After the last couple of weeks’ blogs about stress and how to indentify it, I thought a post on how to keep calm, no matter what the situation, could be useful. So over the next two weeks I’m going to give you some strategies on being patient and keeping your cool when all you really want to do is scream!
We’ll start with a scenario, see if you can put yourself in this position and imagine how it feels:
You have a meeting in 30 minutes and you need the report you’re colleague has been tasked with producing to be ready. However, when you go to ask for it, you find out that not only is it not ready, but it won’t be for at least another hour. What do you do now? This is going to make you late for the meeting and you fear it’ll make you look incompetent too – you don’t like it! As your colleague lists the reasons for the report not being ready, you find yourself getting more and more agitated, until you explode and shout at her. You know this is wrong and that you’ve upset her, but you felt it was just a lack of planning that caused the delay and you tell her so. Now you’ve created an awkward situation and you’re going to have to apologise for your outburst.
Does this sound like you? It probably does, as we all suffer from impatience at one time or another. But, don’t think that being impatient is something trivial. In fact, if you suffer from it, it can affect your chances of doing well at work. People who are impatient are often considered to be rude, arrogant or insensitive. They can be perceived as poor decision makers and difficult to get along with. For these reasons, they may be passed over when the time comes for promotion. You do not want this to happen to you so, it is important that you learn how to deal with impatient behaviour. Not only that, being impatient can affect your home life too – it’s no fun living with someone who irritable, tense or nervous.
So what can you do?
Well, the first thing you can do is realise when you are becoming or being impatient. So, here are some signs you can look out for:
• feeling angry or irritable
• rushing about unnecessarily
• tension in your muscles
• getting nervous or anxious
• clenching or tightening your hands into fists
• shallow, short breaths
• restless, jiggling or tapping feet
If you start to feel any of these symptoms, you really need to stand back, take a deep breath and employ some of the techniques to reduce them as soon as possible.
However, before we get on to how you can manage your symptoms, it might be a good idea to see if you can identify your ‘triggers’ or the causes of your impatience. We all have them, I don’t think there is a human being on the planet that does not suffer from the occasional bout of impatience, and these are nothing to worry about. However, if there’s something that regularly triggers your impatient behaviour, you need to address it.
Think about and write down what might make you feel impatient. If you’re having difficulty doing this, these might help:
• think about the last time you were suffering from the symptoms – what were you doing?
• what is happening with your body at the times you become impatient? Often when we are hungry, thirsty or tired we become impatient, so take note if you feel any of these when your symptoms start.
• ask your friends, family, relatives and colleagues what they think. They probably have more idea about what winds you up than you do!
• keep a journal so you can identify your triggers.
Once you’ve got a good picture of what gets your back up, you can do something about it.
Okay, that’s enough for this week. Next week we’ll look at what measures you can take to combat the symptoms when they arise.
