$pent Millennial

How are those resolutions going? Still haven’t stepped in the gym in ‘24? Same. I mean, there is the snow, and is it just me, or did all the “circling back in the new year” pop back hard this January 2nd…?  

Like so many of us, I track enough metrics in my job, household, and family life- performance goals, budgets, savings goals, future planning, family commitments, and engagements… I don’t need to add another list of check marks or one more habit tracker notebook to complete each day. 

However, also like so many of us, I feel a bit… unhappy and unsatisfied with myself. Over the past few years, I have felt like I have been losing myself. It feels like qualities I genuinely love and enjoy in myself have been suffocated, knocked out, and buried by other qualities, qualities that do not bring out the best in me, but instead engage her evil alter-ego. I feel like I have made slight progress on this in the past year or so, and so in order to keep up with and make progress on this positive change trajectory, I have made a set of commitments for the year 2024. 

Although I might not have pulled into the Planet Fitness parking lot or scanned in my QR code once this year, I haven’t abandoned my resolutions yet. In fact, I am going pretty strong so far. In previous posts, I have gone into detail about what I am working on this year. The commitments come in three categories: what I plan on keeping, ditching, and adding to my life this year. 

The goals, resolutions, or whatever you want to call them are more abstract, big-picture. Continuing physical activity and healthy movement is important to me, and it made my keep list. But, instead of tracking days at a gym, hours of cardio, or steps on a treadmill, I am committing to continuing to get in various forms of outdoor movement. Run-jumping over mounds of Wisconsin snow with my doggo this morning definitely counts!

In order to ensure my abstract, big-picture commitments don’t turn into a self-righteous cop-out, I have detailed clear(ish) definitions of what the three additions to my life (Patience, Meditation, Accountability) should look and feel like this year along with measurements for reflection. I promised to provide some tactical actions and steps towards habit-building to, hopefully, achieve progress on these commitments for 2024. 

The first item on my list of commitments to add to my routines for this year is patience. The reason for my pursuit of patience this year is that in the past few years. I have noticed I have become increasingly impatient. Impatient with my own progress, impatient with those around me -whether it is in line to get gas, coffee, or in deeper interactions- or impatient with the universe over… say a broken washing machine. 

I am sure I could blame this on any number of things (the pandemic, the economy, the environment, life circumstances, killer wasps…), but at the end of the day, none of those things are in my control. So, if I want to change this in myself, I have to do so in a way that addresses things within my locus of control. And so, here we are- number 1 on my 2024 To Do list. 

Patience. 

Over the past few weeks, I have been making a measured effort to increase my patience. Now, I know your next question. How? I ask myself this every day. Just the other day, I was called “the least patient person”. It wasn’t necessarily an insult, maybe more of an observation, but it wasn’t a compliment. And it was true. 

When I was having this conversation, my internal response was “I just don’t have the time…” Why? I don’t know. I don’t know what I am in such a rush for. It just sits in my mind like a refrain “I don’t have the time or patience”. This has been true for me for as long as I can remember. I even remember joking with my dad on time saying, “I just don’t have the time for this, and I have nothing but time”. 

So how do I go from “I just don’t have time or patience” to centering patience as a core commitment of my year? Good question… I don’t have a solid, concrete, definite answer. I can’t prescribe a solution and promise it will work for you. So, instead, I’ll just share a bit from my journey over these past… 13 days. 

Now, it is important to remember that although I am breaking them into separate posts for this blog, I am working on all of my, let’s call it “self-work” concurrently. So, it is likely that work with mediation and even accountability will play into my work on patience. I’ll share more about those commitments and practices surrounding them in the next few weeks. For today, just know these self-prescribed actions are not happening in a vacuum or silo, but in the context of other self-work that likely contributes to the impact. 

1. Recognize 

The first concrete(ish) step I can share in working on patience has been recognizing the trigger. 

Recognizing the triggering event or circumstance allows me the time and mindfulness to pause and breathe. It is crazy how often we end up holding our breath, without even realizing it. The moment it takes to pause and breathe upon recognizing a trigger helps me to assess the situation. It allows me to remove myself from the immediacy of the moment and as I breathe in and breathe out consider it from a 1000-foot view. 

In my mind’s internal monologue, the recognizing sounds like a tap on the shoulder or a whisper in my ear calmly stating, “This is triggering you. You are feeling impatient.”. The voice has no emotion or judgment in its tone. It is matter-of-fact and compassionate. With the reminder, there is an unspoken “and it doesn’t have to” at the end. I believe it is important to note that the tone and sentiment is “it doesn’t have to” not “it shouldn’t”. “Shouldn’t” has the potential to imply judgment, which might lead to burrowing further into impatience and negative feelings. 

2. Notice

Once I recognize the triggering event or circumstance, I check in with myself. I start in my body. What do I notice about my breath, my shoulders- are they up by my ears again? Next, I take a breath to regulate whatever I found in my body. Once my body is regulated, I am able to check in with my mind. What am I thinking? Are the thoughts true? Are they productive? Are they empathic? Do they reflect what my best, favorite self would think? 

If the thoughts sound like “Why does this sh** always happen to me?” or “Everyone is so slow and stupid!”, it is likely that they are not very productive, probably not true, and definitely not aligned with my favorite self. 

