Thoughts on Patience
In a world where responsiveness and timely execution have been the standard, we often choose to forget the value of patience and the impact of acting without it.
Impatience at Work
Having worked in the world of sales and service for my entire career, responsiveness has been at the forefront of my operating system and professional orientation for over a decade. A customer needs something? Hop to it. A prospect actually answered an email I sent? Answer right away or risk losing them. Missed call from a boss? Holy shit! Call right back.
When I graduated college, I started an operations position with an educational company that was owned by one of my best friend’s mother. She was always weird (relevant information, I promise), but she offered me a job with the prospect of helping grow a company that took federal funds to facilitate free tutoring for underprivileged kids. I may have been an immature douche in a lot of ways at 22, but even I knew this was a good professional path to be on, at least in theory.
After working there for about 8 months, I was doing pretty well and enjoying it as much as anyone could be as the first thing being done after the freedom of college. That was until I decided to take a Friday off to drive up to visit some friends in Gainesville for the weekend.
Some general, but important context for you, my dear reader, to know: Up until that point, I hadn’t taken a day off. I hadn’t made any significant mistakes. I was as professional as a driven, caring, respectful employee could have been. No issues at all with work. I asked for a day off and was granted the day off. At the time, there wasn’t nearly the same “use the internet on your phone” capabilities so once I hit the road, I was pretty disconnected.
Fast forward to that Friday evening, after a long drive, where I am now back in a college town with a bunch of friends still in college mode. I was drunk and high within minutes of arrival. Of course, what happens next? My boss calls.
Being out and enjoying my life, I let it go to voicemail. Listening to the voicemail, a bit worried, I was relieved to realize the issue was no big deal and easily something I could handle on Monday. Pfew. Sent a quick (very carefully typed) text back to let her know I was unable to talk but that I would handle it Monday. Put the phone away and proceeded with my evening of friends and fun.
The next morning, I obviously woke up feeling like shit but the misery didn’t end there. 8 missed calls and 15 text messages. All from her.
What the actual fuck?
More on that in a bit.
The Impatience of Responsiveness
Through my professional evolution from that one, shitty experience, I learned a very real truth:
The quicker I responded to people, the more favorably I was treated.
Reading something like “Thank you so much for the quick response!” or “Wow, that was fast! Thanks!” kind of got me off as a young professional. It made me believe that the image I projected others having of me was always that of a thoughtful, respectful, and caring employee, teammate, or partner.
Here’s what was happening. Valuing responsiveness was changing my ability to have a patient approach to myself, my work, and to others. As a result of my own emotional immaturity, the prioritized need to answer someone or something quickly was substantially hindering my own growth, my own awareness, and my own ability to actually learn from what I was doing. Sadly for my future self, this impatience resulted in the following embodied behaviors:
Reduced Curiosity
Good questions, real questions, require patience. They need the proper time and energy to consider the circumstances, search one’s own databank of knowledge, and then ask whatever may be necessary to properly understand by filling the determined information gaps.
Unfortunately for me and my curiosity, patience, time, and energy are the sworn enemies of a person who is eager to respond and please. In lieu of asking the right questions or digging in to someone’s need more deeply, the default perspective was that of the surface need and the path of least resistance to get that need met. Do this five or six thousand times and curiosity becomes but a speck of dust in the overall approach to being.
Fear of Developing an Image of Unavailability
For an image-conscious person, determined to please and be seen positively by others, patience is not much of an option.
Heaven forbid we don’t please quickly or present ourselves as desiring to put energy and effort into someone else’s issues immediately. Taking our time will obviously make someone else think we don’t care. They will think we’re lazy or incapable and likely just turn their attention elsewhere. If others see me as unavailable, I will be deemed “not enough.” Such is my image-consumed fate.
The real crux of this point is that trusting ourselves to be ok without the approval of others takes patience. It takes hard work, deliberate practice, and time to build a self-image that knows its worth. This cannot be done when the need to respond takes precedence over self need at the forefront of ones values.
Anxiety to Execute
Get. Shit. Done. This was my motto for a long time. The more I got done, the better I felt. Even better was that the faster I got something done, the more I could do!
Valuing responsiveness generates a compounding need to action and complete a task as fast as possible so that we can jump to the next one. Executing on tasks or requests then becomes our life’s checklist of things to do. And the faster we check those things off, the better. This impatience to complete, unfortunately, then leads to far more mistakes, much higher stress, and again, less learning.
