Patience: How to get more of it.

Patience is a virtue, but you have to have it. Patience is also something you really need in the Netherlands. After all, you have to wait for everything. On your partner when you go out together, in the store for the checkout, on the train or bus. You also have to wait for your predecessor if you are in a traffic jam. But why is patience actually a virtue, and how do you get it? I address that with this blog

What is patience?

Patience is actually a verb, as it is a technique for keeping your good mood when you are waiting. Especially if you are in a hurry, waiting can make you angry and easily irritated. In fact, if you have to wait, it is a very clear signal that something is out of your control.

When you have patience—or are patient—you’re able to stay calm while you wait and better maintain positive emotions. You can endure the agony of waiting more easily when patience is one of your character traits. You’ll also be more willing to endure that agony.

Researchers also note that patience is a combination of open-mindedness, perseverance, and self-regulation, but the correlation is weak.

You also need patience when dealing with difficult family members and daily stress triggers.

What is patience good for?

So patience is good for staying positive while waiting for something, but that's not the only thing.

For example, are you doing precision prodding? If so, patience is also very important to avoid fraying your work and to deliver quality.

So patience can also ensure that you keep your job because you won't cut corners.

Your sense of well-being also improves when you are patient. This is partly because you find it easier to reframe negative situations, making them no longer (as) negative.

In addition, patience also helps you achieve your goals because you don't quit too early and can stretch your activities to achieve the goal over a larger time period.

How to become more patient.

You may think that patience or impatience is a character trait you may or may not be born with, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, patience can be learned[1].

There are even multiple ways to become more patient.

Realizing that you are part of the whole

Patience comes more naturally to people when they’re waiting for something worthwhile. When they’re waiting to achieve a goal that gives their life meaning, patience comes easily.

For example, when you are stuck in a traffic jam, this is more bearable because you know you are stuck with everyone else because everyone goes to work to make our society function and have an economy that allows everyone to live a relatively nice life.

You can patiently deal with your irritating family member because you know you want to have a good long-term relationship with your family.

You can wait in the store as you are busy gathering food for your family.

Make patience part of your identity

It also helps if you identify yourself as a patient person. For example, this is often part of the identity of people who are involved in spirituality or religion.

Patience for many Christian people, for example, is waiting for better times, or that when you are patient you will be rewarded for it[2].

Stay in the here and now

Another way to integrate patience into your identity is through mindfulness. After all, impatience often stems from thoughts about what you actually want to be doing in the immediate future.

By keeping your thoughts in the here and now, you’ll feel less anxious and stressed about time, and it will be easier to stay patient.

Yoga also fits well with mindfulness. A true yogi is a patient yogi, right?

Use the moment of waiting differently/usefully

When you become more mindful in the moment when you need patience, you may also find that you have much more influence on your surroundings than you initially think.

In the car, most people have the radio on and its music can entertain you to get through the traffic jam. This, of course, is a fun way to pass the time.

Another way is to pass the time usefully, for example by listening to an audiobook (informative).

This is why many women carry a handbag. Then you can always have an e-reader or whatever with you to make moments when you need patience to make waiting easier, more fun and more useful.

For men, then of course, there is the Satchel (Google it if you don't know what it is).

In addition, impatience can also cause a lot of stress. By using that moment of waiting for a brief moment of meditation, you can reduce your stress—which is ultimately very beneficial.

Reframing moment of impatience

Realizing that you are part of a bigger picture or that you are patient for a greater purpose than yourself is a way to reframe the impatient moment. If you find it difficult to do this, a hypnotherapist can help you with it.

When you go to a hypnotherapist, you first identify moments that regularly bother you and when you become super impatient with all the negative consequences.

Your hypnotherapist can then give you suggestions that help you interpret the moment in a different way. You shift your focus—or reframe it—from what’s going wrong to what is going right. This is often done through post-hypnotic suggestions and suggestions that you can repeat yourself during self-hypnosis.

Post-hypnotic suggestions for reframing may include:

"From this moment on, in moments of impatience, you will realize why it is important that you do what you are doing at that moment and therefore you will remain calm and content with the situation."

Suggestions that help with self-hypnosis are more about changing beliefs and experiencing patience differently when you need it. These may include suggestions such as:

"I am a patient person."

"Waiting is resting."

"I am strong by staying calm."

"Staying calm and happy is the solution."

These are just examples to help make patience stronger, depending on your frustrations and beliefs about patience and impatience, a hypnotherapist may choose to give you other suggestions.

Finding out the cause of hurry/impatience

Why do you react impatiently in situations where you need to be patient? Is your planning super important? Is the speed at which you do things important to you? Why is this the case for you?

Where does it come from that you can lose your impatience? Why has this become a pattern in your life?

These are questions related to the cause of impatience or haste. If you cannot clearly identify what this was caused by, a hypnosis expert can help you with that through regression.

Regression is a hypnosis technique that can find solutions to many problems. With regression, you are suggested by the hypnotist to go to the first moment when you were in a hurry or impatient. Because you are in hypnosis at that moment, a memory will immediately surface.

This is often a memory from your childhood because that’s when you typically come up with the “rules of life.” You observe how adults and others around you act and react to what you do, and from that you draw a conclusion about how things “should be” or what a “rule” is. This then becomes your belief.

During regression, you go back to such a rule-defining moment, but now with your adult knowledge. This gives you a chance to evaluate whether the rule of life is correct. The hypnotist helps you look at the moment from different angles and this can cause you to interpret the moment very differently now. And you can rewrite the precept.

This can provide tremendous peace of mind, allowing you to keep your patience much better.

In the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands training, much attention is paid to performing a proper helping regression.

Would you like to know how hypnosis works and whether you can use it to help yourself or others? Then come to a hypnosis workshop in Zwolle or Wormerveer. There, you’ll learn how to hypnotize people in just one day.

Would you like to learn regression therapy or the basics of helping people with hypnosis? Then come to a seminar or sign up for one of the courses offered by the Hypnosis Institute of the Netherlands.

[1] https://search.proquest.com/openview/dcfd470d8a25208f19c97d06cafc894c/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=32264

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sarah_Schnitker/publication/319219667_The_virtue_of_patience_spirituality_and_suffering_Integrating_lessons_from_positive_psychology_psychology_of_religion_and_Christian_theology/links/5cb5e382a6fdcc1d499a15cd/The-virtue-of-patience-spirituality-and-suffering-Integrating-lessons-from-positive-psychology-psychology-of-religion-and-Christian-theology.pdf