Use Your Patience Wisely

Have you noticed that as we go through our day, we tend to be polite or at least tolerant of the people we deal with?  If our order is wrong in the coffee shop, we quickly tell the person that it is no big deal, they fix it and we are on our way.  Someone makes a mistake at work and we expect them to fix it, but we rarely take them to task for it, we simply politely accept it and move on.  This happens all day long, often with total strangers.  Even if we are not particularly polite or tolerant of people’s mistakes, very few people would create a scene or raise their voice in public.

Contrast this with two much more intimate circumstances where we regularly lose our temper, speak harshly, raise our voice and are intolerant of the smallest mistakes:  when we speak to our closest family members and when we speak to ourselves!

We Use Our Patience on Others

When we come home, we regularly speak to our spouses and children in a way that we would never speak to other people and more importantly would never tolerate if someone else spoke to them in that manner.  Yet we do it all the time without another thought. 

We also speak to ourselves in the harshest, most intolerant manner that we would never endure from others.  We use up our patience on others and save our frustrations and upset for those who are nearest and dearest to us because it is easier and has much less consequences. 

But, is it easier and are there less consequences?  While it would be socially unacceptable to chastise someone in public for making a mistake with our coffee or lunch, we rarely think about the long-term effects that treating our families and ourselves this poorly will have on them and on us.  The fact is it is not easier and the consequences, to our psychology and to our children, can be devastating.

We are not advocating losing our temper and making a scene in everyday occurrences; we are advocating for using our patience and understanding with those who matter to us most in addition to everyone else.

Wisely using our patience in this way can have wonderful and long-lasting positive results on us and those in our circle.