Long Listening · Section 7

Patience

Today my voice is a little bit weak because I'm a little bit sick, so I'm sorry about that.

Level: A2 · 320 sentences

Transcript

Today my voice is a little bit weak
because I'm a little bit sick, so I'm sorry about that.
I appreciate you bearing with me.
I appreciate your patience.
By the way, speaking of patience,
this is the topic of today's episode, patience.
So I want to talk about this today
and talk about some different situations in which patience is required.
It's necessary. So I think this will be a good topic for all of us
because I think that pretty much everybody
has room for improvement when it comes to patience.
By the way, we use that phrase, room for improvement.
This just means that you have space to improve.
You are not perfect.
There are still improvements that you can make.
So we all have room for improvement when it comes to patience.
So this should be a good topic for today's episode.
And hopefully it will inspire all of us
to be a little bit more patient in our everyday lives.
And hopefully that will help us out.
So that's what we'll talk about today.
Okay, let's talk about patience.
So, first of all, I need to mention
that I'm not the most patient person in the world.
This is an area in which I need to improve a lot.
I am willing to admit that because I'm not the most patient person
and I really want to improve in this area.
I look at my wife, for example.
She's more patient than I am
and I try to learn from her because there are times
when We're both dealing with the same situation
and she is patient and calm and I'm more agitated.
The word agitated means that you are bothered
and anxious for some reason.
So I might be agitated and yet she's perfectly fine.
and we're dealing with the same issue.
So I can see that other people
have more patience than me sometimes
and I really want to improve in this regard.
I need to improve and I try to do so every day.
So I'm not talking from the perspective of someone
who has tons and tons of patience.
I'm talking as someone who needs to improve in this area.
So what are some different situations
in which we need to be patient?
The first one that comes to mind
is when we're sitting in traffic.
By the way, we use that phrase sitting in traffic
when we talk about being in your car
and and you're in traffic, it's moving very slowly,
or sometimes it's not moving at all,
we say that you're sitting in traffic.
So this is the first situation that comes to mind
when I think of patience, because it's a very common occurrence,
and for me, it's one of the most frustrating situations.
Being in traffic, it's one of the worst things.
I'm sure a lot of you agree with me about this.
So if we're not patient, then traffic can really bother us.
It can really annoy us.
And sometimes it can ruin your day
because you allow your mood to be negatively affected.
by the fact that you have to wait in traffic.
So this is something that we want to avoid
because we can't control traffic.
It's completely outside of our control.
And if we get bothered by traffic, this doesn't help us, right?
We can't do anything.
to change the situation, to make the traffic suddenly go away.
We have no control over that.
So I don't think it's worth it
to lose our patience, to lose our cool
and get really angry when we're stuck in traffic.
There's no benefit to that.
By the way, when we say that you lose your cool,
this means that you lose your patience
and you snap you get mad you get really frustrated
right so we don't want to lose our cool just
because traffic is bad so that's the first thing
that comes to mind because i'm guilty of this sometimes
when i'm stuck in traffic i get frustrated
and i let it affect my mood
but i definitely shouldn't do this so that's one
that i need to work on another situation in which we need patience
is when we're dealing with a difficult person we've all been there
we all know how this is by the way
when i say that we've all been there
what i'm saying is we've all been in this situation
so we've all been there We've all had to deal
with a difficult person in some situation or another.
And sometimes we can lose our cool
and we can allow this situation or this person
to frustrate us to the point where we act differently.
We don't do what we should do.
or maybe we talk in a way that isn't the best.
So I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
Sometimes we have to deal with difficult people,
and it's important to not let them
bring us down to the level where we're
getting really mad for no good reason, right?
Sometimes We get angry at another person for a legitimate reason, obviously.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm not talking about being angry with a person
because they've done some horrible thing.
They've committed some wicked crime or something like that.
That's not what I'm referring to.
I'm referring to situations where a person is just hard to deal with.
and you need to be patient with them.
So that can happen in the workplace,
that can happen just in public, at stores,
with employees, at certain companies, in a lot of situations.
So dealing with these people requires patience,
and it's good to act patiently in these situations
because Sometimes we are the difficult people.
Sometimes I am the difficult person or you are the difficult person
and other people have to deal with us.
So I think that we should be patient with people
because sometimes we need people to be patient with us.
So it goes both ways.
And Another situation in which we need to be patient
is listening to people.
You might not think of this as a situation that requires patience,
but it does because people talk and we should try to listen.
And sometimes people talk a lot or their story
that they're telling takes a long time.
and you can get bored or you can start to get distracted
or you can stop listening, for example, and we sometimes lose patience
when we have to listen to other people talk
because everybody loves to talk about what they wanna talk about.
People like to be the ones to share things
and talk about things, but not everybody likes to listen.
And that's a more important skill
is being able to listen when other people talk to you.
And that's something that we should all
try to improve on and make sure
that we're patient and we are listening to people
And we are genuinely caring about what other people are saying.
And if you do this, if you demonstrate patience
in this situation, you're gonna have better relationships.
People are gonna like you more.
You're gonna have fewer arguments maybe.
The other person is gonna feel more
cared about, for example, and you'll have better communication overall.
So I think that we should all practice
with just being able to shut our mouths
and listen to other people speak
and not just immediately try to talk
and interrupt and say what we want to say.
We should let the other person finish before we
start giving our opinion about something, for example.
So that's another situation.
Another time when we need to be patient
is when we're learning a language.
This is very relevant to all of you
and to me because I'm a language learner.
Learning a language takes a long time.
I constantly get questions from people asking about their language learning process.
And usually they express frustration that they aren't improving
