constant disruption and change. Patience is a mindset and it is not something that comes overnight. If you truly want to be a more patient person, you do have to be prepared to do the work. Embracing patience in your life is part of a life journey and therefor you must be willing to be in it for the long haul.

If you can accept that you are okay with stepping out of your comfort zone and that developing a patient perspective will not come instantly, then you are ready to embrace patience into your life.

So what can you do to become more patient and take control of your life?

How to Be More Patient

Outlined below are 3 practical techniques you can apply right now into your life that will help you be more patient and take charge of your life.

1. Understand What Triggers Your Feelings Of Impatience

The opposite of patience is impatience. Everyone has experienced the feeling of impatience many times in life – in fact, you can’t escape it!

For you to become more patient, it is important that you understand what triggers your feelings of impatience. What is it that you think about or feel right before you lose it? Once you know what triggers you, then you can work on using calming exercises to help you better manage those feelings of impatience when they start to build up.

Making yourself wait before you react, and practising deep breathing exercises are great techniques to help you manage those surging feelings of impatience. Counting to 100 under your breath is another technique to help you WAIT before you react.

2. Stop Doing Things That Are Not Important

We can get easily distracted and stressed when we are doing things that are not really important and are taking up a huge amount of time. One way of removing stress is to stop doing things that create more stress for you.

Take a few minutes out at the end of your day and reflect on the tasks you have done. Write these tasks down and then write down the tasks you have to do tomorrow.

Patience is about having a more positive and reflective perspective in life, so look at each of these tasks and decide which are top priorities for tomorrow and which tasks can wait for a few days. Then go do the important tasks. If you consistently practise this technique, you will slowly take back control over your life.

3. Work on Changing Your Attitude

A person who is patient is able to assess situations from a more positive perspective. They tend to accept a difficult situation as it is and will not fight it or avoid it. They will work with it and try to work on a solution that will enable them to move forward.

Patience is all about perspective and how you look at situations. If you miss your bus or are running late for a meeting and stuck in traffic, you have the choice about how you react. A patient person will work on putting a positive spin to the situation and try to reduce the tension that potentially could potentially build up.

Having a more impatient perspective on life is not going to serve you well. Impatience will block you from living life where you are in control.

Techniques that you could use that will help you have a more positive outlook on life are:

Final Thoughts

Practising patience in your life will enable you to have more freedom of choice and as a result, have more control of your life.

If you commit to the journey of living a patient life, the rewards that you will reap will be unbelievable. Who wouldn’t want to live a flourishing life where you are in charge?

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Learn how to be patient in 5-minutes a week

How to be patient: building calm composure

The fast-paced world we live in doesn’t leave too much room for patience—or so it would seem, at least. We can’t afford to be patient; we want things done, and we want them done now. Think of that work project that you just have to complete by the end of the week. What about that summer body that you only have two months left to work on? Time is ticking, and life doesn’t wait for anyone, right?

But slowing down is crucial for navigating life’s biggest moments.

Patience isn’t just a virtue. It’s a valuable life skill that can prove helpful both at work and in your private life. If you have more patience, people will see you as a friendlier, more focused individual. The good news is that you can actually learn how to be more patient. All it takes is a few consistent, smart behaviors.

With more patience, you’ll have an easier time controlling your temper, and you’ll make better and more rational decisions through effective analytical thinking. Given enough time, you’ll also become a better, more patient leader, teaching your team members how to seek and appreciate patience in their own lives, and perhaps a better teacher, partner and friend.

Here are our top tips for a more relaxed, gentle way of navigating the trials and tribulations of life.

How do you develop patience? Seven ways to be more patient

1. Wait, even when you don’t have to

There are moments in life where patience can really mean the difference between resolution and conflict. Think of a partner who asks you for some alone time so they can mourn the death of a loved one. Think of that employee who asks for a few more days to complete a project because they’ve been having a hard time at home. These are times in which you pretty much have to step back and wait. Sometimes time is all you can give, and simply waiting can be the only solution to a problem.

But you don’t have to think that big. Patience actually begins by appreciating the small things you take for granted. Next time you make some coffee, give yourself a minute or two before taking a sip. If you’ve just baked a wonderful chocolate cake, take a moment to appreciate the result before cutting yourself a slice.

Make a habit of waiting, and you’ll slowly build patience where there was previously none. In the same way you can train your body to endure more, you can just as well train your mind.

