How To Be More Patient With Others
Posted: Thursday, September 01, 2011
by Douglas Cartwright
Living Words Coaching and Training
Why do we get impatient with others? Sometimes it’s because we believe they should know better, other times it’s because we think they should go faster.
Perhaps we’re right. Given their upbringing, their exposure to certain ideas you would think they’d got the idea by now. But they haven’t. They didn’t. And now they’re doing something you’re expecting them not too.
Because one aspect of impatience is expecting others to BE or THINK LIKE YOU. For example, you’d move faster at the checkout so why can’t they? At the point you start fuming it’s because other people aren’t meeting your standards.
They’re meeting their standards.
And you don’t like it.
So recognizing (and acknowledging) the fact that the other people don’t share your point of view is a great step forward because the longer you take to accept it, the more you’re going to make yourself suffer, and if you’re that way inclined you might make them suffer too.
But how can we explain when basically sensible people act and react in ways we’d not expect them to? And how can we become more patient with them, so we help rather than over-react?
In the field of Neuro-linguistic Programming there is a principle used by the field which says:
People make the best decisions they can given the choices open to them.
It suggests that if people, in their personal understanding of how the world works, perceive what we might call a ‘bad’ choice as their best or only choice, they’ll probably use that one. When people have more choices leading to better outcomes, they’ll use those instead.
So if you take the example of the battered woman who kills her husband after years of abuse, what positive value is there in murder per se? None, of course. But if the positive intention was to get relief and freedom from pain, then she achieved her intent through the ‘best’ choice available.
(I want to be clear on this, ‘best’ and ‘positive’ do not necessarily have the connotation of morally good, rather what the person’s brain or value system perceives as being ‘good’ for them. Hence the killing of one gang member by another may be the best way to get ‘respect’.)
Psychologist Alfred Adler believed that it was impossible for people to do evil deliberately. And if you think about it, how many people do you know who are deliberately going to do something knowing that will be to their ultimate detriment? There must be some payoff in their minds for doing what they do.
He said that in order for people to do terrible things they somehow had to focus on what they believed was good about it, which in turn crowds out the evil and enables them to take the action.
Look at the recent London rioters.
People who on an ordinary day go to work have got four years in prison for joining in the riots. If you don’t have a mindset to understand what is appealing about joining in with smashing windows and defying police, stealing goods and hurting people you’d be hard pressed to make sense of it. But for some of those people it represented an opportunity to do very appealing things like:
- Cause destruction
- Feel powerful
- Get expensive stuff for free and the status recognition that goes with it.
- Have fun (yes, someone actually said that stealing stuff was fun which shows my mindset on it as well!)
No, they really, really don’t
Jesus, when he was nailed to cross looked at the people who had put Him there and uttered those immortal words: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
Yes, he knew from their perspective they had put to death a political and religious agitator. That was the extent of their understanding of Him.
If they had known or accepted that He was the one their own scriptural books talked about, they wouldn’t have done it. They made the best choice available to them from their perspective. So He forgave them for not knowing any better!
Imagine how the world would change if people took on this principle. It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t hold people responsible for their actions but surely our perspectives would naturally lean towards educating others to help them make better decisions.
After all, if they don’t know any better, can we help them know better?
Even if not, understanding that they might not be doing what they are doing out of a desire to spite you but simply because that’s the best way they know for now can help us be compassionate towards them.
Then our communications can become less judgmental as we become bigger people. In the end holding bad feelings against people only hurts us anyway and if this can lessen the bad feelings then it’s a good move.
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