Rather than function at a highly anxious, get shit done level, a patient approach allows deeper understanding and higher quality response. We may get less shit done, but the shit we do is better shit, more meaningful shit, and makes us feel less shitty about ourselves in the long run.
Resentment of Non-reciprocation
So here is what happens. You bust your ass to get someone a response ASAP, exactly like they asked for in their annoying email. You are so proud of yourself for getting that answer or file or update to them as ASAP as you could. Go you! Then that same asshole, who dared use “ASAP” in their request, doesn’t say thank you or even answer you back at all for a few days. That asshole. Fuck them right? Wrong.
The issue with valuing responsiveness and not allowing ourselves to be patient is that we immediately judge others for not valuing the same thing. Our attitude toward someone else becomes a complete projection on what we think we should be getting in return, based on our own values.
In this case, we are impatient with people who are being patient. And for what? A sense of acknowledgement? To soothe some negative emotion or anxiety we’re holding? We’ve given someone else a lot of power over how we feel or the way we see ourselves. Resentment is toxic any which way you put it. Our ability to be patient allows us to empathize (important life word) and not instantly resolve to “that person is such a dick” when they don’t employ the same values we hold.
Understanding Our Embodied Patience
By the time I was 30, I had all of these behaviors deeply ingrained into my way of being. So much for the hope of becoming a mature adult…
There is a lot to unpack here. We could go into my image issues, anxiety issues, projection issues, and all other sorts of issues. The key, however, is to use the collection of these issues that I experienced and sadly suffered from to explore the way in which the value of impatient responsiveness drives the different behaviors we may exhibit in life.
It could be as innocent as understanding why returning a phone call from a boss, parent, or partner as quickly as possible is more important than the conversation you’re in. It could be a bit more important like how you’re making the decision on whether to accept a new job offer or which college to go to. What about how you respond to an offer to sell your company? When your child tells you they’re gay? Or when you’re proposed to? What quality of patience are you affording yourself in the response to those situations?
We’re faced with the question of patience or impatience in almost any action, decision, or response we have. We always have the choice of how to answer.
So What Did Your Boss Do?
The result of my first boss’ onslaught of calls and texts was of course:
“I am sorry Alex, this isn’t going to work out. You will no longer be working with us.”
To this day, that is the only job from which I have been fired. Of course, I know now that what happened in that situation was completely irrational and utterly unwarranted as a reaction to what I had done. I was twenty-freakin-two, a good kid, and a family friend. Nothing earth-shattering had happened. Nothing that couldn’t have been discussed calmly on Monday morning and used as a teaching/learning experience.
The Impact of Patience
Regardless of how shitty of a response it was, it left a very strange, juxtaposed mark on me. In that moment, the way I felt for her reaction put a belief in my young, impressionable head that I needed to be radically responsive to keep a job. This lasted for years. All of those behaviors above became significant parts of who I was. I was borderline traumatized as a young employee and would develop habits that removed patience as an option for myself. I was to respond to people as quickly as I could so that they wouldn’t hate me and fire me and think I was an awful human being like I was that day.
Having grown out of that belief system, however, I now can see how immature my boss was at that time. How her impatience and inability to handle her own anxiety and need for responsiveness negatively impacted the life of a young adult in a way they spread far beyond the approach to a career. I also see how immature I was to be that impacted by it, having no other way of knowing that I was just a kid, subjected to someone else’s standards and values.
Today, my value of patience still struggles in the battle versus my value of responsiveness. Intellectually, I know that it is my job as a leader, manager, boss, coach, partner, father, and human to take the time to understand myself. I am cognitively aware that it is my imperative to build my consciousness and self awareness enough to create space for others to be who they are. Patience is a reflection of that work.
Yet, none the less, the work has to be deliberate because of the unraveling required of past beliefs and defaults. Patience is a reflection of the deliberate approach I take to trusting myself more and more each day to be better. The more patient I am with my own process, the easier it is to be patient with the processes of others. It is a daily uphill battle, but I’m focused.
What I know today, regardless of past beliefs, is that if I ever have someone working for me who decides to take a Friday off, I am going to give them that day off, completely. I will be patient with them and seek to understand. Not because it’s the right thing to do. Because I know that if I need them so badly that I need to call them even once to get an answer, there is something I have clearly missed. I’ll know that it’s not a response I need, its a mirror.
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