What does patience mean as a core value?
Patience as a core value means waiting well: staying steady and useful while people, plans and results develop at their own pace, and keeping your frustration in check.
Patience matters most in the gap between wanting something and getting it. A new hire who takes months to find their feet, a child learning to read, a strategy that won’t pay off for three years, a queue that isn’t moving. If patience is a core value, you believe good things usually take the time they take, and you try to wait without fretting, nagging or giving up. That takes discipline: staying steady and useful while something grows at its own pace.
What does patience look like in practice?
- You explain something a third time without irritation creeping into your voice.
- You give a new team member time to learn before judging their performance.
- You stick with a habit or project through the stretch where nothing seems to happen.
- You let other people finish their sentences.
- You wait for the right moment to raise a hard issue.
When is patience overplayed?
Too much patience can become tolerance of things that should have been dealt with. You give a failing project another quarter, a poor performer another chance, or a difficult relationship another year, and call it patience when avoidance is doing some of the work. Others may read your willingness to wait as a lack of urgency. In balance, it waits for things that are genuinely developing and acts when they aren’t. One way to keep it honest is to write down what you’re waiting for and the date by which you’d expect to see it.
Often confused with
Patience vs Persistence
Persistence is keeping going in the face of obstacles. Patience is about waiting well, often when there’s nothing more you can do.
Patience vs Calmness
Calmness is a settled mind at any moment. Patience is specifically about how you handle delay, slowness and other people’s pace.
Patience vs Acceptance
Acceptance is making peace with what can’t be changed. Patience expects change to come, and is willing to wait for it.
Questions to sit with
- What are you still waiting on that you could act on today?
- Whose pace do you find hardest to accept, and what does that tell you about your own?
- Where would a little more patience change the outcome, and your mood with it?
More values in Grace
Calm, composure and a quiet, balanced life.
About the author
Matt Rutherford is a Career and Leadership Coach. The Values Finder is the same exercise he uses with his coaching clients. He also writes Stuff that MattRs, a weekly newsletter with practical ideas to help you think clearer and work better.
Find your own
Is Patience one of your core values?
Choose from 155 values, narrow them down to the few that matter most, and get a personal report to keep. Free, and it takes about 15 minutes.
Find your core values