2. Acknowledge life’s struggles

Patience starts with the small things and can slowly influence you to act more maturely. It may be a hard pill to swallow, but not doing anything at all is sometimes exactly what you should be doing.

We’ve already touched on certain life situations that are best treated with a generous amount of patience. Maybe your partner just got fired and needs some extra time to recover. Perhaps you sprained your ankle and have to stay inside for a couple of weeks. Some things just take time, and there’s really no point stressing about them.

Yes, you don’t have control over everything that happens in your life, and that’s alright. Acknowledging life’s struggles as they come and accepting the fact that some things can’t be changed will put your mind at ease.

3. Focus on what’s important

We all live busy lives and complete hundreds of important—at least to us—tasks every day. But do we ever take a moment to think and really evaluate our daily activities? Is everything as important as we make it out to be, or are there things and people that bring unnecessary stress to our lives?

If you’re a perfectionist at heart, you’ll want to be the best at everything you do (but what’s really the true price of perfectionism?) You might also be tempted to take on more responsibilities than you can actually handle. Spending too much time on ultimately unimportant tasks will make it harder for you to find patience when you really need it. Patience can be a limited resource, and unnecessarily forcing yourself into situations that test it will deplete that resource for when it’s really needed.

Think about it: do you really have to join your friend’s chess club if you don’t even enjoy chess? Do you really want to spend your whole Saturday afternoon helping an annoying co-worker move? If you want to be patient and retain energy for tasks and activities that really matter to you, you need to practice saying no to stress-inducing situations more often.

Needless to say, you shouldn’t always be patient with everyone and everything. In some cases, it might make sense to confront an issue head-on. You might encounter racist, sexist or uncivil remarks at the office or having to deal with an abusive parent or partner at home. Your wellbeing and self-worth should always come first; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

4. Keep track of your triggers

While it’s true that the roots of impatience can usually be traced back to stressful habits, not everyone has the same things that set them off. With millions of neurons in your brain powering thousands of thoughts every second of each day (and night), it’s easy to move from task to task mindlessly, doing most things on autopilot.

The only way to get a better idea of what’s holding you back is to actively keep track of the things that make you impatient. How else can you ever know what’s really going on? It might be a toxic partner or friend who’s always taking and giving nothing in return. Maybe it’s an irritating co-worker who never listens to what you’ve got to say. But equally it might be something more subtle; something you have to look inward to really figure out.

Keep your eyes open and try to figure out your specific triggers. If you can, take note of events that lead to feelings of annoyance, or that make you lose your patience.

It’s time to play detective. When did it happen? Who was involved? What did they do? How did you react? Every bit of information you can extract is crucial. Examine every aspect of these incidents as closely as possible, and you’ll quickly begin to identify familiar patterns in your (and others’) behavior.

Once you have plenty of data at hand, try to focus on the bigger picture. Will any of these incidents really affect your life in the grand scheme of things? Was this trigger even worth your time and energy? As you become more conscious of your behavioral patterns, you’ll realize that your frustration over trivial matters is often largely unwarranted.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that your impatient behavior in itself is irrational. It just means that you’re kind of missing the point. More often than not, losing your patience is a symptom and not the cause of the problem.

Do you often feel tired, overwhelmed, stressed, and powerless to do the things that really matter to you? It might be that instead of directing your energy towards the thing that’s frustrating you, you need to point it at yourself instead and perform a little self-care.

In times like these, make sure you:

The recent global pandemic hasn’t been kind to most of us. If you’ve only grown cranky and impatient recently, a change of scenery and environment will help you find your good old self, whenever it’s safe to do so. Give yourself a break and focus on self-fulfillment to gently guide yourself back into a peaceful headspace.

5. Take a deep breath

Identifying your triggers is only the first step. Controlling yourself and fighting your impulses will take as much—if not more—practice. Did you know that proper breathing comes with a number of mental and physical health benefits?

When you first start feeling like you’re losing your patience, take a deep breath and hold it in for a few seconds. Slowly breathe out and continue the process two more times. These three breaths should give you plenty of time (30 to 45 seconds) to calm your nerves and bring you back to the here and now.

Remember, when practicing controlled breathing, you should solely focus on the breaths themselves, nothing else. Feel your lungs as they slowly fill with air. Put your hand on your stomach and feel the air escape your body as you exhale. Pay attention to your breathing, and don’t let your mind drift away.

