Guide Chapter 3: Patience and Love for the Journey

Apr 25, 2022

Chapter 3: Patience and Love for the Journey

Chapter 2 was about the steps to setting goals. If you missed it, click here to read it. Now that you’ve set these goals, what’s next? This chapter is about the importance of patience and love for the journey of working towards your goals. Including tips and an exercise to get you started.

When you reflect on your lifetime goals, long-term goals, and short-term goals, it is easy to get caught up with wanting to achieve them now. However, it is usually not possible to achieve all your goals overnight. It may take months, years, or even a lifetime of working towards them. Throughout this, it is important to keep in mind the importance of patience and love for the journey of working towards goals.

“Learning patience can be a difficult experience, but once conquered you will find life is easier.” – Catherine Pulsifer

According to Google Dictionary, patience is the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.

At the end of the day, most, if not all people in the world want to be happy. However, in the society we live in today it is easy to quickly get upset or angry over the little things that may not go according to plan. As Catherine Pulsifer said, learning patience can be difficult.

Patience is critical in the journey of working towards goals. Life is unpredictable, you can do things each day to work towards your goals and still not see any results for months or years to come. During this, it is easy to get discouraged and frustrated. However, the secret to succeeding through the delays, troubles and sufferings is patience. Patience allows you to approach all situations with calm, ease and hope. Patience is a skill one must work on.

Here are a few tips on how to begin implementing patience into working towards your goals:

 

  • Become mindful of the moments and situations in which you begin to feel impatient.
    What triggers the impatience? How do you react?
    Take a step back and evaluate how far you’ve already come. Remind yourself that each action you take in working towards your goals is already an accomplishment. More will come, just be patient.

 

  • Rome was not built overnight. Overnight successes took years of work. Good things take time.
    Often, all we see is the results, not the time, work and patience individuals had to put in to gain results. You are right on track.

 

  • Journal about your progress each day. Celebrate every milestone, big or small. Even set a small daily goal that you know you can do each day. Use this as a daily reminder that you have what it takes to accomplish your goals and celebrate this daily milestone.

 

  • Reflect on this analogy: Before a flower can grow and blossom, it begins as a seed. The seed is planted, and we can’t see it for a while as it begins to grow. With patience, sunlight and water, the flower slowly grows and blossoms into a beautiful sight. This is true of our goals. When we set a goal, we plant a seed. No one else sees that seed other than us. No one else knows it has been plated. We must take steps each day to take care of our goal by taking action to work towards it, as we would water a seed. Little by little each day the seed grows more and more, as each day we become closer and closer to achieving our goals. Eventually, the seed blossoms into a flower as we accomplish our goals. In that moment, everyone can see it. Had we not been patient along the process of growing the flower, had we not nurtured it to grow, it would had not blossomed. Just as we must work towards our goals and not give up.

 

  • Do not compare your journey to anyone else’s. Your journey is unique to you. There is only one you in this world and there will never be anyone else like you. The same goes for your journey. Trust the process. Every journey is different and has its own pace. Be patient with the pace your journey is taking and accept it.
“Life is about the journey, not destination.”

Reflect on your past:
Are there any key moments in time that you wish you could relive?
Moments so great, you would do anything to relive once more?
If so, when you were in that moment did you appreciate every second of it?
Or did you spend that moment thinking about what’s next?

It is easy to get caught up with the end result of goals and forget to enjoy the present moment as we work towards goals. Sometimes we spend too much time looking forward to the finish line, that we forget to enjoy everything along the way.

In order to live life to the fullest, we must learn to love the journey and each present moment that comes with it. Throughout the journey of working towards goals, we will grow and evolve as our goals will. The end result may not end up being what we hoped for, it may better, or it may be different. As long as we love each moment of the journey of getting to our goals, we will have had succeeded.

Click here to download an exercise to help you in practicing patience and love for the journey!

The next chapter will be about forming habits to help you along your journey of being simply unstoppable.