Patience: Why Slowing Down Helps You Move Forward

When you're feeling rushed and frustrated, prioritising your ability to slow down and show patience is key – not just for your own wellbeing, but for the quality of your decisions, your relationships, and your mental health.

Without it, you’ll end up constantly exhausted, irritable, and making mistakes you could easily have avoided.

This top tip explores the hidden power of patience – not just as a virtue, but as a practical skill. We'll look at what it means to get comfortable with delays, why it's valuable, and what it can teach us.

This matters because if you're always living at 100mph, you're going to miss the scenery – and sometimes, the scenery is the point.

Have A Little Patience

In 1992, I spent a year living in Tanzania. I was 19 and working as a volunteer teacher. It was a year of big learning, powerful contrasts and – as I want to touch on today – monumental patience.

This wasn’t the kind of patience where you politely wait for a kettle to boil or for your train to be two minutes late. This was deep, existential, reshaping-your-entire-attitude-to-time type patience. The sort you only develop when the world around you forces you to slow down.

One of the most formative things I learned that year was how to wait. And I don’t just mean sitting still.

I mean waiting without expectation, without frustration, without filling every moment with noise or urgency.

And I learned this the hard way – through trains, telephones, malaria, and a lot of shopping for soap.

Look Into The Eyes Of Any Patient Man

Let me take you to a very specific experience. My weekly (and always doomed) attempt to call home from the dusty town of Tabora on the Tanzanian plateau to my family in leafy Harrogate.

First, I’d need to catch a lift from our village of Itaga into town. We might all agree to leave at 10am, but since the driver was also the economics teacher, our departure time depended entirely on whether he’d finished marking his papers or having his breakfast.

If he wasn’t ready until 11:30, then none of us – students, villagers, staff – were going anywhere. We’d all just sit and wait.

Once we eventually got moving in the battered pick-up, we might hit a detour. Overnight rains often carved deep troughs into the dirt tracks, which meant reversing, rerouting, and laying down planks across the worst bits.

A one-hour journey could easily stretch to three. And this was all before I even arrived at the telephone exchange in Tabora.

I Sit And Wait

Once there, I’d write down my home number and hand it over the counter. Then I’d sit. Wait. Hope.

Usually after a few hours, someone would slide open the little window and tell me, “We could not connect.” Just like that.

The system between our town and Dar es Salaam rarely worked - that was the problem. From Dar out to the world was apparently fine. But in ten months, I made just one successful international connection.

And when I say successful, I mean I spoke to a very puzzled woman in Hereford after giving the wrong number. Genius. 

I usually wandered off to the market after that to pick up something essential like a bar of soap, or maybe just to kill time until the truck was ready to head back. On the face of it, I spent hours achieving absolutely nothing.

But was it really nothing?

Time On My Hands

That year tested my patience in ways I’ve never experienced since.

Like the 12-hour train delay where we sat motionless in Tabora station for what felt like forever, with no idea when (or if) we’d ever get moving.

Or the time I was stranded in Singida for three days because my travelling companion, Fr Anto, came down with malaria and couldn’t drive.

No one panicked. No one moaned. It just… was.

It wasn't just the big delays – the medical emergencies, the broken transport, or the missed phone calls.

It was also in the everyday things: queuing for a loaf of bread, waiting for someone to finish their turn on the single village (manually turning) photocopier, or watching clouds build over the hills while you stood holding on to the back of the pickup.

That rhythm of life – unhurried, accepting, and grounded – taught me something that’s easy to forget now: you don’t have to be doing something to be learning something.

Because I wasn’t just standing around. I was reading more than I ever had. I took books everywhere.

I started noticing more – the landscape, the interactions, the small changes. I became more reflective, more tolerant, and less prone to anger when things didn’t go to plan.

Stop Right Now, Thank You Very Much

The modern world doesn’t reward patience. Everything is instant – texts, deliveries, search results, expectations. But here’s the catch: not everything important can be rushed.

If you want stronger relationships, better decisions, or even a better sense of self, you need time.

You need space. You need to let things unfold.

We often conflate movement with progress – if you’re not busy, you’re not succeeding. But as I learned on the back of that pickup truck, stillness isn’t the enemy of progress – it’s the environment in which patience grows.

And patience is what lets you weather the storms, reroute when the road disappears, and keep perspective when things go wrong.

So what does this mean for us now, in the age of broadband and instant noodles?

Well, one thing I’ve taken from that year – and try (not always successfully) to remember – is to stop getting cross about things I can’t change.

Going Nowhere On A Train

Stephen Covey talks about the Circle of Influence – focus on what you can affect, and let the rest go. That’s patience in practice.

Whether it’s a cancelled train, a delayed email, or a project going off track – getting angry rarely helps. But preparing for the delay, accepting it, and using the time well? That’s gold dust.

So this top tip is to learn the difference between pointless waiting and powerful patience.

Next time you’re stuck in a queue or delayed on your commute, resist the urge to grumble.

Take a book.

Breathe.

Think.

Let your mind slow down.

And remember, some of the best growth happens when you’re going nowhere.