There are many transitional times in our lives when much feels uncertain, maybe everything.
As humans, uncertainty is uncomfortable and often revs up our flight, fight, or freeze response causing us to experience stress and react emotionally to our feelings.
This is why many people do not make changes, even ones that would enhance their lives, possibly changing them forever. The distressing thoughts and feelings overtake them and they assume that it’s an indicator (a “sign”) of a wrong decision, or they want to avoid those feelings at any cost.
When in that state, how do you continue on to create a promising and different future? You’ve likely heard that becoming comfortable with feeling uncomfortable is something important to train your mind to accept.
A proven approach is to have patience with yourself in those moments, stop and observe your thoughts and feelings, taking time to understand what brought them about. When you can become the observer of your own mind, you begin to detach from your emotions just enough to pay attention to what is happening within you.
This buys you the time to examine the response you were about to have (possibly to fight, shrink or escape) and allows you to adjust, slow down, understand and rethink.
This applies when there is no true danger causing your internal reaction. When you are truly in an immediately dangerous situation, your instincts can rule the moment, but those times are pretty rare for most people.
For perspective, you can have a survival response because a fire is surrounding you and you can also have a fear response when you want to apply for a job in a new industry.
In typical scenarios, like the pursuit of that job, feeling anxious and fearful often works against you, so you want to attend to your physical and mental state more than ever so you can bolster your courage and create the energy that will assist you to push through the uncomfortable feelings.
Patience creates space and calms the mind, while hope allows for higher-quality thoughts to take shape and guide you forward.
“If we focus on an unwanted past or a dreaded future, that means we live mostly in stress, in survival mode, whether we’re obsessing over our health – the survival of the body, paying our mortgage – the survival need for shelter from our external environment, or having enough time to do what we need to do to survive, most of us are much more familiar with the addictive state of mind we’ll call survival than we are with living as creators.” (Dr. Joe Dispenza – “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself”)
To build new lives for ourselves, whether that involves a new job, a better business or more money working for us, we must be creators.
Creators of all kinds know that to effectively develop a project, an art piece, a partnership, or anything else, you must have an expectation and desire (hope), be focused and intentional, and have the energy to pull it off. You must also be patient as creating takes time.
A word on the word hope. After numerous discussions about my favorite word, hope, I realized that the interpretations of that word range from my own rather spiritual and most positive one to quite the opposite, a wimpy wanting feeling with no action.
For your own purposes, use a word that offers you strength such as faith or expectation if it better suits you.
Creating Money
When you decide that you want to grow wealth and become more secure and abundant, patience will be needed for investments to flourish, for savings to build up, for your spending habits to be reworked to fit your goals. There will be times when you may lose money that you’ve worked hard to create. Patience and hope will be vital to begin again and regain your wealth.
Starting or Changing Careers
Almost everything about a career search requires patience. Gaining a clear understanding of what you want next is a process, and if you aren’t patient you may just jump into something that ultimately doesn’t work. Patience is a key element to finding the right positions, hoping for interviews, having to go through numerous interviews, waiting for the offer and ultimately learning a new job. I have worked with clients who have amazed me at the patience they exhibited as they lost opportunities, one after the other, just to go after the next one until they landed the job.
Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurs jump into business ownership excited about an idea they have. They literally can’t wait to be serving clients or producing for customers and yet, they have so much to set up and create at first that it can feel very slow. Often they are starting by doing many tasks themselves that they have to learn. They must be patient getting their plan in order, marketing started and working, delivery systems created, hiring, and certainly becoming profitable. It all takes enormous patience.
I explained these rather obvious examples to highlight how necessary patience is, and how we can either embrace it or blame ourselves for not seeing results in a world where results are borne of patient action.
And throughout, we must maintain hope for our vision. Without the hope, the patience would be short-lived, and without the patience, the hope would not be realized.
