I sometimes confuse the two terms. Just waiting for people to meet me half way. Sit here, twiddling my thumbs, and eventually people will see things my way and I’ll get what I want. Sometimes the world pushes on your boundaries and other times they try to punch through them. We all have huge ambitions and goals and all very limited time and energy to achieve them. We know that if we don’t do anything then we’ll just leave our lives up to chance and drift along but positive change is a lot of work and sometimes we just don’t have the energy to do it. Patience is actually a lot of work and not to be confused with passivity.

Australia is currently having a Same-Sex-Marriage postal where they are asking the citizens should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry? Without getting technical, it’s not compulsory to vote, a positive vote won’t necessarily lead to a change in the law and I had a stack of other things to do. I knew what I wanted to vote and what felt right for me but I honestly could not be bothered. I waited for it to be convenient for me to post my vote and for me that is being passive.

Hard to catch in the moment but I can recall times when I’ve clearly been impatient. I’m flustered, trying heaps of different things that I would never try, committing myself to a myriad of tasks and just praying that one thing will work. I remember one particularly bad weeks of sales for my business. It came shortly after a couple of good weeks so I was on a bit of a high. I put hundreds of dollars into Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Youtube ads, got a consultant to look at things, cold emails, cold calls. Weeks and weeks and nothing would work. At this stage I didn’t even want my business any more. It was a source of pain.

Looking back I was actually in quite a good position. I had a few early customers who could have become advocates had I been patient, continue to help them grow their business and I would have grown mine. Instead, I became impatient and squandered a couple of good opportunities.

For me it’s a kind of scale. During times of anixety, stress or difficulty:

Passive — not doing the right thing or anything

Patient — Doing the right thing

Impatient — Doing everything possible

When everyone else is either freaking out or chilling out, for me, being patient means being calm enough to see the reality of the situation, the best course of action and then committing myself to that.