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10 Tips for Cultivating Patience in an Impatient World

As an elementary school teacher, my wife finds great fulfillment in helping her sixth graders improve their math skills. But she almost always has to deal with a few students who moan about having to learn new things. They lack the patience to correct their mistakes and practice until they’ve achieved mastery. Their impatience in turn tries the patience of their teacher.

At church, at home, and in the workplace our impatience can start to feed on the impatience of others. Since none of us have the patience of Job, all of us try each other’s patience. Stopping this vicious circle requires a little more patience from all of us. This means being willing to give others – and ourselves – time to change.

Of course, patience is not always a virtue. Sometimes teachers need to send disruptive students to the principal’s office. Sometimes we need to seize the day and take immediate action. Justice, courage, and kindness often call on us to make a difference without delay.

But it goes without saying that most of life’s challenges require patience. It takes patience to accomplish worthwhile goals. It takes patience to face unexpected trials such as serious illness, financial setbacks, and failed relationships. It takes patience to deal with life’s daily problems, including backed up freeways, bad weather, and slow lines at the grocery store.

One of the obstacles to developing patience is that our modern world caters to convenience and immediate gratification. We don’t need to grow a garden when we can pick up whatever we need from a convenience store. We don’t need to spend our time with home-cooked meals when restaurants and pre-packaged meals are always available. We don’t need to save up money to buy a new car when we can get a low-interest loan and buy it now. We don’t need to wait a week for our favorite television show when we can watch the entire series over the weekend on Netflix. And we don’t need patience to travel a thousand miles when we can hop on a plane and be there in a couple of hours.

So how can we cultivate patience in an impatient world? Here are ten tips.

The first two are taken from a 2017 journal article published in the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality by Sarah Schnitker and her colleagues at Fuller Theological Seminary.

1. Attach meaning to suffering.

Schnitker describes how religious communities generally promote the idea that some forms of suffering can be redemptive, leading to self-mastery, empathy, and greater life-fulfillment. This is what she calls a “transcendent narrative identity.” It provides the strength to look beyond present suffering and work toward a future where our lives have changed for the better.

2. Learn to control your emotions.

Schnitker and her fellow psychologists identify emotional regulation as another core aspect of patience. It’s easy to become frustrated, annoyed, and even bitter when things don’t go our way. But acting on negative emotions almost always makes situations worse. When I start to get impatient, I try to imagine how I would respond in my present circumstances if I were patient. Every once in a while, this sort of cognitive reappraisal helps me respond more calmly with a long-term perspective.

3. Look to nature for inspiration.

Ralph Waldo Emerson offers this advice: “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” It takes time to develop a strong root system that can support sturdy branches and bear fruit. We’re more likely to develop patience when we understand that disappointment and heartache can make us more capable of tasting the fruit of happiness in the future.

4. View patience as a golden mean

Aristotle helpfully describes most virtues as the golden mean between two extremes. For example, true courage is found somewhere between cowardice, on one hand, and recklessness, on the other. In a similar way, possessing patience means that we avoid foolish, impetuous actions. But it also means that we avoid a passive or lazy acceptance of suffering, injustice, and mediocrity.

5. Be humble enough to take small steps

For me personally, patience implies the willingness to take small steps to improve my life and the lives of those around me. Building a business, raising a family, and getting an education are made up of little things that add up over a long period of time. This same principle applies to recovering from the emotional wounds caused by unhealthy relationships. Shakespeare’s Othello explains it best: “How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?”

6. Be consistent in taking the small steps

In working toward an ambitious goal, I find that I need to set aside non-negotiable time every day, even if it’s just a few minutes, to do something concrete. If I go more than a day or two without taking any steps toward realizing my goal, the future that I had envisioned grows dim and I begin to lose hope. This is one of the reasons why scriptural counsel often pairs patience with diligence.

7. Be a finisher

Because I’m naturally an impatient person, I tend to get discouraged and move on to something else when I don’t see results as quickly as I’d like. This brings up the importance of personal commitment. Devote yourself to worthy causes and see your projects through to the end. Knowing that you’re a finisher can help you stay the course.

8. Don’t try to control other people

Self-mastery is one of the cornerstones of a happy life. We need to control our emotions, our thoughts, and our actions. But one of the surest paths to unhappiness is trying to control other people. Persuade family members, friends, and strangers through your example. Then give the people you love room to change. Try to remain pleasant and never give up on them.