Another useful trick you can try when frustration takes over is to stop and count to ten. You’ll see that as time passes, your need to yell or act impulsively won’t be as strong anymore. For best results, combine and alternate between these two exercises every time you feel like you’re losing control. If your anger and frustration persist after a confrontation, walk away and take some extra time to think and relax.

If you often get upset over little things, you need to learn to be patient with yourself first of all. You can’t always predict how you’ll react to a specific situation, and you certainly can’t predict how others will react—and that’s alright. Learning how to be patient is largely about mental clarity: Shifting your focus from satisfying the momentary irritation to contemplating the bigger picture.

6. Meditate

Meditation and mindfulness are all about connecting to your real emotions and discovering your inner self. By helping to rewire the brain and create new neural pathways, meditation can alleviate stress, improve your state of mind, and actively contribute to healthier lifestyle choices.

Although not technically an emotion, impatience is a negative character trait that can be unlearned with consistent practice. By drawing attention to the raw emotions and energy of the here and now, meditation takes the simple breathing exercises we already mentioned to a whole different level. You can’t, of course, meditate in the heat of a moment. Meditation and mindfulness exercises are mental activities that require time, effort, and—you guessed it right—patience.

By dedicating more time to making that mental space and finding your authentic self, you’re getting one step closer to eliminating your bad habits and impulses. But to do that, you’ll first need to practice patience with yourself and with others.

If mediation doesn’t do it for you, you can find other healthy ways to relieve frustration. Punch a pillow, call a friend, or just yell in the middle of a field to let off steam. While many gyms and fitness centers are closed during the pandemic, outdoor activities like team sports, group hikes, and Bootcamp classes are still ongoing. They may end up being just the release that you need.

7. Laugh and love

Life has a funny way of proving that we sometimes take it all a bit too seriously. We can sometimes see insurmountable problems everywhere we look but rarely do we make some times to really count our blessings. It’s usually not until we have to face a truly life-changing event (e.g., the death of a loved one, serious illness) that we realize how trivial and insignificant most of our day-to-day problems are.

Have you perhaps ever wondered why older people and people who have been through hell in life are usually the ones who show the most patience? Real hardships remind us that life is fleeting. Be that as it may, there’s always enough time for an odd smile or laugh here and there.

Current research indicates that laughter has quantifiable positive physiologic benefits. Appreciating life and living in the moment isn’t always easy, but it’s a way of living that brings a little bit more love and kindness to the world.

We all stand small in the face of death. But you don’t have to experience tragedy firsthand to be kind and compassionate. A bright outlook on life will allow you to treat frustrating situations with remarkable calm and patience.

How can I be patient with progress?

Being patient in your search for patience might sound a bit silly, but it’s good to remind yourself that change doesn’t happen overnight.

Cut yourself some slack and learn through your mistakes. Yes, there’ll be bad days and some unnecessary outbursts along the way, but that’s just part of the game. If you’re persistent with your approach and make a habit of regularly practicing and applying the tips we’ve shared with you here, you’ll start seeing results much faster than you expect.

Stay positive, be more patient, and others will return the favor. Wait—and think—before you allow your frustration to build. All things will pass. Don’t forget to breathe.

Improve your patience in minutes with fast AI coaching.

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11 Ways to Be More Patient in Life

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Since you’re here, I’d be willing to guess that you’ve had it up to here a bit too frequently…and you’re looking for some relief.

I can relate. Kids. Work. Personal and familial relationships. Interruptions from co-workers. Deadlines. Traffic.

Time goes by quickly and days are overwhelming. And what does this lead to? A complete loss of patience.

I don’t have time to wait for the person who is checking out in front of me to fix their complicated issue. Oh, and every. single. time. I pick a tollbooth lane, it’s behind the one person who can’t figure something out.

I’d say I have a pretty low tolerance for delay, and I think that the final straw to prove that is that I’m the one touching the elevator button several times in a row, thinking it will recognize that I seriously need to be somewhere—apparently 2-3x as much as anyone else.

Like a lot of people in our society, I prefer to have what I need right about now.

And, if you really want to know how patient other people are– according to a British survey, the average person gets frustrated within 16 seconds of waiting for a website to load, and 25 seconds for a traffic light to turn green.

