In this article, we talk about some of the most effective techniques that all of us can apply on a daily basis to cultivate patience as a virtue.

Patience is one of the most important characteristics possessed by great leaders and successful individuals. It allows us to gain victory over difficult challenges in almost all spheres of life. In today’s world, we all tend to incline towards receiving instant gratification instead of long-term prosperity and abundance. This alone closes so many doors for us that we cannot even begin to fathom. We’ve all heard of that impatient investor who lost millions in an unplanned gamble because he could not control his urge to act impulsively. We’ve also heard of the impatient driver who lost his life in an attempt to jump the red light because he couldn’t wait for two more minutes.

Truth be told, no great feat was ever accomplished by anyone who lacked patience as a virtue. And with the world gaining pace every minute of every day, only those who strive to make a conscious effort to cultivate patience will be able to leave an admirable legacy behind. With this, let us dive straight into some of the most effective ways to cultivate patience as a virtue.

Meditation

Meditation is perhaps the simplest way to cultivate patience as a virtue. Spending just 10 minutes on a daily basis to center your thoughts can work wonders for those who struggle to reign in their impulses. Meditation not only allows you to soothe the state of your physical body, but also enables you to keep your anxious thoughts in check while maintaining a calm state of mind. When it comes to controlling your senses, meditation essentially helps in two ways: active pacification and passive forbearance.

Active Pacification

Whenever you feel agitated, or compelled to submit to your impulses, meditation can prove to be a fitting savior. Every time you feel an urge to do something in haste or frenzy, take a moment to find a quiet corner and meditate for as little as 2-3 minutes. The results you’ll achieve will be truly marvelous. And once you get into the habit of actively pacifying your excited state of mind, there’s nothing in this world which will be able to force you into making rash self-defeating decisions.

Passive Forbearance

When you meditate, your body, mind and emotions quickly adapt to a more patient way of life. You become accustomed to maintaining a calm and composed persona in the face of all kinds of challenging situations. As a matter of fact, consistently practicing active pacification eventually leads to the development of passive forbearance. Now, we’re not saying that it will happen over-night. It’s going to take some time coupled with a lot of dedication. Irrespective of how busy your day has been, you will have to set aside 10 minutes on a daily basis if you truly wish to cultivate patience as a virtue.

How to practice meditation?

There are several types of meditation techniques that you can practice regularly. For ex. classic meditation, guided meditation, mindfulness meditation, etc. The best thing about this exercise is that you don’t need much to start with it, or even reach an advanced level. Plus, no matter which type of meditation you opt for, you will always end up developing patience as a by-product, whether you aim for it or not.

• In order to meditate effectively, the first step is to find a silent and segregated place for yourself, away from all sorts of distractions.
• Next, sit in a comfortable position. You may opt for a simple cross-legged posture, or you may sit on a restful chair instead, whichever appeals to you more.
• Straighten your spine as well as your neck as if you were trying to touch the ceiling of the room with the scalp of your head.
• Gently place your hands on your thighs or on the armrest of the chair with your palms facing upwards.
• Close your eyes while maintaining your focus on a point located at 45° from the horizontal.
• Now, bring your focus to your breath. Allow it to get deeper and deeper with each passing second. Observe how it flows in and out of your nostrils. Observe the subsequent expansion and contraction of your abdomen.
• Maintain your focus on your breath. It is highly likely that your thoughts will tend to wander from place to place and you will find yourself getting distracted repeatedly. Worry not. Simply bring your attention back to the flow of your breath.
• You may place your hand on your abdomen from time to time and try to physically feel the movement of the same in order to help yourself maintain better focus and attention.

If you wish to know more about the various other forms of meditation which can prove to be extremely useful in your quest for cultivating patience, do check out our publication titled “5 Easy Meditation Techniques For Beginners“.

Affirmations

Affirmations are yet another effective way to cultivate patience as a virtue. Often, we underestimate the power of words. Especially the ones we tell ourselves. Often, we end up dwelling in a negative space, surrounded by an ocean of unhelpful words and phrases that we keep telling ourselves without realizing their obstructive impact on our subconscious mind. Conversely, those who understand how big a change simple positive affirmations can bring about in their lives tend to witness success and triumph way beyond their initial expectation.

