Cultivating Patience – an Unexpected Lesson

I am grateful that my career journey led me to an organization that allowed me to grow in ways that I couldn’t have even imagined on day one. The experiences gained, lessons learned, opportunities to lead, and friendships made are some of my most significant professional accomplishments.

As I reflect on this time, one particular focus area, cultivating patience, has been one of the hardest lessons for me to learn and the most rewarding.

Before joining, my roles had always been demand-based. Demand-based positions require loads of quick data analysis and execution. It is a constant working and reworking methodologies to meet a strategy, testing, and learning to adapt as new demand patterns emerge. In health care, there is a much longer cycle, a more complex set of circumstances and regulations to follow. If you asked my mentor about the general theme of our bi-weekly meetings, he would likely shake his head and say patience.

In the beginning, I did a lot of investigation into patience, reading about how to cultivate patience, investigating my triggers of impatience, and figuring out to manage my reactions. What I learned in this process is that patience doesn’t just mean waiting; it means pausing and then exploring. When we replace judgment with curiosity, the world opens up for you.

The practice I’ve chosen to cultivate patience is to form new alliances and learn. I decided to build relationships, ask questions, and slow down to absorb their wisdom. In that pause of slowing down, I then ask myself how might I contribute to their success with the tools and skillset I have? This practice led to collaborating on new projects, working with peers across multiple organizations to solve big problems and eventually, starting a new department.

It’s not easy nor perfect, and my mentor still gives me the advice to have patience, but what this lesson has taught me is that people want to share what they have learned. The most unexpected experiences and collaborations can manifest from a place of pausing to listen.