Impatience: An Error of Self-Improvement

Often, the conduct of others at work can act as a precursor to our own feeling and internal behaviours. When receiving criticism, it is a natural human response to experience a somewhat negative internal response.

Essentially, it is important to observe all of your feelings as well as the behaviours of others in your immediate team at work. A careful analysis helps provide an effective point of intervention. Record any notable observations from your colleagues and after collecting several examples, it will be easier to see a pattern emerge and help you understand what triggers you to feel a certain way.

Impatience is a recurrent mistake of self-management. Once you have identified the problem behaviour, managers sometimes rush into an intervention before carefully observing the problem behaviour and those factors controlling it.

Being impatient can be hard to avoid when focusing on more negative aspects and things that need to be improved, however this must be done to set yourself up for failure. You may have overlooked an important regulatory factor (such as physical stress and tension) and thereby attempt to implement an inappropriate intervention. Such a failure is discouraging, wastes valuable time and energy, and can validate the belief that you can’t change.

In order to be effective, you should give yourself more positive reinforcement than you were receiving before you beginning the self-management program. If you find that you must deny yourself reinforcement because you didn’t fulfill your terms, this is a good indicator that you are probably asking too much of yourself, and you should create more realistic goals that will be easier to fulfill.