Someone remarked today about the importance of patience and the difficulty of its practice. Impatience is not, I think, the same thing as impulsiveness. With impulsiveness, the issue of patience does not arise: one acts on impulse not because one is impatient but because one has poor impulse control. Controlling impulses is important, and developing that skill may require patience, but the two things—impulsiveness and impatience—are difference.

I see two ways of dealing with impatience. One is through a greater understanding of the process at hand, so that one understands the rate of progress to expect and also is able to see the signs of progress—to see that things are indeed happening.

Example: One wants to extinguish some particular bad behavior. Understanding how a change in behavior occurs helps one be more patient regarding progress: first you are unaware of the behavior at all; then you are aware of the behavior only as you look back; then you are aware of the behavior shortly after you do it; then you are aware of the behavior even as you’re doing it; and, finally, you become aware of the behavior as you are about to do it, so that you can avoid it.

Understanding that you must go through these stages helps you become more patient—you understand the progression sequence and can tell where you are in it.

BTW, for changing behaviors, the book Changing for Good, by James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Carlo Diclemente, is an excellent guide. (There are other books with the same title, so note the authors.) The authors studied groups of people who wanted to make changes, and looked at the differences between those who were successful and those who were not, and as a result of what they learned have provided some excellent information.

So: understanding the nature and signs of progress can help with impatience, because you see better what is happening—you avoid the feeling that “nothing’s happening.”

Another help is understanding what you should be doing. My Go teacher told me that I was moving too quickly, and said that I must learn to move more slowly. But what he meant was not that I simply look at a watch and wait until (say) two minutes had passed before I made my move. He meant that there were things I needed to be doing before I moved, and if I did those, then one sign would be that I would not be moving so quickly. (Another sign, presumably, would be that the moves would be better.) Things like looking at the immediate threats, evaluating the gains from my responses, taking the time to look over the entire board and make sure that the move I was picking was the move that would provide the greatest gain—those take time. One problem Go players have in the early stages is becoming too focused on one small part of the board: whole-board awareness is vital for success.

Another example: in making a big decision, one can readily become impatient and simply make the damn decision, but if you understand the process—as laid out in, say, Decision Traps and/or Winning Decisions, then you know the steps and the process, and you can tell by what you’ve done how much progress you’ve made toward making the decision, so you have plenty to do to keep yourself from getting impatient.