Two skills that I have found invaluable as I’ve matured and sought to achieve different goals in life are patience and discipline. Utilizing these two skills in concert with each other can yield amazing results. Yet they are often ignored as important traits, particularly in the context of traditional education. Patience and discipline end up being things that most people pick up via alternative forms of education or due to necessity. Real practice is critical to being able to utilize patience and discipline in a way that benefits your life. These are not things that you can merely talk or think about in order for them to have a positive impact on your life.
Patience and discipline are not traits that we are born with. If you’ve ever been around babies you’ll see that they have neither. For example, when babies realize that they want something they usually want it NOW. Wanting something and having to have it now, or else, indicates a lack of patience. An example of babies’ lack of discipline is their tendency to get into precarious situations when unsupervised in open areas. That’s why babies are placed in cribs or bassinets at night when the adults are sleeping. Aside from not having the capability to get up and down or move about safely, they also don’t have the discipline to understand that it’s unsafe for them to move around unsupervised. These characteristics of babies are not faults of theirs. It’s just the way it is. Patience and discipline are things that need to be developed, hopefully with the assistance of caring adults.
The examples of patience and discipline I gave above are general ones so I’ll provide my definitions of each of these traits just to ensure that we’re on the same page. I understand patience to be the ability to wait over a period of time for something to happen or to have a goal achieved. It’s a general understanding that worthwhile things don’t occur immediately. I understand discipline to be the ability to make the right decision in the moment when a decision is to be made. So while patience involves waiting, discipline involves choosing a particular action that helps to achieve a goal or otherwise benefit your life. I will reiterate that the two skills are really only effective when applied together. A person with patience and no discipline will wait forever to achieve their desired results because they won’t make the right choices consistently. A person with discipline but no patience will abandon goals because they can’t be achieved now.
As kids grow we see the lack of patience and discipline evidenced in the common behaviors that occur around toys and food. I remember as a kid I would see a toy on TV in July and immediately have to have it. My parent’s would often tell me to either wait until Christmas or my birthday, at which point I might receive the toy as a gift. I would be lying if I didn’t admit that more than once that got me upset and I let my parents (and anyone else around me) know it. As far as discipline goes my love of ice cream as kid was a great example of my lack of it. From my parents perspective ice cream was a treat to be consumed at certain times and not to take priority over regular meals. So there were limits on when I was allowed to have it. Yet, I would connive and cajole as much as possible to have ice cream more frequently. Sometimes to the point of disobeying my parents altogether. And so my complete lack of discipline with regard to ice cream was on display.
As adults the stakes are much higher in terms of the importance of patience and discipline. Most people are unsatisfied with a myriad of aspects of their lives including their careers, relationships, health and finances. Changing those things in the ways that we want as we get older tends to become quite difficult even with proper application of patience and discipline. Change is more difficult in part because as we get older we tend to get set in our habits and in part because our goals become more complex along with our lives. Hence, affecting real change in our lives becomes extremely difficult without effectively using a combination of patience and discipline.
A relevant practical example of using patience and discipline as an adult involves my desire to lose fat weight and increase muscle weight in order to improve my health. The goal isn’t just a vanity goal either as I’ve recently received some lab test results indicating that I need to exercise more and lose some weight. That’s given me the basic motivation to want to improve my overall health. And while motivation is another important ingredient in achieving goals I’ll address that in another post and focus on the place of patience and discipline in this process for the moment. A combination of losing fat weight and building muscle weight takes time as we all know. For me what has been required in order to achieve this goal (which I’m still working on) is the discipline to change my eating habits on a daily basis while also sticking to an exercise routine. These are every day decisions which require discipline multiple times per day as I consider what meals and snacks to have or not.
Where patience enters the equation is via my understanding of the time that it will take to achieve my health goals. I know that the goals I seek to achieve can’t be achieved in a short amount of time so patience involves sticking with the program for a long enough period of time to let those results occur. So each day I step on the scale first thing in the morning to check my weight progress and, for better or worse, I document my weight. If my weight on a particular morning is the same or a little bit higher than the previous day I don’t abandon the program, eat whatever and quit exercising. I stick with the plan. That’s patience at work. Understanding that this particular goal that I want to achieve takes time. For the record, in just short of a month my weight is down 4.5 pounds. My short-term goal (1-3 months) is to lose 10 pounds. So I’m sticking with the plan until that point and then I’ll reassess my goals.
Think about all the things in your life that take time and can benefit from the application of patience and discipline. Earlier I mentioned careers, relationships, health and finances. Those are typically the major areas where people want to improve their lives. And they’re also the areas where people tend to fall short in their goals and get frustrated. Sometimes the reason they fall short has to do with applying the wrong process to improve those areas. But no matter what process they apply a lack of patience and discipline will always lead to failure. To be continued…
In The Midst Of A Journey 