This is episode 87, How to be more patient, you're listening to the Rise up and Shine podcast with Claudine and Ashley as an empty nester and a mom with young kids. We have both shared very similar and very real struggles from chaos to coaches. We now help other women live an authentic and meaningful life. So, tune in weekly for girl talk and tips on how you too can rise up and let your light shine bright. This is the Rise up and Shine podcast. Hi everyone Welcome back to another episode here with Claudine and Ashley on the Rise Up and Shine podcast today I have a question to start us off. Do you consider yourself a patient person? Are you asking me? I'm asking you, I'm asking our listeners So patience is our topic today and I really like to dive into this one especially because I used to think of myself as a very patient person.

I never really struggled with anger pre Children years so, but once I had Children, oh my gosh, it was it was almost a hard awakening, you know, because I was this is new. What is happening to me. Am I getting angry and frustrated, impatient? I was the most patient person in the world. So, but I don't know about you listeners, Claudia is going to share as well, but patients, patients is something I think many of us, if not most of us want to increase in our life because as life goes on, we have more responsibilities, more expectations. A lot of things come up in life hurts, you know, different challenges. We can feel that impatience creeping in and we just want to be very careful not to let it run our lives. So today we're going to dive into patients and claudia is going to start us off with a lovely definition. Yes. So I looked it up because I too thought I was a very patient person. I feel like um there are many areas in my life. I've had to be patient. I didn't have a choice. And another definition I know in some versions of the scriptures will say long suffering and I'm like, yes, I am patient.

And then I looked up the definition that says the ability to bear or endure pain and trials calmly or without complaint. And then I realized, oh my gosh, I'm not patient at all. I can, I can bear and endure the pains and trials, but the calmly part and the without complaint I do not have down. So, um what a great topic for us to talk about and explore today because they do say patience is a virtue and we know it's a fruit of the spirit and we can all use a little more patience in life. That's for sure. Yeah. And you know, I used to think of it as you're either patient or you're not, you know, it's more of a temperament or personality like for myself, as I said before having kids and before life really revealed itself to me, I thought I was, yeah, surprise. I thought it was the most patient person and I realized, oh, this is just bringing something out now in a different life circumstances. So it's not necessarily that, oh, now I don't have the ability to be patient, right? It's something that I need to practice on a daily basis, which we'll talk more about.

And as you said, it's a fruit of the spirit. So it's accessible. We can be more patient with our spouse, with our boss, with our employees, with our Children, Children, leave it or not, we can be patient with our Children. Um, even difficult people, we can be patient with difficult people. So I realized for myself, I was more patient with people than I was in situations. I had less patients in situational things. Um, challenges that came up. You know, for example, I would drop things and break things a lot in my childhood and still in my adulthood and I would get really frustrated. But with people, I had a lot more patients except for the Children part, that's where I really had to grow. That's interesting. Well, you know, we're such a fast food nation. So I think about that and and things are progressing faster and faster. So, you know, nowadays we're ready to eat meals in a minute or less, you know, where we can find answers in a moment, right? You don't know something, you just google it and the answer will come right to you.

You can buy things and they're delivered to your house in two days. Sometimes even one day. So squared Costco today that will be here in about two hours. Yes. Well I'm an amazon girl. But yes, as we've been buying things for the new house two days or less, it's at my door. So that's what we've become accustomed to. And I was talking with someone recently, we had lived in Nashville for two years and the pace was so much slower and here in California I find the pace to be much quicker. Um, and in the beginning it was really hard for us because people talk longer. The checkout thing, you know, they're having conversations like I'm actually check out, they look you in the eye what and ask you questions. It was shocking at first and I'm like lady, I'm just trying to check out, just ring up my tab and let me go and then by the end of two years, I loved it. I know, I know they don't go through red lights like they stopped behind the line when the light's yellow. What interesting observation. Yes, we noticed it real quick.

So yellow light actually means slow down. Not speed up here as it does in California. I'm not saying I'm guilty of, no, not, but everything here is fast, fast fast and our culture and society, we're used to that fast fast fast. So now we get irritated when we catch a red light. Right? I mean I get a red line like darn it. Like why? You know what Speaking of which I know our listeners can't see this. You see this lovely drawing right behind you. My daughter did my daughters into art and she sketched me with my arms up in the car. Why do I always hit red lights? That's funny case in point right there. That's funny. Yeah, we get irritated with that. We get irritated if our food takes two minutes. Have you ever been through a fast food line and the food like when you pull up it's not quite ready and then they make you pull over into another spot and wait. We know that has never happened to you. It's happened to me numerous times for me it would be if you're trying to watch a movie on netflix and you see the load buffering buffering or loading and you're waiting and waiting longer than two minutes, then I get frustrated.