Negative thoughts tear down our confidence and self-esteem like nothing else does. Affirmations on the other hand help us stay motivated to do great things no matter how difficult the situation may be. They can also help us maintain a calm state of mind in agitated and provocative conditions. But how do affirmations work anyway?

We are all aware of the fact that our thoughts have a direct impact on our emotions. Our emotions in turn influence our actions and to a significant degree. What affirmations do is that they help us guide our thoughts in a direction that can prove to be beneficial for us both in short and long term. In addition to this, when we tell positive words of motivation to ourselves, it sends a signal to our subconscious mind that we indeed believe in ourselves, and have the will as well as the potential to achieve what we desire. Once our subconscious gets that message, every thing else becomes a piece of cake. The trick is to stay consistent till we get the message delivered to our subconscious mind.

Negative thoughts can be extremely difficult to weed out, and expecting over night results is completely impractical. More so when you’ve been feeding your subconscious mind with the same negative thoughts over and over again since forever. Our advice would be to give your subconscious enough time to make peace with your new way of thinking, instead of constantly fretting over delayed success. Rest assured, the success will come. Focus more on how many times a day you still end up feeding unhelpful thoughts to yourself in the form of words and phrases, and try to eliminate such patterns of thinking as soon as possible. The same becomes applicable when using affirmations for cultivating patience.

The next time you find yourself getting irritated or annoyed in any given circumstance, simply say to yourself: “I am in control of my emotions. No worldly stimulation can affect my state of mind unless I want it to.” Repeat this statement multiple times till you successfully detach yourself from your lingering negative emotions. Also, this is just one example of the many affirmations you can use to cultivate patience. You can even prepare your own short and long affirmations and use them as and when required. If you have an inclination towards spirituality, you may affirm: “Thank you God for blessing me with patience and self-control. Thank you for your divine guidance, help and illumination.”

Another point to keep in mind is that you can practice affirmations even during your leisure time. For ex. while walking, resting, cycling, etc. In fact, this tends to have a much more profound effect on our mindset in the longer run. This is because continuously exposing our subconscious mind to helpful thoughts allows it to conveniently absorb the corresponding ideology, thereby registering the latter as our normal way of thinking. Once again, affirmations aren’t magical mantras. They have a scientific basis, and work well for those who practice them religiously with great determination and consistency.

The Replacement Therapy

The Replacement Therapy essentially refers to the practice of reviewing your interactions on a daily basis and replacing the unpleasant ones with a more desirable visualization. Before we explain how this technique can prove to be extremely useful for cultivating patience, let us enlist the process steps first. This way, you will gain a much better understanding of its benefits later on.

How to practice the Replacement Therapy?

• Sit or lie down in a comfortable position in a quiet room.
• Gently close your eyes and place your arms by your side.
• Take a few deep breaths for 1-2 minutes.
• Now revisit the memory of an unpleasant interaction you’ve had recently wherein you lost your cool and acted aggressively with the person in front of you.
• Once you’ve played the entire scene in your head, verbally say “erase, erase” or “cancel, cancel” with the intention of completely deleting that incident from reality.
• You may repeat the last step 2-3 times in order to strengthen the effect of this exercise.
• The next step would be to replace the undesirable memory with a desirable one. For this, re-imagine the scenes from the same incident.
• Visualize yourself responding in a calm and controlled manner to whatever the other person is saying.
• Feel yourself taking up the position of the person in-charge of directing the situation to his or her liking.

The last 3 steps are extremely crucial and must be completed with utmost sincerity. Under no circumstances should you skip these steps since the entire technique will then become ineffective and futile. Make sure you put your best foot forward in making your positive visualizations as vivid, bright, colorful, and realistic as possible.