I do not judge my thoughts as “good” or “bad”, but instead ask myself, “How are these thoughts making you feel?” Typically, the negative thoughts make me feel annoyed, depressed, anxious, bitter…

Again, there is no “right” or “wrong” here. Instead, the voice asks, “and is that how you want to feel?”. If I decide that the thoughts are leading to feelings I do not want, I then move on to the next step. 

3. Reframing

If I do not like the answer of how my thoughts are making me feel, the voice helps me to reframe by changing the thoughts. This is where the 1000-foot viewpoint comes in. If my thought was “Why does this always happen to me”, the birds-eye view puts it into perspective. It really doesn’t always happen. If I’m thinking “Everyone is stupid and lazy and gross”, Brene Brown’s voice pops in with “What if we assume everyone is just doing their best? What if we get radically generous with them?”

Now, even if I am not feeling generous with others- it happens, I’m imperfect. I still want to feel better, not worse. And the voice is there to point out that by choosing the more generous thoughts, I will feel better. As a human who seeks to move away from pain and towards comfort, I tend to choose to feel better. 

This brings me to the final step. 

4. Respond, Don’t React

The brief moment or two it takes to internally walk through these steps allows me to respond, rather than react. 

Reacting happens when we act without thinking or assessing a situation. There is a time and place for this in emergency situations where response time is of the utmost importance and you don’t have time to breathe, think and assess. However, most if not all of the events and circumstances in my day-to-day do not qualify as such emergencies. And so, the choice to take the extra moments to process information and respond rather than react serves me better. 

I know this is kind of an annoying action plan. It is like if someone asks what they should do to get better at basketball, and you tell them to just keep practicing basketball… Gee, thanks! But, also, not horrible advice- practicing patience or basketball. 

For a bit more context and in an effort to make the abstract concrete, I will highlight a few examples of how I have practiced patience in the past couple of weeks. I feel my response in these situations has already seen an improvement from my typical response over the past year. 

The first example was about a week ago while I was doing my laundry in the nasty, shared laundry room of my apartment complex- talk about a trigger. My wash got stuck in the machine when an error occurred. 

Typically, I would have been really, really annoyed. It would have been a spiral into “Why me? This dump sucks. I hate our management. Greedy money-grabbing yadda, yadda, yadda”. I would have grumbled to myself, to my boyfriend, and to anyone else who could overhear me. I might send a short email to property management or even post a grumpy review of the complex on Apartments.com. This is not my best self. It doesn’t make me feel good. And, it doesn’t solve my laundry problem. But, this is the level I have been operating at. 

But, this past week, I responded differently. 

Maybe it was because I was having a good day with work or because I had been practicing my meditation and breathwork or maybe because I had my desire for increased patience in the back of my mind, but for whatever reason I didn’t sink into this familiar reaction.  Instead, I paused. 

In this pause, I went through the above-mentioned steps. In going through those steps, I expressed gratitude that it was just my dog’s blankets- of which we have many more- and not my clothes or other more pressing items that were stuck. I had my boyfriend submit the maintenance report to alert management, and I went about my day. When I checked back, the machine had unlocked itself. Although the items were soaked and soapy, I was grateful to get them out. I luckily had more money on the laundry card, so I just did another cycle in a different washer and then dried them. When management called later to check on the ticket, I informed them I got my items and let them know what was happening with the machine and that they might want to check it out. They said they would, and that was it. All in all, a much more productive way to handle the situation, and I got to keep my peace. 

Now… when I did laundry yesterday it looks like they never actually fixed the machine. Darn slumlords! But still, in seeing that I simply used the other machines and avoided the potential irritation of another incident. I practiced locus of control, and my laundry process went…fine. 

A few things that stand out to me from this example: 

1. Pausing for gratitude 
2. Applying rational and appropriate magnitude and urgency to the situation- not blowing it out of proportion
3. Not assigning blame or making it personal- it wasn’t my fault and nobody was acting against me
4. Sticking to my routine as much as possible
5. Taking appropriate steps towards resolution/ problem solving

These things might seem obvious some days and impossible others, but either way, they are notes I will take on practicing patience in future situations. 

The second example happened last weekend at a local cafe as I waited in line to order a coffee while writing this very post. 

The woman in front of me was taking a very long time, was very indecisive, and was generally drawing out the process as a line formed behind me. In the past, I might have gotten impatient. I might think things like “What is wrong with this woman?” “Just order and pay…” “There is a line here…” or other  unkind things. And for a second, I almost went there. But I didn’t. 

When I was tempted to go there, I practiced the pause and in the pause, a few thoughts popped into my head: 

1. She had asked if we were ready to order and was going to offer to let us go ahead of her because she was still grabbing some items. My sister who I was with had said we were still deciding, and it was fine (which it was). She had been considerate and taken into consideration our needs by giving us the opportunity to go ahead of her. Really, what more could we ask for? 

2. I was not in a rush. It was Saturday morning, and I was enjoying  a coffee out while working on a recreational hobby blog post. The stakes almost could not be lower. How privileged was I? 

3. I asked myself the source of my impatience. I had no satisfactory answer. And so, clearly, I didn’t have to be impatient. 

I brought it up to my sister when we sat down with our drinks. Her response was “She was taking up space good for her.” Her response felt so perfect to me as that is something she herself is working on this year. I am so proud of her for working on that, and the idea that extending patience to others allows them to do the same re-affirms my pursuits alignment with my favorite self. 

So there you have it. An imperfect process from an imperfect person. An inside look at one silly little mess who is just trying her best on the pursuit of patience.

Please let us know how you practice patience! What are your triggers and how do you respond?