The Power of Patience

Progress is a long term game. As we talked about in a previous post, progress comes at different rates, sometimes it is very quick, sometimes it slows way down, and sometimes you may even backslide a bit. If you only focus in on the short term, you will certainly find times of real discouragement. But when you are consistently working at something, your progress is more like the stock market: regardless of the short term fluctuations, over the long term you are improving. That kind of long term thinking about progress is not always easy, and requires the development of a critical quality: patience.

There are many components to progress, some of it is physical changes to your body; losing/gaining weight, building flexibility, building strength. All of these take time and are limited by our actual biological processes. While everyones body changes at somewhat different rates, there is a limit that our personal biology will let us know about and trying to push against or past that limit usually results in injury, illness, and disappointment. We have to push against our comfort zone to make progress, but at the same time we need to respect our bodies. This becomes painfully clear when we have a significant injury. While there is a lot we can do to help with our recovery, we are ultimately limited by our healing processes, and that requires massive amounts of patience to not inadvertently re-injure yourself.

Learning languages and music is also really challenging, especially or adults who never learned these as a kid. Both of these take not only a lot of time, but also require us to mess up a lot, often in front of other people. The consistency of showing up to make small progress consistently will eventually get us to where we want to be, we just need to have confidence in that process. As another analogy, it's very much like compound interest: small percentages of progress compound over long periods of time to add up to huge gains. But that only works if you are patient and consistent in the process.

So if patience is important, how do we cultivate it? This is a challenging question and I think varies a lot from person to person. But I can tell you what has been effective for me: nurturing patience with understanding. It is easier for me to patient with my body if I understand the limitations of the biological processes at play. It's easier for me to be patient with my youth students if I understand where they are in their cognitive and social development. And it's easier for me to be patient in my own practice if I understand how much of a long term process progress is. So as you are developing your own practice and working on your own process, try to always bring more understanding to the table, and see what that may do for your capacity for patience.

-Instructor Mike