Good things come to those who wait, and investing in developing your team’s patience skills is well worth it.
In our how-to guide, we’ll give you everything you should know about the virtue of patience, including what it is, the most essential skills and qualities to focus on, methods for team-wide improvement, and tools you can use to sharpen your team’s skills.
What Is Patience?
Patience is a person’s ability to wait, tolerate, or put up with something without letting the situation make you frustrated, angry, or upset. It’s an essential skill for anyone, regardless of what you do for work.
Knowing how to be patient in difficult or challenging situations comes with a whole host of benefits, from better overall mental and physical health, improved leadership skills, and more satisfied employees, among other advantages.
What are patience skills?
Patience is a skill in and of itself, but patience skills are specific qualities that can make it easier to develop your ability to be patient. For example, some common patience skills that can help you develop your tolerance for frustrating challenges include:
- Flexibility
- Self-control
- Conflict resolution
- Resilience
- Collaboration skills
- Tolerance
Why is learning how to be patient important?
Learning how to be patient is incredibly important for folks to have a happy, fulfilling life. At work, having a level of tolerance and self-control helps you make better decisions, lower stress, boost your professional growth, and improve your problem-solving skills. In your personal life, having patience helps you improve (and maintain) your relationships, have a more positive outlook, boost your level of emotional intelligence, and improve your physical and mental health.
Why is it so hard to be patient?
That being said, learning how to be patient isn’t easy. Having patience can be really difficult for many people. In fact, researchers think it’s harder to be patient now more than ever. People today are more likely to expect immediate gratification due to cultural shifts, especially with technology.
Having instantaneous access to things we want — whether it’s googling an answer to a question, ordering food or groceries via an app, or scrolling through TikTok — makes it much harder to wait for things. That’s why it’s so important to prioritize building patience on your team.
How to Develop and Encourage Patience Skills in Your Team
Helping your team develop a deeper understanding of patience and patience skills can be challenging because it takes time. However, with a little dedicated time and practice, you can completely transform the way your team functions when it comes to tolerance, flexibility, and self-control.
Here are six straightforward strategies to improve your team’s overall patience and hone their patience skills.
1. Make a habit of practicing gratitude.
Although you can’t force people to be grateful, you can make an effort to prioritize practicing gratitude on your team. Even just modeling the habit of practicing gratitude can help.
Some ways you can practice gratitude both at and outside of work include:
- Keeping a gratitude journal where you write down things you’re appreciative of
- Openly expressing your thanks to those around you (including your team)
- Writing thank-you notes or emails
Cultivating a culture of gratitude within your team and at work can be particularly challenging, but it can go a long way with regard to improving your team’s overall patience skills.
2. Encourage positive thinking amongst the team.
Positive thinking and optimistic attitudes can give folks the capacity to be more patient with others. The best way to encourage your team to think positively and see the brighter side of things is to model that behavior yourself, as a team leader.
Practicing gratitude will certainly help. Other things you can do include challenging any negative or pessimistic thoughts with positive ones. This can help you develop a more optimistic outlook on situations.
Encouraging your team to work together and collaborate can also create a more positive environment all around.
3. Make sure your team knows how to set realistic expectations.
It can feel nearly impossible to be patient if you don’t have realistic expectations. When those unrealistic expectations go unmet, it’s only natural to feel frustrated or upset. However, helping your team understand how to set realistic goals and expectations can make it easier for them to practice patience skills and tolerance.
One way you can start encouraging this mindset is by reminding your team that perfectionism doesn’t exist and isn’t the goal. Nobody is perfect and everybody makes mistakes. They’re a normal part of life and to be expected. This can help take a lot of the pressure off your team.
Recognizing and deliberately highlighting things that folks have done right is another good way to help your employees set more realistic goals. Instead of only celebrating “big” company-wide wins, shout out the smaller wins, too. That way, your team can better visualize their progress. A team that doesn’t know what’s realistic and what’s not is set up for disappointment.
4. Explore meditation, mindfulness, and similar practices (and encourage your team to do the same!).
Again, although you can’t force your team, encouraging them to explore practices like meditation and mindfulness can help them improve their patience skills. That’s because both mindfulness and meditation help you accept the present situation and recognize what’s in your control vs. what’s out of your control (more on this later).
Even something as simple as deep breathing exercises can help you and your team regulate emotions and boost your capacity for patience. You can encourage this in your team but not just modeling the habits yourself, but also providing resources for them to do the same, such as how-to reading materials, workshops, or classes.
5. Work on your team’s understanding of time management.
Although it might not be first on your mind, working on your team’s understanding of time management can actually boost their patience skills, too. That’s because time management and patience (or lack thereof) go hand-in-hand. If you struggle to manage your time at work, for example, unexpected situations can ruin your whole day, leading to much higher levels of impatience.
To improve your employees’ time management skills, encourage them to break up large tasks or assignments into more manageable, bite-sized chunks. Then, emphasize the importance of prioritization and how they can start with the most pressing things first. You can also explore specific time management techniques, like the Pomodoro method or time blocking.
6. Help your team know what’s in their control.
Similar to the concept of mindfulness, helping your team know what’s in their control vs. what they can’t control can help them develop better patience skills. If something is out of your team’s control, for example, there isn’t reason to become impatient. If something is in your control, make a plan to tackle it.
Being able to identify what circumstances you can change vs. what you have to accept can go a long way in building patience and tolerance.
5 Core Patience Skills to Focus on with Your Team
Although patience itself is a skill, there are other skills and qualities that increase your team’s capacity for patience. Here are five core patience skills you should explore with your team to boost their abilities and improve the team dynamic.
