Patience, its an art. Sunset at harties dam

I Wish Someone had told me about the art of patience

“I wish someone had told me” is a series of posts that feed into our inquisitive nature at CN&CO. Each week we hear from someone in our network about something interesting or surprising that’s recently happened or occurred to them – or lessons they learnt. These blogs are a way to pay it forward and form part of CN&CO’s belief that the world can be a better place – and we all have a responsibility to make it so. This week’s post is by our freelance thinker Josh Nuttall, he shares his insights and learnings around patience.

Growing up playing a lot of team sport and having a very high standard of what I wanted to achieve, I got myself into a fair bit of trouble as I tried to “impose” these standard/expectations onto fellow team mates rather than just focusing on myself and what I could control… looking back on it now, I probably could have avoided a lot of it if I had been patient.

Patience is something that I have had to get better at and learn along the way. It took me a couple of years to reflect on my experiences and ask the question of what I could have changed, rather than looking for errors in those around me. In short taking greater ownership of my actions and choices, rather than passing on the responsibility.

Being more patient has also taught me to think about things from a different perspective.

While I was told to be more patient by people close to me in my younger years, it was a lesson that I had to learn for myself.  Maybe I didn’t listen to this advice, because I was being reactionary rather than internalising the lessons that I could have learnt by listening to this small piece of advice. Having walked this journey and learnt more about the art of patience through experiences, sometimes the hard way, I have grown as a person.

The more I think about it, I am convinced that patience is an art and while some people are naturally more patient than others, by being more aware of and open to difference I have become more patient…but still have some way to go.

Being conscious of different perspectives is one of the things that has helped me grow my patience. Reading and learning from different people around me has helped tremendously with this mindset shift, it really is a big wide world with many different perspectives. Here are three recent reads that reminded me about the art of patience.