Developing Patience

Impatience costs you. It damages relationships when you snap at your wife or kids. It leads to poor decisions when you can't wait for the right timing. It creates stress when things don't happen on your schedule. Patience isn't just a nice virtue; it's essential to living well.

But patience doesn't mean being passive. It means maintaining self-control while waiting, staying engaged without losing your cool, enduring difficulty without letting it break you.

Where Impatience Shows Up

With your wife: Wanting her to change faster, getting frustrated when she processes differently than you.

With your kids: Expecting maturity beyond their years, losing your temper over normal kid behavior.

With yourself: Frustrated at your own rate of growth or change.

With circumstances: Traffic, slow service, plans that don't work out.

Impatience reveals what you value more than the people in front of you. When you lose patience with your kids, you're telling them your schedule matters more than they do. They notice.

What Drives Impatience

• Desire for control: You want things to go according to your plan.
• Unrealistic expectations: Expecting people or situations to be different than they are.
• Stress and depletion: When you're running on empty, patience is the first thing to go.
• Self-focus: Seeing others' behavior primarily in terms of how it affects you.

Building Patience

Adjust expectations: People grow slowly. Kids act like kids. Traffic exists. Adjust your expectations to reality.

Manage your capacity: When you're rested and healthy, patience comes easier. Take care of yourself.

Pause before reacting: That moment between stimulus and response is where patience lives. Extend it.

Practice perspective: Will this matter in a week? A year? Most things we lose patience over are trivial.

Your Action Steps

This week: Notice when impatience rises. What triggers it? What's underneath?

This month: Work on one specific area where you regularly lose patience. Practice responding differently.

This quarter: Ask your wife and kids where they experience your impatience. Listen without defending.