Yeah. See if some other network has this movie. Right. And what about those of us who are starting businesses? We get irritated and frustrated when our six figure business isn't up and running in three months. Right. It's like, man, I should be making this much money already. Not super realistic. But the point is we're used to things fast, fast, fast and so patients can be an issue when we have to wait a little longer for things. Oh yeah, I know one just speaking from a mom's perspective, our Children where I would get frustrated because I would expect them to behave or I would expect them to obey the second I ask them right to do something. And I realized that I was just getting so irritated. It goes into other things, other beliefs, um, that underlie the frustration, but I would feel ignored, I would feel disrespected, I would feel just, I would feel hurt even and unimportant. And so I realized that my frustration in that impatience with them was due to those underlying thoughts that were coming up and I have to realize with my Children there's consequences obviously for not obeying but talking them through about the importance of obeying and having that structure and guidelines for them, but also understanding they have free agency, they are their own person and they're growing.

And one thing that really helped me have more patients honestly was reminding myself that their brain is still developing and so they do not think the way adults think they don't have that capability yet we're teaching them as their prefrontal cortex is growing and developing. We're teaching them how to behave as adults right there. Basically little adults that were raising. So keeping those things in mind was really helpful because I was expecting so much from them and of course we want to expect our Children to obey. But to a point of being so frustrated and taking it personal. That's why we want to draw the line right. We want to be careful for that. Well, it's what you said. It's expectations and beliefs and that's what gets us in trouble when we expect it to be quick. Like if I go into a situation, well, I'll give you an example by now. I know especially with kids, but like right now our situation as we sold our house, we bought a new house and we are still waiting.

Now. I'm hoping by the time this podcast is posted, we will have keys. But as of today we have no keys and we were supposed to close tomorrow. And so my patients by friday, I was super irritated and angry really because it was going to go now another week. We've already been delayed a month and now it's going to be another week and it's like, okay, we have no home. And my belief was my expectation was if I do my part, you do your part. It didn't work out that way. I did my part. We did our part. And yet on the other hand, on the other side, some balls have been dropped so that patients and trying to get through it emotionally healthy. But my belief was it should be done already. And so then my feeling is frustration because I'm believing that now I'm being short changed, right? This didn't come in. My timing. My feeling is frustration and irritation and anger. Then my actions are to almost shut down. I mean I don't have that choice because I have to respond to all these things they need.

But I remember on friday over the weekend, I'm like, I don't want to talk to the lender. You deal with it to my husband, you deal with it. I don't want to talk anymore. If I talk to them, it will not be good. It will not be good. They'll delay us on purpose. I know it's like I've got a got to only say kind things and right now I can't say anything. Kind. Did your mom teach you that if you can't say anything kind don't say anything at all. I was like, yeah, I'm past the point of kindness now. So I'm just going to be quiet. So anyway, it's just the feelings. But those come from our thoughts and our beliefs and then the actions follow. So you know, we've decided to make lemonade out of lemons. And so we're just going out of town this week. We're going to go to a beautiful place. Heat. We're going to escape the heat. We're going to one of our favorite places that we haven't gone to for a year or so. So we're just going to go there for a few days and kill time while we wait for these keys that one day hopefully will be in our hands. But it's important to grow this ability or the skill or right because it affects our emotional well being.

It's hard to be irritated and frustrated. It's hard and if we take it out on other people, right, if we take it out on our Children, her husband, I can't use his undeveloped prefrontal cortex as an excuse, but sometimes he's a little slower than I would like him to be to respond to things that I need to get done. I'm not, I'm sure I'm not the only wife that his experience asking their husband to do something and it takes a lot longer than you would like. But like you said, it's understanding to that they have free agency, they free will and they're going to do it in their timing. I don't want to be a nag and then we can have discussions or maybe I could communicate more effectively. My timeline, but me being impatient and me reacting in frustration or irritation is not going to help. Absolutely. Do I want to be that person? Do I want to come across this way? Do I want to live in this space? You know, in this anger, frustration and granted there are times where as you said on friday and over the weekend, you were frustrated, angry and you made a healthy choice to pass on the communication to your husband because you knew it would not come out well if I have to deal with this right now and you allowed yourself to feel those emotions without acting out, you know, and reacting negatively or harshly, but you chose, okay, I'm accepting, I'm identifying how I'm feeling and it is what it is and you took time just to do whatever you needed to calm to get through the day.

