00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 81, "How to Be More Patient." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Well, hello there, my super friends. So great to be with you today. Hey, have you signed up for my "weekend win" email yet? If you haven't, go to tanyahale.com, scroll down to the the bottom of the front page, and there's a place where you can sign up for the "weekend win." You can put your name in there and your email address and every Friday morning I send out an email it is meant to be read in one minute or less. Just some little pieces of information to help you have a greater weekend, to give you something to think about, and I think they're great. I love writing them. I love sending them out and I think you'll like them too. So if you haven't gone to sign up for those again, go to tanyahale.com, scroll down to the bottom of the front page, and there's a place where you can sign up for my "weekend win" super easy and you've got some good stuff on there. 

01:12 

So today we are doing episode number 81, "How to Be More Patient." I have to tell you right up front, I have loved creating this one because in the course of creating this I was like "what, oh my gosh, I just discovered something new and exciting about patience." It was fascinating to me. I love that when I prepare these podcasts for you that there's such a learning experience for me. As I'm creating the content it's amazing to me how often I feel the spirit teach me something and help me know what he wants me to teach you. And so I'm really grateful for those opportunities because they're very sacred to met tat I have these opportunities. And I had that with this one. Just a whole mind shift in how I started looking at being patient, and I'm excited to share it with you today. 

02:07 

So let's just start off. Who here hasn't wished about a million times that they had more patience? As in right now. As in I want to be patient right now, right? When we struggle to have patience, it can seem so elusive. It seems that we're constantly struggling to be patient or to maintain our patience. We sometimes explode into anger even before we're aware of what's going on, or we get so frustrated that we can barely function sometimes, right? Who's been there? Anybody besides me? 

02:44 

Okay, then there's these people that we know in our lives who just never seem to run out of patience. They have what we affectionately call "the patience of Job," right? It doesn't seem to matter what is going on, they just never seem to get riled up about anything, and they just stay the course. And then the rest of us just stand back in awe as we watch them navigate these difficult circumstances after difficult circumstance with patience and with peace. And I know that I sometimes find myself sitting on the outside starting to lose patience for them, right? Because I'm like, "what?" 

03:20 

So let's start off this discussion today by defining patience. The dictionary says that patient is, "bearing pains or trials calmly or without complaint." Okay, so that seems to fit right in with all of the examples of patience that I can think of: staying calm, not complaining, and sometimes even doing both of those at the same time. I would say that those people are the real miracle workers in the world, right? 

03:47 

So why is calm important? Well, because the state of things can cause us to get so riled up sometimes, either with anxiety or frustration or irritation, it's important that we learn how to stay calm when these things are happening. And what about not complaining? It's easy to become a complainer when things don't go the way that we think they should. When someone makes a decision we don't agree with or we think we could have done something better, it's easier to start complaining.

04:15 

So let's just look at some blanket examples of when a person may struggle with being patient. Now, none of these, I'm gonna say, are taken from my own personal life. I'm just absolutely, oh gosh, all of these are from my own personal life, right? This is how I know what impatience looks like. Okay, let's start off by talking about traffic. Maybe we're driving in traffic and somebody cuts us off, or maybe there's a slowdown and we're late for something we're going to. It's possible that someone could even change lanes in front of us and not use their car turn signal. Although that one doesn't happen very often, right? It seems like every state says, "oh, nobody in this state ever uses their turn signals." I think that's a nationwide epidemic. Maybe we need to get over into a turn lane and nobody will let us in, right? We just, it's one of those things. 

05:06 

Okay, so let's talk about work. The copy machine is down. Again, the person in the office or the cubicle next to us is being much too loud and it makes it so difficult for us to focus. The management just came down with new regulations that seem ridiculous to us. Someone ate our lunch that was in the fridge. Someone else left their dirty dishes in the sink. Alright, which takes us right into home, right? Let's take a look at what goes on at the house. Someone left a huge mess in the kitchen. There's a trail of clothes from the front door to the kids bedroom. Someone finished the box of cereal and put it back on the shelf. No one let you know they brought up the last toilet paper from the storage area downstairs. 