In this article, we are going to talk a little about patience and the importance of having it. Then we will look at 11 ways that you can increase the amount of patience you have in your life.

Let’s start by defining patience and looking at how important it is to develop (if you don’t already have it).

What You Will Learn

What Is Patience and Why Do I Need It?

Dictionary.com seems to have the most comprehensive definition of patience. They offer three definitions:

“The quality of being patient, as the bearing of provocation, annoyance, misfortune, or pain, without complaint, loss of temper, irritation, or the like.”

To me, this means being able to stay calm when you’re aggravated.

“An ability or willingness to suppress restlessness or annoyance when confronted with delay.”

This one clearly has to do with time, so if you are very protective of your time or you’re often rushed, but you can accept unexpected delays, you would be considered to be patient.

“Quiet, steady perseverance; even-tempered care; diligence.”

So, pretty much having the willingness to keep going, even if things aren’t going your way.

And what is patience in layman’s terms? It’s basically a practice of self-control.

Without having patience after a long day, you will undoubtedly experience ego depletion, which means you’re no longer able to regulate your thoughts, feelings, or actions.

What kind of impact do you think that could have on your life?

Your willpower to have patience takes a bit of a nosedive throughout the day because you’re constantly using it, and by the time dinner has been cleared, you’re completely depleted. Everyone reaches their limit, and once you’ve gotten to that point, it becomes nearly impossible to have any type of patience for something standing in your way. If you’re tempted to yell at your kids at night for misbehaving, that’s the time you’re probably going to do it. However, if you can learn to improve your patience, you will be able to pause before you react to something unexpected and gain control of your thoughts.

Building patience will also:

To avoid having adverse reactions to situations such as these, it’s important to learn how to develop patience. Let’s look at a few ways you can do this.

11 Ways to Be More Patient in Life

1. Start to Wait for Things on Purpose

Weird, but true. One of the most effective ways to become more patient is to literally make yourself wait for things. Research published in Psychological Science reports that making yourself wait for things that you want can not only increase your patience, but also make you happier in the long run.

You can start small by putting that unopened package on your front step aside when you get home and tend to it later. Then you can try bigger things like putting off a purchase that you really want. And, if you’re among the 96% of people who will knowingly eat or drink something that will burn your mouth because you don’t have the patience to wait? Just chill for a sec. Literally.

Your patience will grow with time. (And to make the wait less boring, listen to these songs about waiting.)

2. Explore Your Triggers

You’re probably more willing to be patient in some circumstances than in others, so what makes the difference?

As you pay closer attention to losing your patience, think about the antecedents to these events. What was going on right before you lost your patience? Is it when a coworker isn’t responding to an urgent email? Your spouse isn’t answering their phone? Your child won’t stop singing that song about sharks?

Some triggers will happen more often than others, and you can work up to focusing on the situations that really grind your gears the most. But start with something manageable–a trigger that only makes you a little impatient, not something that sets you off the edge. If you can gain control over this first trigger, take the skills you learned from that exercise and apply it to another trigger. One by one (with practice and patience), you will make great progress.

Not sure how to recognize your triggers? Start by keeping a sheet of paper with you that you can write a tally mark on every time you lose your patience. Doing this will help you control your impulse of getting mad because you will learn to become more aware of it. When you acknowledge your triggers, you may be better suited to take control over your feelings and calm down a bit.

3. Put Unimportant Things Aside

There are a lot of things you probably do (whether you realize it or not) that take time away from the more important things on your agenda. So one way to gain patience is to gain time.

Take a few minutes to look at what you have going on every day, and try to remove 2 or 3 tasks that take up time, but aren’t really that important. You need to figure out what’s a priority and what can be either delegated to someone else or eliminated altogether. Here is a great tool to help you do this.

4. Practice Mindfulness

Yes, I realize this topic comes up a lot. But–for good reason!

Many of us think about several things at one time, jumping from one thought to the next without pausing to finish the first task. We all live lives full of interruptions as we try to take on too much at once–yet never feel like we’re making any progress.

Those who are very well-versed in mindfulness recognize patience as being one of the seven pillars of this practice, because with patience, we can accept the fact that some things have to unfold on their own, and the timeframe is out of our hands. Mindfulness reminds us that patience is a type of wisdom that lets us know that everything in the world is in its own process than cannot be hurried.

