3 Ways To Build Patience In Life When You Feel Lost

Before I give you my personal perspective on this I have to mention one thing: You need to find your own answer to what life means to you.

I can only give you what I believe and can only share my personal perspective. It may work for you, it may not.

The true answer, the one that makes you want to stand up every day and makes you rather take a bullet for a cause you believe in than to surrender it, you will only find that through searching for it yourself. Sorry.

That being said, currently I could think of millions of reasons why someone might continue to live the best life they possibly could. But I also remember a time when I could not think of a single reason to continue to live.

It is all a matter of finding out what means something to you!

For now, let me give you some of the reasons why a life might be worth living:

• Live to enable others to live a better life. We all need some help, some protective wing and someone to take us in their arms sometimes. Without you someone may never have that chance.
• Live to experience the world! There are so many wonders in the world, so many places to visit, and so many experiences that only you can have that will make you fall to tears.
• Live to see how far you can go. View life as one big test of your abilities to continue as far as you can and see how far you can reach in one lifetime. Exceed your expectations!
• Live to protect and nurture the ones that cannot do it themselves. Some of us are born with disadvantages or encounter life events that change our lives forever. But that does not decrease the value of the life we live, even though most of us forget that when we encounter such a drastic life change. Those of us who need help to even survive can still accomplish things greater than anything done before. If you cannot live for yourself, do it for them.
• Live for a better world. There are so many things wrong with the world but also so many things that are right and amazing. It’s time we all worked to make the world a better place so it is filled with beauty, art, kindness, love and happiness every step of the way. You may not get to experience this world, but if you do not step up, who will?

Those are just some of the very generic reasons a person may have to continue to live a life even if they find that their life has no purpose on its own.

Now, I could start telling you the 3 reasons to be patient and to keep living your life in hope that something will come from it, but I know that they all will mean nothing to you if you are at a point like I was that is so low that nothing matters anymore.

I cannot give you a reason to stay patient because that is not what is going to get you the life you want. But I can give you a reason to get up:

If your life is horrible right now it makes no sense to stay where you are at. Things will not change from that perspective. Life does not change on its own.

It can get better; life has for many people, but you have to do something.

You can experience days where you are feeling only gratitude towards everyone and everything, bringing you to tears as soon as you think of it because you are just so happy to be alive.

You can experience a love for every human being that goes deeper than the love most people have for their partner and live for the world out of a complete unconditional love.

And you can experience events and situations that will leave your mouth wide open because the littlest thing can create a chain reaction in your mind that will change the way you view the world forever!

But you will only experience this when you keep going in life, keep fighting and keep trying to make your life better than ever before.

If the above resonates with you at all, if you agree with any of it, then you can definitely build up a level of patience that will get you there, but you have to continuously work on it.

This patience is not something that you get once and it’s done. This is a mindset, a skill that needs constant brushing up and something that will simply die without attention.

To grow such a patience, here are 3 things you can do:

#1 — Create a Goal Worth Waiting For.

When you create a goal make sure it excites you so much that it won’t matter how long it takes to achieve.

Most of the time we cut our desires short to make them seem more reasonable, but that is exactly what gets us into trouble. Because they are not juicy enough we do not wish to work terribly hard for them and give up sooner.

Example: How many hours would you work for $100? How many hours for $1,000,000? How many hours for $1,000,000,000,000?

Or how many years would you work to get a life that leaves you happy 60 days out of the year? How about one that does it 300 days out of the year? How about one that leaves you happy 300 days out of the year, with a incredibly satisfying relationship and a skill set you are immensely proud of?

I want you to expand on your personal goals so much that they seem too good to be true, so good that you are willing to work decades for it and would be happy if you just got close.

For that is a goal worth waiting for, and one worth being patient for.

Sit down, write out your goals and then elaborate on them to make them at least 10x as amazing. This may take some time. It will be worth it.

#2 — Make the Present Great!

Imagine it is the day before Christmas. You are excited about tomorrow and incredibly impatient.

What will ease your mind more: Waiting on the couch in front of a black screen doing absolutely nothing? Or playing games with your family, enjoying the day and having a great time?

Time goes by faster when you are enjoying yourself, you know this. So if you want to be patient with life allow yourself to have fun where you are.

Create days that make you feel excited, happy and that make you smile.

Do not wait for something to happen or for you to reach your goal and make life as great as you can.

In this case, do whatever you can to give yourself some happiness and make life exciting.

Personally I’d advise either for filling your schedule as much as possible (leaving no white spaces) or relentlessly chasing a hobby (it’s Martial Arts and Dungeons & Dragons for me).

“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” — Helen Dukas (Misattributed to Albert Einstein)

#3 — Make Progress towards something.

Innately, we all understand that nothing lasts forever. But when we never move anywhere it does not feel like it.

When we stay in the same home for decades, do the same things with our partner every week, and always hold the same position in the same job, we feel life has stagnated.

This means that everything we have, and everything we do not have, stays the way it is.

While this can be good in certain regards, it can be just as bad in others.

We may not loose our friends or family, may not loose our desires and passions, but we do not gain any skills either and do not get closer to our goals.

If you want to be more patient with your big goals you have to see some progress.

The problem with this is though that you have to be able to see that progress, which means it will sometimes take you more progress and sometimes less to feel any at all, as it is a very subjective feeling.

We want to make this more objective, more cold, more calculated so that you cannot deny your own progress anymore.

Yes, you will have to work on something a little bit, set some smaller goals and meet some self-proclaimed dead lines, but it also means you sitting down every so often and reminding yourself about what you have already accomplished.

Look at your life this year, for example, and see what progress you’ve made.

The more progress you see, be it in a hobby, your job, your relationships, or your personal development, the more you relax as things are moving forward.

You are not as pressed for the big changes for you proved to yourself that something is changing in the right direction.

My personal advice: Create your goals and divide those into smaller subgoals and those into daily habits.

The daily habits do not need to be long, difficult or stressful, but something you do every day.

If you want to become more knowledgeable, for example, then read 5 minutes every day. Over the course of the year that is more than enough to make you progress.

And the more you progress towards something in life the more time you think you have.

(There is more information you can get regarding this particular point that is discussed in the book Learned Optimism — by Psychologist Martin Seligman should you be interested.)

Story originally published at Quora.com