Waiting for the Unexpected.
There are a set of people I admire. People who have some sort of organisation to their lives but are not necessarily stuck on it. They can adapt to life’s changes pretty easily and continue to move forward. I have spoken to a few of them and they will admit to the difficulty that comes with doing this but you can tell that no matter how difficult, it is something they can and will always do.
I have recently gained some ground in the area of patience, LOL, sounds funny even to me but earlier in my career, I was not always patient with people. I was all about getting the job done no matter what it took. Bosses loved me and colleagues loved me outside of the field of work. Since then I have grown to learn to see people as people and not simply as tools to execute whatever I had to do. Having this mindset shift allowed me to ingenuously create ways of getting the job done all the while being sensitive to and empathetic towards people. This is one of the surest ways I have learned to get the best of both worlds. Over time I tested this and realized I had cheated myself of the goodness of people by failing to see them as people first before people who have to do a job. Seeing the humanity in people does not make you soft or sappy but pushes you to create a work environment that allows you to meet your expectation without unnecessarily burning people out.
However, I am recently discovering that I have not gained as much mileage in the area of being patient with myself. For a while, I have assumed that I have given myself enough flexibility to be human as I achieve the things I set before me. But because things have almost always worked out, not without their unique challenges and because it has been within my capacity to handle, I allowed previous experiences to reconfirm to me that blazing through was my default disposition when I meet challenges. So for me, it was, issues come, enter fix/work mode, clear it out, arrive on the other side with a cape and soundtrack of victory.
Until I met a life situation where I had given what I knew and could and had absolutely no control over the outcome or what will happen and it began to mess with me. There was no blazing through, nothing I could visibly fix. Simply nothing I could do on my part other than to be patient and wait. But the hard part is that I did not know exactly what I was waiting for or when it was going to happen. This was not a situation where you order pizza and have to wait for it to arrive not knowing which route the delivery driver took. This is life in its fullest where you are unsure if your hard work will produce the desired effect. So what do you do when what you are waiting for is uncertain?
Here are 3 things I am learning and actively applying in my life.
- Remember that you are human too. Sometimes we are hardest with ourselves or lax. We should be neither. Because we are human, we do not always have control over everything. We are subject to other people's decisions, their timings, impulses, etc. We may not know what is going to happen or what comes next. It does not mean that something is wrong with us, it may just mean humanity has caught up with you too.
- Give yourself grace. In the same way you give grace to others and other situations, give yourself grace. Be kind to yourself, be patient. Take baby steps if you have to and encourage yourself when you are absolutely blank about what next to do. I know you’d like to have it figured out asap but if nothing is happening, give yourself grace.
- Do not implode. I realized when we hit a brick wall and we have no external tangible thing to hold on to as cause or reason, we tend to implode. We start to look out for failures on our part. Something we must have done that made everything go south. Something about us that is making us rejected or undesirable or making things fail. That is often not true. Understand that you will not always have a reason why things do not work out as planned and you don’t have to always be at fault.
When these things happen, I try to do my due diligence. I do my best to ensure the things within my control or that depend on me I have done and then whatever is left is left.
I am still walking this tight rope, if you have walked this and gotten to the end, please share what helped you on the journey.
Rooting for you.
With Love
Eva.
