Patience: Cornerstone #6

Patience is probably one of life’s hardest and most important lessons. It's an important avenue to clarity.  Lack of patience undermines everything else you do.  To learn patience…well, you have to be patient.  It's the same Catch-22 as developing discipline. 

True patience is hard to attain because it competes against so many of your other emotions. Emotions that can unleash themselves in a hurry and without restraint if you’re not paying close attention. I adopted my axiom of Choose Your Reaction as a mechanism to help me be more patient. I tend to be highly opinionated and controlling. I've found out the hard way what a bad combination that is! My solution was to try to eliminate the emotional component in many of my responses.

Of all the Cornerstones, I struggle with Patience the most.  I simply don't have much... but I've chosen to be patient as I slowly learn to have more.