05:46 

The grandkids came over and they all left leaving a huge mess of toys in the basement. Okay, do we even dare start to tackle relationships? We were supposed to leave 10 minutes ago and they're still not ready. I told them over and over the right way to fold the towels and they still do it wrong. I asked them to do the dishes and they're doing them, but they're not happy about it. And I want them to be happy to do the dishes. They didn't acknowledge that I spent hours doing the laundry today. Okay, so these examples...I'm sure we could all pull out loads of examples from our own life. We could go on and on. There seems to be an endless supply of things that could set us off and pushes over the edge and cause us to lose our patience. 

06:34 

So how do we fix it? How do we have more patience? I know this is going to shock you, but I'm going to suggest that we start by looking at the thought model. If you remember the thought model, it starts with a neutral circumstance because all circumstances are neutral. Really, they are. But once a circumstance happens, we have a thought about it. And that thought makes that circumstance positive or negative, right? That thought causes us to have a certain feeling, which then causes actions, which then creates the end results in our lives. 

07:06 

So we start with circumstances first, then thoughts, feelings, actions, and results. Okay, so let's just pick one of these circumstances we talked about earlier. Someone did not clean up in the kitchen after they made food. That, my friends, is entirely neutral. There are dirty dishes in the sink. The counters are not washed off. Neutral. The floor has something spilled on it. Neutral. How do we know they're all neutral? Because not everyone would think that that was bad. Obviously, the person who left those things that way didn't think it was bad. You could walk into thousands of homes and see the same thing and those people don't see anything wrong with it. It's neutral. Okay? Circumstances are always neutral and generally we don't have any control over them. What we do have control over is the next step in the model, which is our thoughts. 

08:05 

What I choose to think about those dirty dishes is entirely up to me. But here's a sub-level to our thoughts here that I would like you to consider. Ask yourself this question: what do I make those dirty dishes mean? The answer to that could be they must think I'm the slave around here and it's my job to clean up everyone's mess, right? Or do those dirty dishes mean that we're thinking that we think we're being taken advantage of? Do they mean that we don't feel appreciated? Nobody around here appreciates me, right? Do they mean that we're an awful parent if our kids don't know how to clean up after themselves? These kinds of thoughts are going to create feelings of irritation or impatience or anger that will then produce actions that we may not really want to engage in. 

08:55 

Okay, but what if the answer to the question, "what do I make those dirty dishes mean," was something like, "wow, someone must have been in a hurry to get somewhere," or even just curiosity about why the kitchen would have been left in such a mess. The feelings that these thoughts create will fall more on the positive end of the emotion scale and we will more likely  feel things like compassion or patience, which will then produce actions more in line with the kind of person that we are and that we want to be. 

09:26 

For example, it's just me and my 17 year old daughter in my home. So if there's a mess, I know exactly who made it. It was either her or me, right? And we've had similar experiences where a mess has been left in the kitchen. But approaching her with the thought that she must think I was created to clean up after her is not going to be very helpful because if I'm having that thought, I'm going to feel irritated and then I might raise my voice or demand that she come in right away and clean it up, and this is coming from a place of fear. And we're going to talk about that a little more in-depth later on. But this approach is never going to work. Well, my action of yelling will move into her circumstance line. "Mom just raised her voice," right? And she will have thoughts like, "why does she hate me so much? Why is she so judgmental? Why do I have the meanest mom in the world?" And then we start to spiral into a more negative situation, right? 

10:24 

But if I see in a messy kitchen and I get curious and I start wondering what's up, I may go in and find her upset about something that happened at school or even stressed out because she has so much homework. Or maybe she just got distracted and was going to clean it up, but then forgot. But I can promise you this, when I respond with becoming curious rather than jumping to a negative conclusion, the situation will always end better. Curiosity in this instance breeds patience. Slowing down to think about the other person rather than just ourselves will always land us in a better place. This is coming from a place of love and that is always the right place to come from. 

