Patience

Usually I leave the writing up to my wonderful wife, but I got inspired at my bikram yoga class this morning. On Saturday morning the teacher usually draws an Angel Card to set the theme for the class. Today’s card was Patience.

Patience is important when you want to have a happy life and even more so if you would like to be successful in business. Just after class my patience was tested. I wanted to buy myself and freshly squeezed fruit juice after class. There was one guy working there and two ladies already waiting for their order. He took my order and started to cut the fruit and prepare for the juices. He left a couple of times to fetch something from another room, fixed the juicer numerous times. I looked at the ladies, they were in the class as well, and the three of us were waiting very patiently for our juice. It took about 15 minutes for the juice to be ready and I kept smiling. There is no gain in getting angry, it just makes you feeling bad and the other person as well.

While waiting I was looking outside, and enjoyed the sun shining and planned my walk back home. If it had been rainy, I probably would have been happy to stay inside as long as possible. Try to turn things around, if something does not go as planned find the positives in it. Too many people look always on the negative side of life. Remember there are always two sides to everything.

My wife and I had been trying to get pregnant for more than 4 years and we had many challenging moments through that period. We never gave up hope and waited patiently for our time to arrive. As I am writing this blog we are 24 weeks pregnant. And we had the previous 4 years to concentrate on our businesses and build a foundation for our child.

You may have a slow period in your business, sales are not going your way in the current economic situation. Take this time and sit back, do something for your education or look for alternative services or products that you can offer. Use this time to build your business and wait for the economic cycle to go up again.

Here are a few tips that can help you being more patient:

• Smile (and I don’t mean the sarcastic smile). Smiling puts your automatically in a better mood. Very often you cannot do anything about the situation and getting angry only makes you feeling worse and affects the people around you as well. Smile and you see others smile back at you.
   
• Network. Lets say you wait in line at the supermarket or in a juice bar like I did. Use this time and start small talk with other people there. Avoid talking about whatever it is that makes you waiting, talk about the weather, a sporting event or anything positive. You may have similar things in your shopping trolley as the people around you; this as start. In our coaching business we had clients that found their partner this way.
   
• Be polite. Always be polite and give the person a compliment. I do this sometimes even when I get a bad service. Often you find as a repeated customer you will get much better service than before. We all need compliments and it works wonders.

If you have any tips or would like to share your story, please leave a comment below.