As Engineers, we will face lack of clarity in below situations during our career

1. Requirements for a Feature

2. Growth in Organization

3. Appraisal

4. Debugging an issue that rarely occurs in production

5. Working with a new team member who does not share tribal knowledge of your team

6. Learning a new programming language

Under all these cases, if we have to solve problems sustainably and maintain good relationships with people we collaborate, we need patience with ourselves and with others

Each time we go through challenging situation, patience is the safest choice but often not the easiest .

Does it make business sense to be patient?

1. Patience helps one make better decisions and plans grounded in reality.

2. Patience helps one move from Fear by default mode to Trust by default mode. Fear by default always results in short term gains and long term debts

Quality of our Decisions affect our quality and reliability of ourselves as a product and the product we build.

Is it hard to be patient?

Yes and No.

If we do not consider it as a skill which takes time to learn, then Yes, it is hard to develop patience.

Patience is a skill and can be built by exercising it at every opportunity mindfully and recognizing the benefits you get out of it.

Recognize that Patience just like anyother skill needs time to become a second nature because it is about growing out of our comfort zone and better managing our frustrations.

We develop the muscle over several iterations. The more mindful we go through a phase, the earlier we can master patience for that situation.

How to develop patience?

First recognizing that this can not be achieved over a day or a week or a month is important. There will be moments where when you believe that you developed patience, a new situation will topple your current mindset and you might end up acting impulsively.

The below items helps one with developing patience

1. Setting realistic expectations for ourselves.

   1. Not every day is the same. Based on our daily circumstances, we should adjust our expectations of ourselves accordingly.

2. Practicing Gratitude

   1. Helps us from focusing on what we have got instead of what we are lacking

3. The Ultimate: Self Care

   1. No one will care about us more than ourselves. We know what we are going through. This is the foundation part of developing Patience

Ending

Finally, remember that developing a skill requires the mindset to reframe skill development as a process of progress rather than an achieved state.