11:07 

Here's an awful truth about impatience, and this was one of my big ahas I mentioned at the beginning: it often comes from a victim mentality. We are blaming someone else for things not going the way we want them to. My expectations are not being met, therefore I am allowed to be frustrated and angry. These thoughts of entitlement that "I don't deserve to be treated this way" breed a lot of impatience. The point right here, this point is so important to understand: it is our expectations of other people that creates the feelings of impatience. When I expect other drivers to always use their blinker, then I will very often be let down, and I will feel like a victim when they pull in front of me without using a blinker. Feelings of impatience are a result of thoughts, thoughts of expectations not being met, thoughts of entitlement, thoughts that someone else should or should not be doing something. 

12:11 

So if we want to be more patient, it is important that we learn to manage our thoughts more. And this means that when we ask ourselves the question, "what do I make this mean?" I start learning to not make it mean anything about me at all. When I start making it mean something about me, I am either taking credit for or responsibility for something that really has nothing to do with me. I can promise you that if my daughter leaves a mess in the kitchen, it would have nothing to do with me. She's not leaving a mess just hoping I'll get upset so we can have a fight. She's not intentionally trying to make me feel like the maid around here. She's not trying to show me disrespect in any way. And if I go there and I make it about me, then I am more likely to lose my patience and act in ways that I don't really want to. If my daughter leaves a mess in the kitchen, it really has something to do with her. She is distracted or upset or tired. But if I choose to make it about me and become the victim of the dirty dishes, my patience runs thin. 

13:27 

Alright, are you resisting this? Does tying our impatience to our victim mentality get you a little riled up? Ask yourself this, what do I make it mean? Sometimes we really just need to start taking a good, hard look at our thoughts because we've created these patterns over the many years of our lives and we think without thinking. But when we start to slow down and really look at the thoughts we're having, getting curious about it all, we start to see things that can use some tweaking. And it's in the tweaking of these small and simple thoughts that we can start stepping into more Christlike behavior. We can become more aware of things we need to repent of. 

14:11 

So let's take a look at the expectations piece of impatience. When we have expectations of what other people should or should not do, when things don't go as we had planned from those expectations, again we will often feel impatient. But let's take a look at where those expectations come from. When I expect someone to do something a certain way, in essence I am seeking to control their behavior. Now before we get get to freak out about this, there's two exceptions to this: parenting and working, okay? Parenting, especially young children, requires that I have expectations of them and that I teach them, right?  That I expect them to learn how to behave and do certain things, right? Parenting, but as my children get older, those expectations need to back off for sure. Work is very similar. There are expectations at work that need to be kept in order for people to be productive enough for their bosses to want to pay them. If I'm in a managerial or a boss type of position at work, I have to have expectations of the people who work under me, right? 

15:16 

But those two situations aside, when we have expectations of other people, it is all about us and what we want. How we want people to behave, to respond, or to interact. When we're impatient with our spouse because they're late, it is because we expect them to be on time. Now, in our mind, that may be very reasonable, but to be honest, they're adults and they get to show up at whatever time they choose. Now, we can definitely express our desires to be on time and even put consequences in place, such as leaving and they can drive separately, but our expectation that they'd be on time is our issue, not theirs. Obviously, it doesn't bother them to be late or they'd be on time. Being late is a thought, right? The exact time would be the circumstance. He was ready to leave at 12:15, right? That's just a circumstance. My thought of whether that's late or not is completely a thought, right? And whether that's good or bad. 

