Hopefully, you can now identify when you are starting to suffer from impatience and you’ve identified some potential triggers too. Now it’s time to start doing something about eliminating the triggers and alleviating the symptoms!
Eliminating the Triggers
I realise that it may not be possible for you to eliminate all the potential triggers of your impatience, morning rush hour traffic for example. But, even in this situation, you could try finding an alternative route to work that takes you away from the busiest areas, or think about public transport. Other trigger issues, such as people, may be easier to deal with as you can speak to people to try to resolve the issues directly.
Managing Symptoms
There are a number of ways you can manage your symptoms. So, once you start to feel the symptoms of impatience building, use these ideas to calm yourself down.
Self-Talk
One of the most effective ways of beating impatient behaviour is to talk to yourself. Your internal self-talk is very powerful and can affect how you feel in both a negative and positive way. What do we mean by self-talk? We mean the conversations that run through your head. For example the self-talk you experience when you are getting impatient might go like this:
“I can’t believe that she’s not done that report. What’s wrong with her? She’s making me look like an idiot. Why should I have to put up with that, she’s lazy and incompetent and that’s reflecting badly on me. Why can’t people just do what I ask and have it ready when I want it?”
You see how this is very negative. And, although it’s very easy to do this, it serves no purpose other than to make you feel bad about the situation. You’ll then transmit your feelings of negativity to the other person and they’ll probably end up feeling upset. Wouldn’t you if someone felt like that about you and the work you are producing?
Instead you should try to have self-talk like this:
“It’s no problem, we’ll just have to advise the others people at the meeting that we’ll have to delay it until later. As long as we let them know now, it’ll be fine. I understand that she’s had lots of work to do and this report is complex. But, she’s a capable person and if she’d had the chance to finish the report she would have done so. If I make her feel bad, she may feel stressed and not be able to do the job properly.”
Relaxation Techniques
This is simple! Take five minutes to step back from the situation so that you can assess it objectively. If you need to, excuse yourself, pop to the toilet, take a short walk outside or take a few deep breaths – do whatever it takes to make sure that you calm down. Being impatient can make your muscles involuntarily tense up. If this happens, make sure you concentrate on relaxing your muscles from your toes upwards using clench and release techniques. This involves you tensing each group of muscles for a minute or two, then relaxing. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be more emotionally detached from the situation and in a better position to deal with it in a rational way.
Practise Active Listening
This is when you really listen to other people, not just nodding while they speak, waiting for your chance to jump in with your point at the first available opportunity. While the other person is talking, you should be concentrating on what they’re saying, not formulating your next point. If you do this, you’ll not hear what they are saying and could miss valid points.
Are you a Perfectionist?
It may be that you’ll need to assess whether you are a perfectionist. This ‘condition’ afflicts many people and can lead to big problems. It often prevents people from delegating, as they think that no-one else can do it as good as they can. It can make sufferers feel like they need to check any work prepared by other people to make sure it’s right. In short, it makes you practically incapable of letting anyone else do anything for you. This can become a dangerous situation as your stress levels could become very high, impacting on your mental and physical health. If you feel you might be a perfectionist, it may be worth you trying to resolve this issue. You can start by reading more about it here.
Do let us know if you use these techniques and how successful you find them. And, if you have any others you think work really well, let me know about those too.
