Source- Patrick Fore: Unsplash
Patience is a virtue that helps in all aspects of life. Be it your personal life, family life, work life or love life. Today I want to share some insight into this from personal experiences.
Transformation
Throughout our lives we are constantly evolving. We go through certain processes that we are put into, or we decide to undergo with a desired outcome. Patience plays a very important role in this.
But before I go into the meat of this post let's look at the origins of the word Patience. It originates from the Latin word "pati", which means "to suffer" or "to endure". Over time, this word evolved into the Old French word "patience", which was used to describe the ability to endure suffering, hardship, or delay without becoming upset or angry.
This sense of the word was later adopted into Middle English and has persisted to the present day, with "patience" continuing to be used to describe the ability to remain calm and composed in the face of difficulty or delay.
Processes
What comes to mind when you think of processes in the context of your life? Your academic process, your career, working out at the gym?
These are all processes we endure because we want something out of it at the end. It's selfish. However, there are certain things in life we have to deal with that we need to practice patience for which we don't necessary want to. These are important. We end up learning things or how to deal with them even when we don't want to. We are thrown into situations whether we like it or not and it's how we deal with it that makes us the person we are today.
The benefits of these types of processes is developing mindfulness, better decision making, curbing impulsive behaviour, self-awareness, compassion, resilience.... and much more.
"Hold on a second what is he talking about" you may be wondering? Let me explain with an example by taking a page out of my book.
In the last decade of my life living in Trinidad and Tobago if I was asked what the most important thing that I had learnt, the answer would be patience.
Lessons Learned: How Cultivating Patience Helped Me in Life
Growing up back home in India I lived in a society where if you could afford to, you find a shorter way of getting things done. It was just the normal way of life for me and I didn't know better. But looking back it now, it was selective. Let me explain. With education parents made you endure extra to be the top of the class. This was so that you can get a better job and earn a good living. However, when it came to things like getting a driver's permit, why let your kid take lessons and a test when you can just buy his/her license. Literally, if you know the right people.
Getting My Driver's Permit in India
What's funny is that my parents sent me to a driving school and I took classes to get my license. Legitimately I thought. Months or a year later I had a thought "Hold on, I took the classes and ended up with the license, but I never took a test at the Licensing office, so how did the license end up in my hand?!" It turns out the driving school pay off somebody at the licensing office to get the permit! Perhaps their marketing gimmick!
Come learn driving with us and we deliver your license to you!
So even in the legitimate systems there's shortcuts. What was the point of going to a driving school? My friend could've given me lesson in his car for free! I would have learnt some cool tricks maybe?
Getting My Driver's Permit in Trinidad and Tobago
13 years later, my first year in Trinidad and Tobago I needed to get a local license. Especially being in sales. It was a prerequisite for most jobs to have your own car and to know how to drive it. My colleagues told me I could pay someone to get it why bother doing the mandatory hours and paying for classes?
But I decided to do everything by the book. Especially being in a new country I wanted to start on a clean slate. Also, I had just applied for permanent residency. So everything had to be legit. I enrolled in a driving school. I dint drive a car after I got my India license, so I didn't have any practice at all! In fact that stupid driving school never taught me to park or reverse. I managed well though. It was even easier because everyone drives automatic here. I had learnt to drive in India on manual which is what everyone drives. However, I had to take a lot of time off work because the written test was on one day then the driving and parking test was weeks apart.
I managed to get my fist job in Trinidad without a driver's permit on the condition that I would get a license within a specific time frame. My wife and mother-in law would drive me to my appointments in the day and my wife used to work evenings into nights as she's a chef. My mother-in-law had to take time off or make work calls in her car while I did my meetings. I made the most of this situation. I used to make calls and follow-up on meetings and deals on the drives and when I had meetings far away, tried to prequalify the customer and the deal as much as I could where I was confident it would be a done deal. The support was a major factor in being able to do all of this. Without their support I wouldn't have been able to endure a lot of life's challenges.
Immigration- What I Needed the Most Patience for
Not only for my driver's permit but I did everything by the book for my permanent residency process which took 6 years for a 3-year process. Boy was that a process! during the 6 years I had to report to the immigration office every 6 months to extend my visa with a Police Character Certificate and plenty documents with multiple copies. On top of that I'd have to line up at 7 am an hour before the office opened just to get and appointment and then the same time on another day regardless of what time the appointment was for. The whole process was quite eventful and painful with the immigration office going on strike and the fear of them loosing you file which happened to a few expat friends of mine.
At one point my application was at a standstill, and I had to leave a good job that I loved because of some policy change where I wasn't allowed to work on the work permit exemption which I was granted on the basis of my residency application. My employers weren't really aware, and I decided to leave because I was so close to getting my permanent residency, so I didn't want a black stain on my file.
I mean I could've just kept quiet and continued working. Until I finally got my permanent residency status in 2020 6 years later, I had to work odd jobs to pay the bills. I was off the books and what hurt me was that my official status for a few years was "unemployed" including my daughter's birth certificate. It really hurt my ego.
Patience in Your Career
Patience is a very important in a sales profession especially. More importantly timing. When you are impatient you mess up the timing. Sometimes you get the sale because you engaged the customer at the right time coincidentally when they were in the market for what you were offering. On the other hand, you think a customer has all the reasons to buy from you but the timing is not right, so you end up getting rejected not understanding what went wrong. So, I learnt to be patient but still persistent in sales.
Reflections
Doing things legally and taking the official route was more out of compulsion initially but it taught me patience and the lessons were retrospective.
I felt a great sense of accomplishment for the smallest achievement like getting my national ID after I was a permanent resident! Looking back if I could change something I would complain less and be more patient and endure the process with a better understanding and awareness of it. After all life is going to throw challenges at us all the time and we have deal with it calmly and we have to be smart in how we deal with it.
Now that I have my own business, I apply what I learnt during my immigration process, and I need 10X more patience now that I have kids. Infact, I think I'm a pretty impatient person still, but I might have been worse off without the process I had just gone through. It's a different kind of patience needed with kids. Well, that's for another post😄
Final Thoughts
Sometimes in life we have to unlearn certain things in order to better ourselves. That's really difficult because with repetition it's like tracks are engraved in your brain which are very different to clear out in order for the new path to be paved. Humans are most resistant to change. These unwanted habits or mindsets can be passed on from the previous generation to you so its innate. It's like a river and takes the path with least resistance. We have to have the willpower to change for good even though it may take a lot of resistance, put us out of our comfort zone and also beware of the implications that if we don't, we could pass them on to our future generations.
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