Patience increases our compassion for ourselves and helps us recognize and tolerate all of the processes in our lives. Learning how to be mindful helps reduce any mental resistance to time and lets us accept every moment as it unfolds–all the while, having trust that any development is unfolding exactly how it’s supposed to.

Try to sit with the feelings of impatience if you start to experience and notice that there are negative things going on in your mind and body. You will be able to develop more patience if you can recognize your frustrations, slow down, and focus on one thing at a time.

5. Respond, Don’t React

When you confront an inconvenience with resistance, you’re probably going to get frustrated pretty quickly because you’re looking for (but not finding) any way to remove the challenge ahead of you.

However, if you respond instead of reacting to the unplanned circumstance, you may realize that the source of your typical frustration isn’t the inconvenience itself, but the feelings that it stirs up inside of you.

If you have no control over the situation that you’re facing, you don’t have to like it, but you can still choose to accept it since you can’t change it anyway. Try to be open in your responses to unwanted events and, if nothing else, be neutral.

You can try asking yourself these questions if you need to:

6. Devote an Entire Day to Being Patient

Set one day aside and make being patient your short-term goal for the whole day. Make an effort to think about everything you do as you take your time going about the day.

When the day is finished, think back on all of the ways you’ve been able to make smart choices, collaborate with other people, and understand the things going on around you. After you do this for one day, put forth the effort to be persistent and do it on a more regular basis.

7. Practice Pausing Before Speaking

If you’re like me, you may sometimes have a tendency to blurt out the first thing that comes to mind without thinking about any potential consequences. However, if you can take the time to pause and think for a moment about what you want to say and how you want to say it, you can avoid getting yourself into some messy situations that could stem from your impatience.

This exercise will address your lack of patience because you will be forced to stop, consider your thoughts, and make the right decision before responding to something. This skill can then be translated to other areas of your life.

8. Use the Time Wisely

If you’re waiting for something to happen, it means you’ve got a bit of extra time on your hands that you weren’t expecting…this is a good thing! Instead of counting the minutes, focus on something that you otherwise might not have time to do.

Take advantage of this time that you have to spare. Text a friend, read a bit, listen to a podcast, or simply just practice gratitude. Look at the extra time as being a favor rather than an inconvenience.

9. Take Some Deep Breaths

Possibly most importantly, try to relax and take some slow, deep breaths. This will naturally help calm your body down and relax your mind if you’re starting to feel impatient.

If you’re still feeling upset after doing some deep breathing, go for a short walk and try to clear your head that way. Try doing some walking meditation so you can alter your focus to things that are more important than whatever is bringing you down.

10. Understand That Being Irritated Is Addicting

Our brains still have that old reptilian part that controls our fight or flight response and aims to protect our safety. When it comes to emotional safety, we want what we want, we want to get ahead, and we want to achieve more than the person next to us. This isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just biology.

That urge to protect ourselves is addicting. So in order to grow patience, you need to learn to battle any feelings that are the opposite of patience, including:

This is uncomfortable at first, because you have to recognize that things aren’t going your way. Then you have to face your inner thoughts of, “Can’t they hurry up?” or “Why are they so incompetent?” and move beyond them. Remember that the situation that you’re in may be uncomfortable, but it’s probably not entirely intolerable.

11. Change Your Story

Give yourself a pep talk as you’re focusing on your vulnerability of becoming impatient. Don’t fuel the story with how wrong everything is around you or make up some “possible” extreme circumstances that may be the cause of your frustrations.

Whenever you start feeling impatient, remember that you’ve been given an opportunity to grow by reminding yourself that you’re a tolerant person who is stronger than whatever force you’re unfortunately facing.

Final Thoughts on Being More Patient

Patience is a very beneficial character trait that you can learn. This purposeful form of self-discipline can help prevent you from doing things that are counterproductive and a waste of energy. As you learn how to lay your frustrations aside, you will start to think in a more positive manner and make more responsible decisions.

Try the strategies laid out in this article to help you learn to be more patient. This single skill that can often be overlooked is so valuable and can ultimately save you a lot of stress and frustration.

Connie Mathers is a professional editor and freelance writer. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and a Master’s Degree in Social Work. When she is not writing, Connie is either spending time with her daughter and two dogs, running, or working at her full-time job as a social worker in Richmond, VA.