Benefits of the Replacement Therapy

Replacement therapy allows you to (figurately) rectify your past mistakes by serving as a powerful agent of change. Combining this with any of the other mentioned techniques will help you cultivate patience much more efficiently in much less time. Truth be told, you will not be able to control your reactions always. Especially when you’re just beginning with your journey towards building a better temperament.

Meditations and affirmations will allow you to prevent yourself from falling over the edge and acting indignantly in provocative circumstances. But some times, those techniques won’t work as effectively as you’d want them to, and you will end up losing control and saying things you’ll regret in the future. This is where the Replacement Therapy comes in. In the aforementioned scenario, this tool will act as an unbreakable shield against getting demotivated in your quest for developing a tolerant mindset. With this, you will be able to use a sour experience to your advantage, and countless times at that.

When you consciously erase memories of displeasing confrontations and dialogues, you tell your subconscious mind that these are behaviors you wish to eliminate and change for good. Following this, when you provide your subconscious mind with positive visualizations to replace the bad experiences with, you proactively guide it in the direction you actually want it to go. Your subconscious mind then starts to bring about the required changes in your thought process and behavior. Every time you use this technique for cultivating patience, you reinforce and strengthen your will as well as your capability to handle difficult situations in a calm and controlled manner.

Conscious Control Method

As the name suggests, this method involves the use of your conscious mind for controlling your behavior by changing your focus, physiology, breathing pattern, etc. It cannot be categorized as a long term solution, but comes in handy when trying to make it through a challenging situation. There are numerous steps that you can take in order to immediately shift your attention from the source of agitation to something much more appeasing. Let us discuss about a few of them in detail.

Breathing Exercises

It is a well know fact that the depth, pattern, and quality of your breath have a direct impact on your mood and emotional state of being. Here are a few breathing exercises you can practice on the go whenever you feel a sudden build up of anger and agitation within you.

(A) Deep Breathing: This is the easiest way to disperse your anger almost immediately. For this, simply bring your focus to the flow of your breath. It’s kind of like meditating with your eyes open. Pay attention to the flow of your breath. Observe how it moves in and out of your lungs. Make every breath deeper than the one before until the expansion and contraction of your chest and abdomen is all you can focus on. For convenience, you may even try counting from 1 to 5 with each inhale and exhale respectively.

(B) Inhale, Hold, Exhale: This technique is applied in conjunction with the deep breathing one. Once you inhale, hold your breath for about 3 seconds, then exhale. So this divides the entire exercise into 3 distinct sections: 5 seconds of inhale, 3 seconds of holding, and again, 5 seconds of exhale. The holding part makes it easier to let go of the problem at hand and shift your focus on your breathing pattern due to the slight difficulty and inconvenience involved.

(C) Mouth Exhale: In this, you simply inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth. Use the 5-3-5 seconds rule as described in the previous exercise for best results. In case you feel a little uncomfortable in carrying out these techniques in front of other people, you may politely ask for a short time out and perform 2-3 quicks sessions of any of the aforementioned breathing exercises. You may then resume your conversation once you’ve centered yourself and regained your senses.

Focus Shift

Focus Shift technique is all about playing with attention. Whenever you feel an emotional turmoil building inside of you, instead of focusing on the latter, shift your attention to your feet. Observe how they feel amidst all that anger and agitation. Do they seem a little tensed? Is there a tingling sensation between the toes? Feel the ground beneath your feet. Is it soft or hard? What’s the texture like?

Instead of your legs, you can also apply this exercise with your hands, back, heart, etc. If you truly wish to cultivate patience as a virtue, the Focus Shift technique can work wonders for you. Yes, you will have to put in considerable amount of effort in the beginning. But with time, you will get accustomed to it. And once that happens, you will be able to control your anger and sudden outbursts at will, just like that.

Observe your emotions

Getting into the habit of observing your emotions can take you a long way in your journey towards developing patience as a virtue. Why is that? Because it can help you make peace with how you feel in any given moment. Given the analytical nature of this technique, we believe it can produce noteworthy results for those who have a rational and logic oriented way of looking at the world.

