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Patients is a Virtue

Once you have begun to develop habits, have some emotional management skills, cleared up your past and cleaned up and clarified your attitude, you are well-prepared for purposefully building a mindset. By building a mindset, I am referring to creating the beliefs, aligning the values, building the attitude, and further developing habits of thinking that become your mindset toward living life. If we are going to build a mindset, we probably should think about what would be pieces to a growth mindset and how that might differ from a mindset of a champion. We know this, it will consist of those habits you establish, how well you manage your emotions, and your attitude on life.

Starting to build a structure such as a bridge, you want to build the foundation. The Growth Mindset Training Academy mindset training foundation is to build a foundation of love. Build a loving mindset. A loving mindset would consist of several virtues or characteristics. Those characteristics include being patient, kind, not envious, not boastful or proud, not self-seeking, not easily angered, not dishonoring others, not keeping a record of wrongs, not delighting in evil things but delighting in the truth, protecting, trusting, hopeful, and perseverant. Training a mindset of love means training your thinking and emotionality and attitude so those characteristics become who you are. The first we will look at is being patient.

Patience is a virtue is an adage I grew up hearing often. It is true. Like all virtues, you train it. You develop it. As with all of these virtues we talk about, you should spend your life time training and reinforcing them. There are other characteristics of love that are similar to being patient. If you are slow to anger and perseverant you are also demonstrating patience, yet patience is listed separately. It is not exactly like those other two.

One of the oldest ways to train a virtue is using Ben Franklin’s method. He wrote about it in his autobiography. Franklin would focus his attention on the virtue and keep track of how he did exhibiting the virtue repeating that process daily for a week at a time. Franklin trained himself in the virtues he was seeking over a year. It is not the only system, but it does work. The regular repetition of sayings or mantras or proverbs is similar to the Franklin method and also a time tested method for training a virtue. Here are a number of adages, sayings, proverbs about patience. How many did you grow up hearing?

All good things come to those who wait.Rome wasn't built in a day.A watched pot never boils.First things first.Patience is a virtue.Patience surpasses learning.You have to learn to walk before you learn to run.All things are difficult before they are easy.The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.Lose patience, lose the battle.Patience attracts happiness; it brings near that which is far.Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.One minute of patience, ten years of peace.Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.One moment of patience may ward off great disaster. One moment of impatience may ruin a whole life.

Other techniques that can help you train patience are knowing how you do that behavior and its opposite – impatience. By knowing that, you can interrupt the impatience and run the patience strategy. It takes practice, but you can’t practice until you discover how you do it. Self-awareness is an essential tool in mindset training. Emotions play a role in developing patience so having habits around managing emotions is another factor. Breath control is a great weapon against impatience, which in turn creates patience. When you have the habits, manage the emotions, and develop the attitude of patience the behavior will follow. The more you do it, the more you become a patient person. The more that virtue becomes part of you the more love becomes part your nature.

Remembering that Carol Dwek says someone with a growth mindset embraces challenges, persists in the face of setbacks and sees effort as a path to mastery, you can probably see that patience would be a characteristic of one who has those traits. You will see too how those other traits of love will show up. More importantly, a champion unquestionably exhibits patience. A champion in any endeavor knows that patience is a virtue and has created the habits, managed their emotions, and has an attitude of patience.

Finding a coach and or a system to help you do those training steps is invaluable. Most people will not do this on their own. The simple fact is about 98% of the people do not follow through on goals. They need to be committed, have the structure and discipline in place, and someone or someway to be held accountable. This is especially true for teens and college students, but they have the advantage of their “job” being to learn. Getting this mindset trained while young is invaluable. It is a life long process and an early start certainly will be to anyone’s advantage.