And a lot of times it is just getting through the day, just going through the day, being easy on yourself, being kind to yourself, even being patient with yourself. You know, that's something we also have to be patient with. Um you know, it's life's a process and things in life are process, right? The growing of our Children, waiting for your house, you know, waiting for our spouse to change or to take out the trash when we've asked you get things done. You know, it's all a process. So just trusting in those things. Yes, so much so we have a few practical is to share. So for me, one of the first things is recognizing or being aware of the feeling. So I can usually tell if it's an impatience issue because I started to get really irritated and frustrated. It's like, okay, and this is not going fast enough and it's that expectation that it should have already been done. It should have already been happened, It should have whatever the should have right away and the expectation that this is taking too long or I want this now or whatever the case is, but recognizing and usually you're going to recognize in patients, by the way you're feeling.

So for me it's an awareness of the feeling how many feeling right now like you said, do I want to stay here? Because that's part of our podcast is rise up and shine. We don't want to stay stuck. We've both been stuck, but you don't want to stay stuck and it's okay to have a feeling of irritation or frustration, but we don't want to get stuck there. We want to process it quickly and move forward, right? Yeah. And I was thinking also just letting our emotions run our life. You know, when I do get stuck, that's what ends up happening. You know, I realized I did not want to be uh this mom, this is not the mom I envisioned myself to be. So I really had to learn a lot of patients with myself and growing and making mistakes and not shaming myself, but just apologizing to my Children when I reacted unnecessarily and then just having patients with myself to grow and to learn. And just as you said, identifying what you feel because we don't always take the time to stop and understand how we feel. We try to do the fix is right. We've got to fix this problem fixed fix. And a lot of times were so focused on the fixing that we don't acknowledge how we feel and most of the time we don't feel or believe that it's okay, we right to feel what we're feeling.

Feeling angry about the situation. I'm feeling really impatient. That's ok. It's human. It's your human. We're all human, right? We have emotions, we have feelings. It's what we do with them. So, the first step identifying right, identifying what you feel and I'm going to add on to that too, is identifying the underlying belief. What is the belief under this frustration or this impatience? You know, I this is for me, as I mentioned again, I'll share even with my marriage, I had an expectation of what I wanted. My marriage to look like marriage should be easy. Right? Well, whoever told me that, you told you told me that. So, all the romantic movies I watched, Although that was the courtship. You didn't really see what happened after marriage. So that was left to interpretation, which I interpretative, that like, oh, everything's great. They're all in love, like happily ever after. Yeah, happily ever after. So, But ironically I realized that this is a belief that I built in my head obviously from some influences, but you know, it that's why I would get impatient with my husband's not doing this thing that I asked him to do or he's not treating me the way I expect him to treat or he's not taking me out on dates all the time or doting over me or whatever.

It may be. Um you know, but expecting these things right? Without um communicating for one, but also just get letting myself be frustrated and impatient. Like it should be different. It should be different, right? We get it every time. Well, that's a great point about our beliefs because a lot of times we try to manage the circumstance, like you said, fix fix, right? But we're not managing our minds, you know, really managing our minds. It's so powerful if we want to get out of that stuff. Feeling, that irritation, impatience feeling, we have to manage our minds, not the circumstance. What do you think about it? One thing that's really important to keep in mind with managing our minds is that we want to control the outcome of things. You know, we we try to have as much control as we can. We can only control us, right? So we can control our patients. We can control our reactions, right? How we respond, choose to respond. We can stop, take a break. You know, not instantly. There goes that instant, you know, we don't have to instantly react to anything.

We can take a break, process, think about these things, but basically just accepting that there's many things that are going to be outside of our control and that's okay. Yeah, I've learned that my friend last week is like, what do you think the lesson is that God wants you to learn? I'm like, there's no lesson to be learned. There's no good coming out of the situation. But it's no sense to me. Makes no sense to me whatsoever. There's no lesson here. Just I guess I learned that I'm not patient. That's the lesson. As I read this definition, I'm like, oh yeah, I've been complaining and I have not been calm about this. I'm frustrated. But you think to the calm will come as a result to they're not complaining, right? There's no way we can have a calm heart about something and be patient about something when we're complaining, we're just reinforcing the frustration. So if we want the calm then we got to stop complaining, which is so hard to do, we understand. But it can be because we always think when my circumstance change, then I'll feel better. But what if your circumstance never changes?

