Patience is a Virtue

We have all heard this saying before. Patience is a key to success. It’s one thing to be patient when waiting for your food at a restaurant or your favorite show to drop a new episode. But what about patience in reaching our goals?

It’s easy to get caught up in the next thing and always be striving to move forward. This is absolutely a good thing. But many of us get frustrated waiting for plans to unfold, for progress to be made, because it’s a marathon, not a sprint. If we could all get there quickly, we all would.

Consistency and patience really do win out in the end. When we embrace the long game, buckle ourselves down for the grind and the journey, that’s when we really see the results.

Try something once and don’t see results right away? Keep doing it. Experts say it can take up to 21 days to make something a habit and about 90 days for something to stick and start driving results. This is the same with our personal and professional goals. We need to make sure our plans and systems are in good shape and KEEP GOING. We won’t see results right away and we need to be ok with that.

Sometimes it can take weeks, months or even years for progress to really show from the work you’ve put in. Understand what is realistic for you, what your timeline is, and what winning looks like for you. Once you set the bar for success, be ready to hurry up and wait.

When things aren’t working, you can be tempted to switch gears and start to create something new. While new innovations are great, you have to be sure you’ve put enough time, effort and thought into the original project. Before you start sinking tons of your time into a new project on top of everything else, give your original project the time to show results.

Never quit on a bad day. Giving up before you’ve really tried everything, or more importantly before you’ve let your plans reach fruition, is why many goals don’t get reached. So remember, patience is a virtue. Set your goal, create your action plan, identify what winning looks like, and get ready to run that marathon.

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