9. Remember how tough you are

Patience is more about toughness than weakness and passivity. When life gets overwhelming, remind yourself of the many challenges and difficulties you’ve overcome in the past. You’ll find hidden strength and happiness if you just keep moving forward.

10. Cultivate hope for a brighter future

Patience is much more than a willingness to endure suffering. It’s about believing in a brighter future that comes one small, imperfect step at a time.

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Practical Wisdom as the Cure for Shortsightedness

In recent years, business leaders have become more attuned to a problem known as “short-termism,” or the tendency to focus on short-term profits at the expense of long-term innovation. Executive management teams are driven by shareholders to reduce costs in an effort to raise quarterly profits. But when companies refrain from investing in things like employee training and research and development, they typically become less innovative and less profitable in the long-term.

The problem of short-termism is not isolated to big business. In their obsessive focus on an upcoming election, politicians neglect the most difficult, time-consuming problems. They focus instead on cheap legislative accomplishments designed to enthuse their core supporters.

As individuals, we often embrace the pleasure of the moment at the expense of long-term physical and emotional health. Our marriages and family relationships suffer as we immerse ourselves in online gaming and social media.

Of course, some of us have the opposite problem. For the sake of future financial security, we become workaholics, neglecting our families who need us to be fully present in their lives now.

So how can we become more adept at pursuing two goals at the same time, responding to present needs while preparing for the future? From the perspective of character development, the answer is practical wisdom.

Practical wisdom is what allowed Abraham Lincoln to preserve the union and abolish slavery. His ability to hold these two disparate goals in his mind at the same time explains his openness to legislative compromise and gradual emancipation. Accomplishing both goals would require unimpassioned judgment and carefully planned legislative and military strategies.

According to Aristotle, practical wisdom is the ability to deliberate well about human action. He contrasts theoretical wisdom with practical wisdom, which takes into account the messiness and complexity of real life. Where theoretical wisdom can provide clear, rational guidance for an ideal world, practical wisdom recommends middle-ground solutions that accommodate more than one point of view. Seasoned mentors can help us find otherwise hidden paths through the thorny problems of real life.

Practical wisdom is developed as we gain experience working toward more than one goal at the same time. For Aristotle, the goals of practical wisdom are shaped by the other moral virtues, such as courage, self-control, fairness, and generosity. If these virtues define the ends of human behavior, practical wisdom determines the means toward those ends. The real challenge comes when the demands of different virtues conflict with each other. For example, the virtue of honesty regularly conflicts with kindness, such as when expressing our honest opinion about another person would be unnecessarily hurtful.

We could say that practical wisdom is the executive virtue that harmonizes conflicting goals and finds a reasonable path to solve intractable problems. In most cases, balance and moderation are its guiding principles: considering the needs of the present and the future, caring for both the body and the soul, and strengthening both our relationships and our personal well-being. The hallmark of practical wisdom is confidence in one’s rationality, in one’s ability to resolve moral dilemmas and formulate creative solutions.

As a modern society, we probably don’t value practical wisdom as much as previous generations. But it may be the cure for short-termism in business and in life.

There are at least three major obstacles to cultivating this type of wisdom. The first is that compromise and moderation are unpopular. In politics, they connote weakness and a lack of conviction. Voters are typically more attracted to a candidate who refuses to compromise her firm and unyielding principles. In business, an executive who turns down the financial security of a promotion to spend more time with his family will likely be labeled as dimwitted. But those who possess practical wisdom know that life is too complicated for one-dimensional measures of success. They know there is more than one goal worth pursuing. Wise politicians know there is more truth out there than they currently comprehend. Sometimes practical wisdom dictates a radical and revolutionary fight for truths we hold dear, but most of the time it places us on a middle ground.

The second challenge is that our emotions tend to inhibit our rationality. Emotions are part of our humanity. Without them, virtues such as kindness, generosity, and compassion would remain undeveloped. But practically wise people know that the consequences of unbalanced emotion include reckless behavior and blind spots in our thinking.

The third obstacle to practical wisdom is that our knowledge and perception are limited. Reconciling the demands of the present with the needs of the future requires a level of foresight that we often lack. Because we all have limited life experience, it’s essential to engage in dialogue with those who have different perspectives.

The widespread problem of shortsightedness calls for a revival of practical wisdom in both public and private life. With a willingness to compromise, better emotional balance, and greater openness to others’ insights, such a revival can become a reality.