fast or they feel stuck or they feel like their progress
is not what they want it to be.
They feel like they have a problem.
They ask me questions and they frame the question
kind of like saying that there's something wrong with them.
Why aren't I improving how I should be?
I have a problem with this.
What's wrong with me?
What should I be doing differently?
I constantly get questions like this.
And these are legitimate questions.
I'm not saying that these aren't good questions.
However, what I want to say is the vast majority of the time
when people ask me this question, it's not like
these people are studying in the complete
wrong way and they're wasting their time
and they need to completely change everything about their language learning routine.
It's not that.
Usually, they are just advancing slowly,
and they don't realize it, and they don't realize
how long it takes to learn a language.
Let me give you an example of my language learning process.
I've been speaking Spanish for over a decade.
a year or a couple years, not five years, not eight years.
No, I've been speaking Spanish for over 10 years,
over a decade now, okay?
My wife is a Spanish speaker.
She only speaks to me in Spanish, okay?
I lived in Mexico for six years.
My whole life was in Spanish for six years.
And yet, Today, over 10 years later,
I'm still in the process of learning Spanish.
Not actively. I don't actively study Spanish.
However, I'm constantly learning new things, new words.
There are things that I don't understand.
There are things that I misunderstand.
There are things that I need people to repeat.
because I didn't get it, and I make mistakes all the time.
All of this is what I deal
with, and I've been speaking Spanish for over a decade.
I've lived in the country for many years.
My wife only speaks in Spanish to me,
and yet I'm still improving.
I still make mistakes.
I still have an accent.
I still don't sound anything like a native speaker, etc.
So just know that learning a language takes a really long time
in terms of getting to a very high level.
Of course, you can reach an intermediate level
in a pretty short period of time
if you dedicate a lot of hours to it.
And you can even reach an advanced level
in a relatively short period of time, depending on your motivation
and how many hours you're dedicating to it.
However, when your goal is to become really good at
a language, that is inevitably going to take a long time.
When I say that something is inevitable,
what I'm saying is that it's unavoidable.
So there's no way to avoid this.
If you want to reach a really high level in English,
then that's going to take a really long time.
OK, that's just how it is.
We need to be patient.
And similarly, another situation in which we need to have patience
is when we are trying to achieve a goal.
Learning a language is one goal.
That's one example.
But when we want to achieve any goal, we need patience.
If you want to lose weight,
that's not going to happen tomorrow, right?
You can't just expect that to happen in 24 hours.
You need to stick with it for a certain period of time
before you actually see these results.
By the way, the phrase stick with it
just means that you continue doing something.
So you need to stick with it and be patient
and eventually you'll see results, but not overnight.
The word overnight refers to from one day to the next.
You're not going to see results in just one day.
You need to have a little more patience than that.
Or if your goal is to learn some new skill,
maybe you want to learn a programming language or something like that.
That's not going to happen overnight.
You need patience.
You need to accept that this is going to take some time
and eventually you'll reach your goal, right?
If you stick with it.
But patience is necessary when we set goals.
and we want to achieve these goals.
And another situation that requires a lot of patience
is when we're going through government processes.
This is probably the worst one.
For me, this is the thing
that is the most frustrating and tests my patience the most.
When I am going through government process and the government takes
a long time to do the process and respond to me
or to do what they need to do this can be really frustrating
I need to have more patience
when it comes to this because this is inevitable
we all deal with these processes we all
live in countries that have governments that are not efficient
and not very well run and are not
the best institutions with the best customer service and all of that.
All of us are in this situation regardless.
of which country you live in.
So we need to have patience and know
that these processes are going to take a while and we can't
do that much to influence this.
So when my wife was going through the immigration process
to live in the U.S., U.S., this took a long time.
This took multiple years.
So this was something that required a lot of patience.
And at times it felt like it was never going to end.
But of course it did.
And we got through the process and everything is okay now.
But during that period, it was hard to have patience sometimes.
And that was something that really taught me
to just wait and to not allow things
that I can't control to negatively impact my life
and my daily life and my mood.
I needed to kind of not focus on this process
and just live my life, be patient, and wait.
So that was a big one.
And one more situation that I wanted to mention,
probably the most important one, the most important situation in which we need patience
is when you are parenting, when you have kids.
When you have kids, your level of patience
is tested in a way that unlike anything else.
So you're dealing with small people, humans,
that have not learned to act properly, behave well, communicate effectively.
They don't know this yet.
They don't have these skills, especially at young ages.
So if you don't have patience,
this is going to be very hard for you.
You're going to deal with a lot of situations
in which you are annoyed or irritated
or you feel desperate because you know
how something needs to be but your kid doesn't.
They don't know this or they...
do the opposite or they do a lot of things
that can possibly irritate us and affect our mood
and they can cause us to lose our cool sometimes
and we need to be careful
with this and we need to exercise patience
and to really understand that kids need instruction and discipline
and they need time they need time to learn these things
and to learn how to behave properly learn how to communicate
learn how to express their feelings in a good and normal way
they need time before they can do all of this effectively
So we can't expect them to just be born with these skills.
That's simply not reality.
And as a parent, patience is necessary.
You need to understand that these processes take a long time.
These kids will need a long time before they really...
learn all these lessons and they can do things the way
that you can do them as an adult.
So for me, that's probably the most important situation
in which patience is definitely required.
So those were some different situations, but there are plenty of others.
I hope this episode was interesting for you
and hopefully It got you thinking a little bit
about your patience levels, and maybe
it can inspire all of us to be a little more patient.