Resilience
One of the best strategies to improve your team’s patience skills is maintaining a positive, optimistic attitude and resilience is a key skill your employees can work on to achieve this. Resilience allows folks to keep up that positive attitude even in the midst of challenging circumstances. It also helps people bounce back from difficulty.
Instead of letting the negative or difficult situations hold you back from success, you can prioritize seeing the good in things to improve your ability to be patient. In fact, a lack of resilience has a direct tie to impatience.
Flexibility and adaptability
Similarly, the ability to be flexible and to be patient go hand-in-hand. If you have employees who aren’t very flexible or who have a hard time adapting, it’ll be much more difficult for them to practice patience when things don’t go their way. Working on your team’s adaptability skills can help them better understand the options when things don’t go according to plan and as a result, can improve their ability to be patient.
Self-control
Not surprisingly, one’s ability to control themselves is directly related to their patience skills, making self-control an essential skill to hone in on when working on your team’s patience.
Think of road rage, for example. Chances are, you’ve witnessed someone in traffic make a poor decision. As a result, another driver becomes upset and acts irrationally, perhaps yelling or driving erratically. This distinct lack of control influences their ability to be patient. Someone who’s specifically worked on their self-control can get cut off in traffic, take a deep breath, and practice patience instead of letting their emotions control them.
Encouraging self-control on your team can help your employees react appropriately when things don’t turn out as expected.
Conflict resolution
In a similar vein, your team’s conflict resolution skills can complement their patience skills. For example, if your team is able to successfully solve internal or cross-team conflict, their capacity for patience increases. They’re more willing to work with others and collaborate to find common ground and come to a solution, as opposed to letting their impatience win.
If your goal is to improve your team’s patience skills, definitely prioritize sharpening their conflict resolution skills, too.
Collaboration skills
Your team’s ability to collaborate and be a team player also correlates with their patience levels. Folks who can’t work well in a team, let alone collaborate, tend to really struggle with being patient.
To mitigate this, actively encourage and reward teamwork and collaboration within your team. Invest in their collaboration skills and watch the way they work together to problem-solve and brainstorm ideas. Encouraging this collaborative behavior can help folks be more patient with each other.
How to Work on Your Team’s Patience With Yoodli
Patience is one of the most difficult skills to learn and it’s often a lifelong journey. However, tapping into a tool like Yoodli can speed up the process. Yoodli — an AI-driven communication coach — offers the most realistic, conversational roleplays for teams to practice their patience skills. Practicing patience skills like flexibility, conflict resolution, and collaboration can be difficult in real conversations, which is why Yoodli’s roleplays are the perfect environment for practicing.
One of the best things about Yoodli, especially when it comes to practicing skills like patience, is that it provides a whole host of different personalities your team can interact with. Just like in the real world, people’s personas are unique and sometimes don’t align with your own personality.
Because Yoodli offers so many different types of conversation partners, your team will be able to practice their patience skills with people who are stressed, frustrated, or skeptical. Your team members can try their hand at communicating effectively when other people are impatient to further develop their capacity for tolerance and self-control in a completely safe space. They’ll be able to understand how to adjust their communication based on the situation, which makes handling real-world frustrations that much easier.
When it comes to improvement, your team can skip the guesswork and go straight to improving thanks to Yoodli’s intelligent AI analysis. Once your team has practiced their conversation, they’ll receive detailed, actionable feedback on what could’ve gone better so they can improve. As their team lead with admin access, you’ll also get to see how your team compares up when it comes to their patience skills.
Learn more about how you and your team can use this tool to develop your team’s patience skills for free at https://yoodli.ai/.
Benefits of Encouraging Patience on Your Team
Both within and outside of work, there are tons of benefits to encouraging your team to work on their patience skills. Here are the top benefits of being patient, from better overall health to happier employees and better leadership.
Improved overall mental and physical health
One of the most surprising benefits of practicing patience is improved overall health, including physical and mental health. People who are patient experience less depression and negative emotions compared to those who struggle with patience. They have better coping skills and are more equipped to deal with stressful or upsetting situations.
Not only that, but there’s evidence that being more patient can boost your physical health, too. Research suggests people who experience impatience, anger, and irritability often have worse health outcomes, like lower sleep quality and higher blood pressure levels. Stress and its effects on human health are pretty well documented, and improving your patience skills can help mitigate this.
More satisfied, productive employees
Teams and employees who are more patient are also more productive at work and satisfied at their jobs. This can benefit companies in any industry. Your employees will build stronger relationships, make more informed decisions, and collaborate much better when their capacity for patience is higher. That’s in part why it’s so worthwhile to invest in building your team’s patience skills.
Improved leadership abilities
The ability to be patient can also improve your ability to lead. Many people make a point to work on improving their leadership skills, and developing your patience can enhance your ability to lead, too. You’ll be able to achieve more goals, complete more tasks, and build and keep better relationships.
There are no real drawbacks when it comes to learning how to be patient.
The Bottom Line
Patience is a virtue and it’s also a necessary skill for successful, collaborative teams. Developing your team’s patience skills is no easy feat, but it’s well worth the effort you’ll put in to improve their tolerance and flexibility. Plus, tapping into a tool like Yoodli can make things a whole lot easier, especially when it comes to real-world practice.
Sources
- Indeed: “Important patience skills to develop (plus examples).”
- Cleveland Clinic: “How to Be Patient: 6 Tips.”
- Mindful: “A 15-Minute Meditation for Patience and Resolve,” “The Benefits of Being a Patient Person.”
- University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences: “9 Popular Time Management Techniques and Tools.”
- LinkedIn: “10 Negative Impacts of Impatience on Your Life.”