Today's topic is quite personal. I had to take a moment and look into my personal life to detect a weakness I have been struggling with. Basically, everyone of us has one weakness that keeps us from growing at the pace we desire. This is because we are humans full of imperfections, but that doesn't mean that we should dwell on our weaknesses but always strive to improve on them. In this post, I will tell you about one of my weaknesses and the measures I am taking to cope with it.
Over the years, I have seen myself as that individual full of impatience. I didn't notice this as an adult; it started dealing with me right from my teenage years, but as an adult, I started understanding the implications of this trait, and so far, I have been striving to improve on it. A trait that has birthed other traits like overthinking, anxiety.. always worried about the outcome of a particular thing increasing my stress level and affecting my mental health.
I am that kind of person that if I request a thing from someone, I would love the person to give it to me almost immediately. I hated to hear "wait." My body system does not understand the language "wait." My blood is always hot, hehehe... craving to complete a task immediately without having any reason to wait. Most times, I am always faster than my shadows, always in a hurry to do this or that due to my impatience, and this has landed me into mistakes and regrets in life. I mean, why can't I have patience in my life? Why can't I just calm down, take a deep breath, look into a matter closely, and understand that some things require that I wait before having them?
I can't count the number of times I have had issues with my friends and my husband because of this trait. Things that obviously, I should be calm and allow things to unfold, I will be pressurizing people unnecessarily because I want them to take action almost immediately without considering if it's convenient for them. It's been all about overthinking about something that requires that I exercise a little patience. My level of anxiety in virtually everything I do in life has led me into mental stress. But then, being patient would have been enough to prevent such from happening.
Lately, I have improved from this weakness, especially after it affected me badly sometimes in December last year. I learned to always take a deep breath, be calm, and take a moment to think through an issue front and back and see reasons to wait. Currently, I have been having some disagreement with my partner over something, and he said, "Wait!"
For a moment, I reflected on the reasons he gave me and actually saw that I needed to have patience. If it were me last year, I wouldn't have wore patience like a garment like I am doing currently, but rather overthink and worry myself unnecessarily and sometimes go ahead in taking drastic actions that would eventually land me into troubles. For the first time, I haven't seen this weakness turn out in a positive way, but good enough, this measure I have applied so far has been a lifesaver in helping me cope with this trait.
This is my response to the #hivelearners community contest on the topic titled, A Weak Point
Images were taken from canva