Part 6: Adjusting Impatience and Correcting a Perfect Mindset
impatient
Those prone to impatience often act rashly and carelessly, resulting in outcomes contrary to their wishes and leaving them disheartened. Furthermore, their eagerness for quick success leads to emotional turmoil, disrupting their mental harmony and peace, and severely impacting their physical and mental health.
Adjustment
(1) Strengthen planning. Before doing anything, think things through calmly. Make a written plan for important matters and keep track of the details for minor matters. Make arrangements for each step of the matter so that you will not be hasty or careless when working. Gradually, you will develop a steady habit.
(2) Use self-suggestion before doing something. Before doing something, you can silently repeat to yourself "calm down, calm down" or "stay calm down". With this suggestion, speak slowly and then start doing something. This will achieve obvious results.
(3) Strengthen character training. Impatience is often closely linked to personality and can become a habit. To overcome impatience, one can hone one's patience and resilience through activities such as playing chess, painting, and making small handicrafts. Over time, this will naturally cultivate a good habit of not being impatient.
(4) Be consistent in your work. Impulsive people should never start something and then leave it unfinished. When taking action, you should not only have a good beginning but also a satisfactory ending. Therefore, maintaining a good start and a good finish is also an important part of overcoming impulsiveness.
Controlling impatience is not something that can be achieved overnight; it takes time to see results. Therefore, controlling impatience requires determination and perseverance; otherwise, good results will not be achieved.
Symptoms and Adjustment of Negative Mindset
1. A Perfect Mindset
Pursue results. If you demand perfection in everything, this very mindset becomes an obstacle to your work. Don't compete with others on your weaknesses; instead, cultivate self-esteem, self-satisfaction, and interest in your work based on your strengths.
Re-examine "failure" and "imperfection." One or even multiple failures do not define a person's worth. Think about it carefully: if we never experienced failure, could we truly understand the meaning of life? We might know nothing, complacently basking in our foolish ignorance. Success strengthens our beliefs, while failure provides unique and invaluable experience. Only by enduring the test of failure can one reach the pinnacle of success. There's no need to wallow in self-pity for not achieving perfection. Nothing is without flaws; blindly pursuing an illusory ideal is futile. Ask yourself: "Can we truly achieve perfection?" If not, abandon that idea as soon as possible. Those who pursue perfection often deliberately seek success, but success and failure are relative. Success only indicates achievement in one aspect; therefore, we should not absolutize success.
As long as we demonstrate our abilities in a certain field or aspect, we can consider ourselves "successful".
2. "Saturation" mentality
The phenomenon of psychological saturation is almost ubiquitous in life. For example, an American businessman traveled to a Native American settlement and saw the beautifully woven straw hats. He asked, "How much is one?" The seller replied, "Ten dollars." "What if I buy 100 of the same hats?" "Twenty dollars each." "Why is it more expensive if I buy more?" "Making one hat feels novel, making ten requires patience, but how will we possibly maintain our patience to make 100 identical hats!" Psychological saturation caused the sale to fall through.
Psychological saturation often has negative effects. For example, when a teacher assigns 100 math problems, students start quickly and correctly, but later slow down, make more mistakes, and experience frustration. Similarly, workers doing the same work or managers hunched over their desks may also experience psychological saturation.
Extramarital affairs are often a result of psychological saturation. After several or even decades of marriage, couples living together become intimately familiar with each other's every move and word. The initial novelty wears off, and even their sex life loses its initial passion. They've said everything they needed to say and done everything they needed to do, leading to a hidden sense of boredom. At this point, if another person of the opposite sex shows interest, they feel a sense of novelty and excitement, finding that person more interesting than their spouse. If they fall in love, they find it difficult to extricate themselves. Looking at various forms of extramarital affairs, a significant proportion stem from psychological saturation.
Adjustment
When you feel bored with doing the same job every day, you might as well relax: move around, look into the distance for a while, take a walk, or talk to someone to distract yourself from the tension. This can reduce the mental stress caused by mental saturation.
3. Unfair mentality
People often demand fairness and reason, believing that fairness and reason are essential in interpersonal relationships. They feel unhappy when they encounter unfair treatment. Demanding fairness is not inherently wrong; however, if the inability to obtain fairness leads to negative emotions, then it should be considered a psychological problem.
Adjustment
(1) There's no need to demand fairness in everything. In reality, there is no absolute fairness in the world; the world wasn't created based on the principle of fairness. For example, leopards eat wolves, wolves eat badgers, badgers eat rats, and rats eat... Just look at nature to understand that this is always unfair to the threatened and vulnerable. Natural disasters like hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes are unfair to all life. In human society, poverty, war, disease, crime, drug addiction, and other inequalities are rampant. In a sense, fairness may only exist in mythology. Therefore, there's no need to measure everything with a yardstick of fairness; otherwise, you're just making things difficult for yourself.
(2) Try to achieve fairness through your own hard work. For example, some people believe that as long as they work hard and have strong professional skills, they should be favored by their superiors, and they mistakenly regard the act of actively trying to get along with their superiors as flattery. In fact, leaders are also human beings, and everyone needs to be respected and affirmed by others. Therefore, some seemingly unfair things are caused by one's own immature concepts and words and deeds.
(3) Change the standard for measuring fairness. Unfairness is a subjective feeling after comparison, so as long as we change the standard of comparison, we can eliminate the feeling of unfairness psychologically. For example, you feel very "unfair" for not being selected as an advanced worker. But if you think about it from another perspective, you will find that other colleagues may be more outstanding than you, and many people who are the same as or even better than you were not selected. Perhaps if you think about it this way, you will feel at ease.