Or what if it takes a long, long time? I mean, I think about single women, you and I are both married. But I know single women that are older that would really like to be married. I can't even imagine that struggle to remain calm without complaining. That would be a challenge for me. Clearly, I found that I am not patient. So it would be a challenge. But then if you're complaining and not calm, that's not attractive, right? Right? So many things or promotion. So many people have jobs that they're waiting for? A promotion and they've seen other people pass them up. Can you be patient through those? It's a challenge. Another practical is take deep breaths. I know this is you know, we talked about this a lot and sometimes it seems so obvious and other times it's the very thing we forget to do. You know when I start feeling irritated, frustrated, I tend to hunch my shoulders and stop breathing deeply. It becomes very shallow, you know, it's like you know, not that you could tell, but I wish you guys could have just seen her demonstration there in person.

That was really good. It was good. But remember to breathe deeply deeply because it does calm our nervous system and then it does help us to respond calmly, you know, and just breathe deeper, it calms the whole system so take deep breaths when you're feeling impatient. Another one is look out for comparison comparing yourself to others, your stage of life, to others, comparing where you want to be to where you actually are. You know, comparison can definitely be a trap that we fall into that can lead us to feeling impatient because if we feel like I should have been here by now or I should have been doing this by now or you know that what if then mentality as you were just mentioning so be aware of that. Yeah, yeah, don't compare because everyone's journey is different and it's easy to look at someone else's journey and go well that happened fast for them and also a lot of times we don't even know the whole back story, especially if we're looking at things on social media, but to those of us, if you don't know the backstory, it just looks like, well, that was easy.

That was an overnight success, right? And you have all over the internet people pitching, hey, you can make 67 figures in one year, pay my very high priced program and I will teach you how right. And another practical for me is just really trusting, trusting the timing, trust the timing, trust the process. I to like things. I do things quickly. I move quickly. I do things quickly, but sometimes when things are taking longer, I just have to trust the process. Like, okay, I just need to trust it, it's going to unfold in just the right time, right? And that takes faith. That my timing isn't necessarily the right timing. I wanted to see certain things in my kids and when it didn't happen quickly. Yeah, I have a timeline and then when it goes past the timeline, you're like, oh my goodness, you know, it's discouraging, but to learn to trust the timing, that it's all going to unfold in just the right time for the best benefit for everybody. And it takes faith because that's believing what you don't see yet.

And when we want something, when we want something clearly, we don't have it yet because it's in the future and we don't see it yet. So it takes a lot of faith to believe what we don't see. The last practical I'm going to share is accepting the discomfort. So that that's what we try to avoid, right? The discomfort of something not, you know, an expectation not being met or our timeline not being met or things not following into place the way it should write, quote unquote. Yeah, quote unquote. We feel like it should so be very careful not to push past those uncomfortable feelings. Don't avoid them, deny them. You know, allow them, allow it sit with it like you did, you know the other day, just feeling angry, irritable, impatient, frustrated, just allowing yourself to feel those things because it's normal and just accepting that okay, this period of time is going to feel a little bit uncomfortable, but it's okay. I don't have to ignore it.

I don't have to deny its okay. And time will pass. You know, time will pass and it will be a new stage and we'll get through this. And so just allowing yourself to sit with that discomfort really huge because you know, especially the uncomfortable feelings and those emotions that we feel can be quote unquote bad and when we get to stuck into trying to fix the problem when it's out of our control. You know, you're just gonna get yourself tired and frustrated more so just irritate the people around you and so just really accepting that hey this is going to be uncomfortable for a little bit. This isn't exactly what I want, but it's okay. It's okay. We'll get through it. That's a really good one. I could have used that last friday. We should have recorded this last week anyway. I've learned now. I'm going to go forward patiently as long as it takes Well, thank you for listening. I hope you've all gotten something out of patience, the ability and the skill of patients. And I'm going to leave us with a scripture which I should have read last week but saw it this morning.

So there you go. In Romans 825 it says, but if we have hope for what we do, not yet have we wait for it patiently? Hopefully that is a bit of encouragement Until next time. All right, everyone, thank you for joining in on our conversation today here on the rice. I've been shine podcast. If you haven't already, please take a second to hit that subscribe button. So you never miss an episode and while you're at it, share this episode with a friend who you know, it can bless today if you want to visit us as well on our websites, you can catch Claudine over at Clotting Sweeney dot com and Ashley at mind over chaos dot com are links are in the description. We also have some free resources there for you as well. So remember ladies, no matter what you are facing in life, it is never too late to rise up and shine and live your best life. Mhm. Mhm. Okay.