What is Patience?

As I mentioned previously, I retired at the start of July.

When I did, in one of life’s odd coincidences, I ended up dealing with a major bureaucratic snafu that reminded me of a major bureaucratic snafu that occurred when I was first hired.

Both episodes were potentially costly and difficult to resolve.

In the earlier instance, I lost my patience and spoke angrily to the powers-that-were.

This time, I remained calm, but I couldn’t help but think that I felt and sounded a bit like Jimmy Dugan in A League of Their Own.

Nearly everyone knows the scene in which Dugan (played by Tom Hanks) shouts, “There’s no crying in baseball!!!”

What few remember, however, is that in a later scene he refrains from yelling, even though the player he’s coaching has made the same mistake… again.

This made me wonder, what is the psychology of patience?

One Google search later, I stumbled upon the recent work of Kate Sweeny.

As she points out, cliche would have it that patience is a virtue.

For Sweeny, however, patience is a process best explained by first considering what impatience is.

According to Sweeny, impatience is an emotion—one that we experience when we encounter a frustrating or unwanted delay.

I can relate: in both of my experiences, I was facing a delay that was both inconvenient and and frustrating—one that was, in Sweeny’s words, “unreasonable, unfair, or inappropriate.”

In the process model that Sweeny offers, patience is thus “a form of emotional regulation that targets the subjective experience and outward expression of impatience” (7).

This idea of “emotional regulation” is what makes Tom Hanks’ behavior and facial expressions so amusing in A League of Their Own: his character is on the verge of exploding at Evelyn (again) when she makes the same mistake (again)… but he doesn’t.

Studies of stress have suggested that the quickest way to stress someone out to the point of near insanity is to hold them responsible for things over which they have no control.

One thing we have absolutely no control over, of course, is someone else’s mistakes.

When those mistakes impact us, we’re put in the position of being “responsible” for correcting or resolving something that was 1) unanticipated, and 2) not our fault.

Sweeny suggests that there are various was that we can engage in the kind of emotional regulation that leads to the practice of “patience.”

On the one hand, we can distract ourselves from it.

If this simply isn’t possible, we can try to reframe the situation by thinking differently about the source of our impatience.

Over the years, I’ve learned to try to default to thinking of the situation as a puzzle.

I’ve also learned that, unfortunately, sometimes the only way to coax others toward that resolution is to make sure they understand that not assisting me will ultimately create greater problems… for them.

My dad used to quote Teddy Roosevelt and counsel me to “Speak softly and carry a big stick”—which was a bit ironic, because he (my dad) was notorious for impulsively yelling when impatient or angered—much like the character of Jimmy Dugan

When I pointed this out to him, though, he’d laugh and quote the biblical injunction, “Do as I say, not as I do.” (When Jesus was counseling his followers about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, he told them, “Do as they say, not as they do.”)

When it comes to practicing patience, what do you do?