How to Lead with Patience and Not Get Walked On
You were born exasperated and impatient.
Patience emerges after we learn that we aren’t the center of the universe. In other words, when you know and accept your limitations and frailties you become able to practice patience.
Lead with patience without getting walked on:
#1. Patience with people.
The tender side of patience centers on people.
- Patience allows mistakes to become growth. Patience that prolongs and enables weakness is poison, but patience that encourages growth is energy.
- Patience accepts poor performance or failure in the pursuit of improvement. Leaders who only accept the best have low standards. You failed this time, what will you do differently next time?
Patience with people who lack aspiration is frustration.
Aspiration gives value to patience. Patience respects aspiration.
Patience doesn’t passively tolerate weakness or failure. It never pretends that failure is success.
Without aspiration, patience is weakness disguised as virtue.
#2. Patience in difficulty.
The gritty side of patience matters when you want to quit.
- Patience presses forward in the face of resistance, difficulty, and adversity. The gritty side of patience is fuel for success. Everything worthwhile requires grit.
- Patience is love in action when the path is steep.
- Patience looks beyond difficulty. You might hate current difficulties, but the city on a hill calls you forward. Leaders who focus on difficulty and pain will quit soon.
Patience is tenacious.
“Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.” Lois Pasteur
Tenderness without toughness is an invitation for abuse.
(Assess your grit with this 10 question assessment.)
#3. Patience with kindness:
Angry tolerance isn’t patience.
Kindness elevates patience to virtue.
Kindness is:
- Doing what is useful, even if it isn’t convenient.
- Seeing life from someone else’s point of view.
Reflection: Someone was patient with you while you were learning. Who needs your patience today?
What does leaderly patience look like to you?
Reflection: Someone was patient with you while you were learning. Who needs your patience today? Anyone who is learning something new and is frustrated, half the battle is believing in yourself, the other half is trusting those who are teaching you..
I preached to my children with the “now syndrome”, “be patient and we will get to it”. Nothing says it has to be done now, in most circumstances, yet through their inexperienced lives they have not seen that perhaps. Our youngest daughter became a veterinarian and now she understand patience, the good, the bad and the ugly. Most people hve no patience. You need to learn to be patient and handle crisis when it develops. Not everything in lifeor work is a crisis.
What does leaderly patience look like to you?
Those who sit back and listen to the discussion, ponder a bit and perhaps enshrine a little of thier viewpoints to open our eyes to the ways things can be, yet don’t have to be.
Patience requires being able to realize that — most of the time — a crisis really isn’t that much of a crisis. If someone is going to die in the next five minutes, don’t take the time to teach and explain. Outside of that, though, you can probably take those five minutes to calm yourself (and others around you) and then patiently guide folks along the path.
I think of patience as a position I adopt, and a strength I appropriate , as opposed to an emotion that I control.
So when I feel frustration rising, inside i say “take a position of patience”.
The subtle difference helps me.
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