Why we become impatient

People say patience is a virtue, but I find it more useful to define it as a skill. Patience is the ability to wait for something without becoming frustrated.

Sometimes exercising patience is difficult. When we’re forced to wait, we become impatient. When we’re impatient, we expose our frustrations via body language, words, and actions. Our emotions take control.

In the short term, losing our impatience might gain us results. But over the long term, impatience reduces trust. It makes us less predictable to others and slows progress down. It can also lead to regret over how we manage our interpersonal relationships.

Impatience creates a vicious cycle of cause and effect. The original effect, impatience, becomes a cause of its own, effecting more waiting. And more waiting causes more impatience. This continues until the cycle breaks.

Why do we become impatient and what purpose does it serve? Answers to these questions will help identify ways to manage our impatience.

Impatience requires three conditions. First, we must have a goal. Second, we must have expectations of how much time and money reaching that goal will cost us. Third, our goal must have opportunity costs. By opportunity costs, I mean we could be spending our time and money on another opportunity.[1] 

When these conditions exist, an increase in costs will trigger our impatience. We might learn the goal is going to cost us more time or money than we expected. Or we might learn of a new opportunity that increases the goal’s opportunity costs.

Once triggered, we act on our impatience in two common ways. First, we look for shortcuts and often take them if we find them. Second, we consider switching goals.

As cavemen, our impatience was rewarded. We spent all our time tending to basic needs: food, shelter, and safety. Our impatience helped us find shortcuts for shelter and to switch goals to ensure we could eat. We could not afford to be patient. Patience equaled death.

Today, our impatience still leads us to do great things, but it can also get us into trouble. Many of us spend little time attempting to meet our basic needs. Instead, we put our time toward new, more complicated goals. 

Today’s goals need more time and money and depend on cooperation from other people. If we mismanage our impatience, we threaten our ability to achieve our goals. 

To be a great leader, you must manage your impatience. Here are three tactics.[2]

First, you can reduce your exposure to impatience triggers. You can do this by increasing focus and regulating access to new information. 

Second, you can improve your response to impatience triggers. To do this, increase your awareness of triggers and manage your emotions when they happen.

Third, you can break impatience cycles after you’ve lost your patience. To do this, take responsibility for your impatience. Then apologize, explain why it happened, and ask for forgiveness.

Since managing impatience is hard, it’s probably best to pursue a combination of all three tactics.

Notes

[1] For more on this topic, see Jim Stone's article on understanding impatience.

[2] If you’ve found other tactics helpful in managing impatience, I’d love to hear about them.