For this, you will have to learn the skill of detachment. You will have to learn to distance yourself from the way you feel before you can understand why you feel the way you do. We know it sounds like a lot of work. But with time, you’ll become a master at creating a healthy space between your rational and emotional minds. And once you get a taste of how powerful this technique can be, you will never be able to revert back to your original ways.

In brief, this techniques requires you to assume the role of a third person observing your emotions from a distance. There are two approaches that you can opt from. Both are simple and easy to apply.

First approach: Seek a quiet place and assume a comfortable position. Close your eyes. Visualize yourself in the difficult situation you were in moments ago. Observe the changes that occur in your physiology and emotional state of being. Contemplate upon each and every negative emotion as it comes and goes with time. Feel the pain. Notice the anger. Follow the anxiousness. Do not chastise yourself for feeling the way you do. Emotions like pain, anger, anxiousness, etc. serve an important purpose in our lives.

With your eyes closed, ask yourself, “why do I feel the way I do?” and let the answer come to you automatically. Next, try to reason with your emotional mind as to how it could have handled the situation better. Further ask questions like “is there any other way I could have responded to the other person?” or “do I need to feel this way any longer or have I understood the message and it’s time to move on?” and again wait for the answers to come to you automatically. Continue observing your negative emotions until they completely disperse and disappear on their own.

Very soon you will notice that the negative emotion has dissipated completely. With this technique, you will gain a much better perspective as to why you feel the way you do. In many conditions you will find that your anger is not at all justified and you’ve been overreacting all along. Nevertheless, there was a message behind the emotion, and the wise thing to do in such cases would be to understand the message and move on as soon as possible. In other situations, you will realize that your anger and hurt had been justified and you had the right to feel that way. The best thing to do in this situation is to make peace with your emotions, tell yourself that it’s okay to feel this way, and allow yourself to feel better.

Second Approach: The second approach is more of an “in the moment” thing. This may or may not work for everyone, depending upon the severity of the argument one is involved in. For this, you don’t have to remove yourself from the situation. You just have to recognize your emotion and silently state the name of the latter in your mind. For ex. If you find yourself getting angry, silently say “anger” to acknowledge the presence of that emotion. Similarly, repeat the same exercise for anxiety, stress, irritability, jealousy, pride, etc.

Sometimes, simply recognizing a negative emotion can diminish its intensity. This works because deep down, we all understand the fact that it’s always better to use a positive way of expressing ourselves no matter how bad the circumstances may be. And reminding ourselves that we are taking the lesser of the two courses available, our subconscious mind immediately kicks into action and prevents us from worsening the situation any further.

Once again, the tools and techniques mentioned in this section will not help you cultivate patience in the longer run. But they will enable you to control your reactions in provocative and emotionally stimulating times.

Take a time-out!

Taking a time-out from challenging situations is just as important as developing the habit of tackling them head on. We all have different thresholds and patience levels. Although it’s good to push your limits, however, sometimes allowing yourself to relax and recalibrate your senses can prove to be much more beneficial than putting in relentless effort towards your goal. This practice actually works on multiple levels, depending on what it is that you’re trying to achieve.

When we talk about striving to cultivate patience as a virtue, a time-out would imply a short break from the continuous exposure to difficult circumstances that we would be subjecting ourselves to. Working hard towards developing tolerance and acceptance can become extremely demanding physically, mentally as well as emotionally. After a while, it may very well happen that you find yourself to be losing temper even more easily than before. In such scenarios, the most helpful thing to do is to distance yourself from all major sources of agitation for some time. You don’t have to practice any technique or even think about cultivating patience for a day or two. Simply let yourself be. That’s all.

Conclusion

There are numerous techniques that we can apply in our daily lives in order to cultivate patience as a virtue. Techniques like meditation, affirmations, and the replacement therapy can help develop passive forbearance in the longer run. On the other hand, techniques described in the conscious control method can improve our ability to handle challenging and provocative situations that instigate an ocean of negative emotions within us on the spot. Lastly, taking regular time-outs can help you absorb the progress made by your application of other techniques while helping you to recalibrate your senses and maintain a healthy state of mind.

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Resources

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