As a Leader, should you be patient or impatient?
Patient or impatient – with the speed your people and your business are moving at?
Patient or impatient – with yourself, your family, your friends?
Patient or impatient – with the speed of life and work in general?
It depends…
As a starting point, patience or impatience are expressions not of pace, but of your energy around, your relationship to the pace of movement of an individual, a project, a situation.
There is no one answer to “should you be patient or impatient”, it all depends on the situation.
Again, patient/impatience are all about your energy and relationship to pace.
My advice today is to first focus on your own self-awareness around your relationship to that pace.
If you are unaware that you are seeming impatient, for example, then you are going to be unaware of the impact you will have on others involved, people who may be perfectly happy with the pace and will, therefore, feel somewhat stressed by your impatience.
Conversely, imagine you are being super relaxed and patient with moving something forwards and the other person involved wants to move fast to a decision, to action. Your patience may then land on them as disinterest or lack of prioritisation, so causing them frustration with you.
So, recognising that your energy around patience/impatience will always have some degree of impact on others, I encourage you to bring awareness to how you feel about pace often and consciously.
Once you bring awareness to your feelings, whether that is patience or impatience at that moment, then you can, consciously, make a choice as to whether to be patient or impatient with self, others, situation.
Energy awareness is a powerful tool for leaders, awareness of energy around patience/impatience is certainly important as leaders do impact others through their energy, which can be viral in an organisation.
Be conscious of your energy and impact.
Patient or Impatient? It depends, but do make a choice, don’t be unconscious.