If patience is a virtue, I am rarely a virtuous woman

During a recent chat over lunch with my career coach, we got on the topic of what I am learning from my experience searching for my next position. Having a slightly sarcastic side to my personality, I had to exercise a great deal of restraint to keep my response appropriate to the context and company. Later that evening, having been unable to get the conversation out of my head, I realized that there are quite a few “take-aways” from this experience and not all of them negative. Perhaps the biggest for me is learning to have patience.

When it comes to me, personally, I have never been a particularly patient individual. I tend to expect a higher level of performance from myself than I would ever expect of anyone else. This characteristic once prompted a therapist to say to me, “Maggie, perfection is about heaven, and in case you haven’t noticed – you aren’t living there.”

Generally, I do tend to achieve whatever I set out to do. Unfortunately, what this means is that if for some reason my expectations are out of sync with reality, patience is in short supply. There tends to be a lot of introspective analysis of where I got off track and what it will take to refocus my efforts to reaching whatever end-state was so blasted important in the first place. Ironically, this rarely, if ever, spills over onto others and I am incredibly patient with children, even my own. Go figure.

This job quest is teaching me (the hard way) how to be patient with myself in general, but more specifically, when things are beyond my control. It has also taught me that there are a lot of things in this world that are beyond my control. A very sobering realization, I must admit. At the same time, I have discovered that one thing is universally in my control and that is how I respond to the situation.

This isn’t to say that I am serenely going about my day, calm and secure in a place of Zen. I’m not. Not even close. There are days that I am barely keeping it together and there are days that I can actually forget that my situation is so tenuous. And in between those two extremes are a lot more days where my expectations align with reality.