Cultivating Patience For Personal Growth

The key discourse around personal growth and development quite rightly emphasizes virtues such as determination, discipline, persistence, creativity and so on. Yet, about the biggest personal growth challenge many of us struggle with is impatience.

For changes in the physical and natural world, we seem to understand very straightforwardly the need for patience. For instance, we know if we want a baby it would take 9 months. We know if we want corn cobs from the grains in our hands, it would take 2-3 months at least. We know if we want to build a new house, it will take several months as well.

We intuitively understand that none of these things can be planned and hatched in a day, week or even a month, regardless of how quickly we want it.

But when it comes to personal growth, we seem to think we can short-circuit the process. We think we can read one book or article that would magically make all our procrastination problem go away — forever. We seem to think that a chronic bad habit can be shed forever just sitting through a 60 minutes webinar.

This poor judgment wouldn’t really be a problem if not that it has significant consequences. When the change we seek don’t happen at the snap of the fingers — as we expect them to — we become frustrated and jaded on the whole idea of personal growth and development. There are people who think the whole idea of personal development is a scam.

A big part of the problem is that self-help marketers make empty promises of big, quick results. They have to. They are desperate to sell their products and make big bucks.

But they are also aided by the fact that deep down what we actually want is result that’s really big and fast. So we buy that one book or course and sink into it all the expectation that this will finally make all our problem go away.

Personal growth is bound to look like scam if what you expect to get is quick, snap-of-the-finger results. You’ll rarely get that. What’s more common is incremental, tiny, barely perceptible improvement, which, with consistency, develops into a huge breakthrough after several months, or maybe years.

Personal Growth Takes Time

The reality therefore is that personal growth, like most processes in the physical natural world, requires enormous patience. To paraphrase billionaire investor, Warren Buffet, “you can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.,” The same is true for personal growth.

With personal growth, the timeline for any significant, tangible change is often on the scale of months to years rather than days to weeks. Therefore, the willingness to wait the process is crucial.

You would usually not get your time management deficiency fixed by reading one book. Your productivity likely won’t shoot through the roof as soon as you take that productivity course. It’s often the case that you’ll drop the ball several times while trying to cultivate a new habit.

Those are the normal state of things because real personal growth is hard and happens slowly. It’s really a journey that lasts a lifetime. So, you really don’t get to the end of it.

And it’s hard is because lasting change often requires many things to change at the same time: thoughts, limiting beliefs, behaviour, environment, reinforcement and so on. Therefore, the big breakthrough rarely occurs in an instant as we often expect, it builds up gradually through months and years of striving, taking baby steps, falling, rising, learning from the experience and improving.

It rarely ever one big overnight thing.

Developing Patience For Personal Growth

Developing patience for personal growth requires recognizing that the change you seek will probably take longer than you expect. This allow you to develop realistic short-term expectations ensuring that you don’t fall into the trap of overly optimistic short-term expectations, on one hand and overly pessimistic long-term expectations on the other. As Bill Gates put it:

“Most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year but they underestimate what they can accomplish in ten years.”

Patience is accepting that its possible for you to break into the top 1% of writers [insert whatever your goal is, here], but not in 1 year, maybe not even after 10 years of consistent writing.

Patience is keeping short term expectation in check while retaining the unflagging belief that the result you seek is achievable in the long term if you’re willing to pay the price.

So, should you give up because it’s obvious it’s going to take so long to get what you want?

Actually, one of the absolutely worst reasons to abandon a goal or a change is to think it’s going to take a fairly long time to accomplish.

Whether it takes 5 years or 10, the time will pass anyway. You might as well, keep going so that 5 years or 10 years down the line you can find yourself in a better place than you are today. And if it’s worth having and fighting for today, it’s worth fighting for a decade from now.

And the best thing about personal growth is that if you keep at it, you’ll eventually cross an invisible threshold where it seems you have an epiphany — where everything seems to be coming together at once. You reach that point of synergy where all the early struggles finally pay off, and your progress takes an upward trajectory and accelerates dramatically.Why Progress Often Frustrates Us (And What To Do About It)
Decrypting our amazement when too small and too slowly to notice becomes too big and too fast to wrap our heads around.medium.com

Most people often expect their lives to change in an instant which only lead to disappointment. Personal growth is a lot of almost indiscernible baby steps, taken consistently.

Don’t give up on your personal growth just because you can’t see results immediately. Don’t give up because it’s going to take a long time to accomplish. You have to be patient with the process and with yourself to achieve your goal.

The key to getting to the result you want is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.