16:22 

So when I get impatient, it's because of my expectations for their behavior. Ugh. Does that feel like a bunch of crap to you? I'm gonna tell you it's true. My wanting to control them being on time and them not letting me control them being on time is what creates those feelings of impatience. Because we think they should be on time or we're going to be late because of him and those types of thoughts cause us to feel impatient. And whenever we get upset because someone else does not act the way we think they should, we step into victim mode, okay? I have to admit I was a little bit shocked when I made this connection here, but it's so important that we start seeing where those feelings of impatience are coming from. They are coming from our thoughts, okay? 

17:16 

Now I'm going to circle back to another thought that I touched on briefly earlier but didn't explain. Feelings of impatience also come from a place of fear, while feelings of patience come from a place of love. More and more I am beginning to understand that everything comes back to these two motivating feelings, fear and love So, how is impatience caused by fear? It's an underlying fear that we're not being listened to, that we aren't being respected, that we're being taken advantage of, that they don't love us enough, that we are not enough. When we start feeling impatient, it is so insightful to start asking ourselves, "what am I afraid of?" At first, it may be really difficult to answer this question, but the more you explore it, the more curious you get about it, the more you will also ask, "what do I make that mean?" The more things will become clear, and we'll start to identify the fear. 

18:16 

So how is patience caused by love? Well, when we really, truly love other people unconditionally, we allow them the space to be who they are, and walk the path they need to walk, without our expectations getting in the way. We realize that they're in a learning curve, and they're not going to do everything perfectly. We embrace their imperfections as a beautiful part of who they are. Rather than judging them harshly, we recognize that most people are doing the best they can. And when we really love ourselves, we allow ourselves the space to be who we are, and walk the path we need to walk. We recognize that imperfection is part of the plan, and we seek to learn from our mistakes rather than judge ourselves harshly, or cycle into guilt or shame, and become super impatient with ourselves. 

19:14 

So in summary, when we find ourselves feeling impatient, we need to try to slow down, identify the circumstance, and then figure out our thoughts about that circumstance. Are you thinking that someone should be acting in a different way, or doing something different? And then also asking the question, "what am I making that mean," can be a great way to start identifying your thoughts. Once you identify your thoughts, see if you can find the root of that thought in fear. It will take some practice but I think you'll be amazed at what you start to see over time. Then ask yourself how unconditional love would respond to the situation. Again, this may take some time since we really believe our own thoughts. It's important to remember that our brain lies to us all the time. Our brain will make up all sorts of reasons why we're justified in our unloving thoughts. It will try to make us think that we have no control or that throwing a fit is the only way we'll get our own way or that anyone will listen to us. But when it comes to creating connections with the people we love, being motivated by love rather than fear is the only way to make those connections happen. Fear drives us apart. Love brings us together. 

20:32 

Isn't this amazing stuff? Growing up is such an amazing process of putting all of these pieces together and seeing how I truly can be more Christlike, seeing how I can truly grow into the person that I am meant to become. Alright, if you would love some personal help from me on patience or anything else that you're working with, you can go to tanyahale.com. You can book a free 20 minute coaching session to get you started. Just go to the "coaching" tab or the "contact me" tab, okay? I would love to help you work through these processes and invest in yourself, which is the best investment you can ever make. Is coaching expensive? Yeah, it can be expensive. But the investment that we make in ourselves to live a more content, growth-minded, happy life, grounded, centered life is worth any investment to get to a better place. If you could live the next 40 years of your life in a better place with a small investment now, it would be so worth it. Or don't invest now and live the next 40 years struggling, struggling, struggling. I tell you what, coaching is a brilliant process. The coaches that I work with save my bacon time and time again as they help me see things that I really need to see. 

22:01 

Okay, if you love this podcast, please share it with somebody who could also use it. This is good stuff. This mental and emotional health is one of the most important things we can do in our lives is to get mentally and emotionally healthy. So share this. Let's spread the word that this is the way to really live the lives of our dreams. Okay, my dear friends, that is it for today. Wish you all the best. Happy New Year. I hope it's been a good first couple of weeks for you and we will talk to you later, bye. 

22:37 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya! you