I decided to put this week’s and last week’s words together because they go together. We are going to talk about the difference between active patience and passive patience.
When you are on a journey towards a goal, sometimes the most difficult part is waiting for results that don’t show immediately. Whether muscle building or weight loss or especially martial arts, the results of all your hard work rarely show right away. It often takes weeks or even months before you see any significant difference. What makes it difficult is what happens in between. You get to a point where you start to question if your hard work is even worth the pain and struggle you are going through.
This is where patience becomes important and active or passive patience makes a difference. Passive patience is when you simply wait for the results to occur. You continue to do what you have always done and wait for the results to appear. Active patience is different in that during the time you are waiting for your results, you find other ways of continuing your journey. Instead of doing the work and letting the consequences happen, you work to find new and better ways to see the results as well as focus on other results you may not be aware of in the beginning.
Take martial arts for instance. Our goals are usually the next rank or the next win in a tournament. Along the way, we can either do the work and wait for the rank or possible victory or we can also realize that during all that time we have also been getting more in shape, we have been developing our hand eye coordination, we have been developing synaptic response speed, we have been training our bodies to be stronger and tougher than before, etc. When you are active with your patience, you will notice a lot more results and find that even if the final goal hasn’t been reached, many other smaller goals have been. There is success in every moment. Take the time to watch for this and you will be amazed at how far you have actually come.
Train hard,
Head Instructor Shawn Morris