Impatience

Bloody hell, I get so IMPATIENT with IMPATIENT people!

So for me to actually remain an adult and be patient with IMPATIENT people well … that takes real emotional muscle.

I am still a work in progress, but am working daily on my Emotional Fitness in the area of IMPATIENCE.

For those of you like me who are aware that we need some improvement with our IMPATIENCE, life provides plenty of opportunities for character building in this area.

Whether we’re willing to work our muscle of patience or not though is completely up to us.

It helps to remember that our level of IMPATIENCE with our external world is directly related to our need to control.

If our internal world feels chaotic we often demand excessive external order from ourselves and others.

When we do this we’re trying to decrease feelings of internal overwhelm using external control to reassure us that not everything in our life is in a mess.

So let’s understand IMPATIENCE rather than judge it harshly, as it’s simply an alarm to stop doing and start feeling.

When we remember to stop, take a deep breath and ask ourselves compassionately, as we would a frustrated child …

“What feels out of control emotionally, where is the fear coming from?”

Often the answer is that our IMPATIENCE stems from feeling emotionally powerless to change others … or incompetent, so we overcompensate by being physically or intellectually controlling, and if that doesn’t work … IMPATIENCE results.

I always know it’s time to do some IMPATIENCE homework when I find myself telling off and actually threatening with my scariest voice inanimate objects like my seatbelt, or thumping my poor innocent computer mouse up and down on my desk!

So if we find ourselves bullying a cufflink or swearing at people in traffic that can’t hear us, let’s give ourselves and others permission to slow down.

Once we deliberately pause and take a deep breath we can then be emotionally present and make our apologies for our outburst of IMPATIENCE, even if it’s just to our computer mouse.

When we pause and breathe we intercept adrenalin build-up, so any internal chaos can gently be addressed, and then we can watch with relief our IMPATIENCE dissolve …

Let’s try to live and let live a little more peacefully from now on.

Lotsa love Cynthia xxx