Patience with Self

Hi everyone,

I hope everyone is doing good! Today’s topic is patience with personal development. It is sort of a follow-up to my post last week about forming routines.

I am patient with people. If someone is misbehaving, I don’t react (warnings aside) because I know that everyone makes mistakes on their way to better themselves. Yet, I am not patient with my own development. I want to get to the destination quickly and when I don’t, I get demotivated. Say, I have a research project. I want to achieve the analysis as soon as possible, with leaves me with little understanding of the data. I scan and skip the data-understanding stage so I can get to the next level.

And spoiler: this does not work. Everything has its own time to grow in us. Data should grow in me first, so I can have an analysis of the well-understood data set.

What does this require? Patience.

Let’s say we want to be able to read a book every week and currently we don’t read a lot. If we really fast start by reading a book for each of the first several weeks, we will likely burn out. Instead, we should start by targeting the consistency (for example, 15 minutes of reading everyday) and maybe we will finish one book in a month or two months. If we can keep to this schedule, this time will naturally increase to 20 mins, 30 mins and ultimately we will be more likely to hit our reading goal of reading one book per week.

What does this process require? Patience.

Patience will give us the best results in the long run. We will not be reading one book per week initially, so it might look like we are failing. But at the end, we will establish the habit. If we start fast, we will maybe achieve the goal for some time but it will probably not be consistent. So, it might be better to think in longer terms and just bear with initial failures. In fact, these are not failures. They are just steps towards the goal.

Do you think you are patient with yourselves? If so, were you always like that or did you learn it? If not, are you working on it? If you have established habits for yourselves, how long did it take you to establish them? Let’s talk about patience this week!

Betul