Lost Your Patience?

Lost your patience?

Here at True Balance Karate, we have a social emotional learning program called True Character. I’m Master H, the owner and chief instructor here at the studio. I have two master’s degrees in education, and we’ve developed this curriculum to best meet the needs of our youngest students who are 3 or 4, and our oldest student who is 85.

And this month we have been talking about patience. We started it off by defining what it looked like, waiting without getting upset. We talked about the fact that everyone around us shows us patience, just like we show patience to everyone around us. And then last week we talked about how we can teach patience to our kids when they should interrupt, and what patience would look like otherwise, putting in place some of those strategies.

And this week you’ve lost your patience. Let’s just say you’ve reached the end of it. You’ve lost your patience. You would like to be the kiddo laying on the floor, throwing a temper tantrum. And what do we do? How do we get that back? How do we show that kind of patience? And again, this is also a learned skill, right?

So when they’re four, five, six, seven, getting them to understand where their feelings came from, what their feelings were, why they were feeling that way, and then talking about what strategies could we put in place instead? Instead of crying, instead of screaming, instead of pitching a fit, what could we have done instead is the first step in helping us as adults controlling our patience, so we don’t lose our patience. I like to teach the kids how to take a deep breath, right? Inhale like you are trying to smell the flowers. Exhale like you’re trying to blow out birthday candles.

Another common keeping your patience strategy for our younger students is counting to 10, or counting backwards from 10, so that when you get down to one, you are just calm and cool and relaxed, because we don’t want to be the person throwing the temper tantrum.

And then as we get older, temper tantrums with teenagers could look like them being quiet, being silent, not sharing, slamming things. They’ve lost their patience, and they’re just grouchy, grouchy people. And again, it’s helping them work through some of those bigger feelings that they’re having as they’re teenagers. Giving them journals or opportunities to write about it, giving them safe outlets, punching a pillow or something like that, so that they can let whatever frustrations they’re feeling out so that they can find that equilibrium again, so that they have their patience back.

And then us as adults, as much as I’d like to sit down in the middle of a grocery store and start crying because the world is ending and I’ve lost my patience, it doesn’t quite look so good when we lose our patience that way. For us as adults, sometimes losing our patience is being short, being quick, making bad decisions. Bad decisions is sometimes the sign of a person who’s lost their patience. Just look at anybody who’s in rush hour traffic, who needs to get where they’re going right then and there. They’re suddenly no longer thinking clearly, and they’re making rash decisions about moving in and out of traffic. So that could be another way of seeing when somebody has lost their patience.

And just like with what we teach the kids and the teenagers, as adults, we also need to take deep breaths, we also need to count backwards from 10 or count forwards from 10. There’s another skill that we could employ that the young kids wouldn’t understand, but maybe the high schoolers would. And that’s this idea of re-grounding yourself, re-centering yourself, taking a moment and noticing five things around you. And then taking a moment and listening for four things, and taking a moment and smelling. Do you smell three different things? Like literally trying to re-center yourself in the space that you’re at so that you can remind yourself that it’s okay.

And then another way to regain our patience is to talk to ourselves, talk positively to yourself, remind yourself that it’s okay. This too shall pass. We’re doing just fine. We can be a few minutes late. It’s fine. Those kinds of strategies go a long way to helping us continue to practice our patience.

Thanks, and I’ll see you on the mat!

True Balance Karate was founded in 2012 by Master Sue and Paul Helsdon.

We offer kids karate lessons for pre-school children ages 3-6 and elementary age kids ages 7 and up. These lessons are designed to develop the critical building blocks kids need — specialized for their age group — for school excellence and later success in life.

Our adult martial arts training is a complete adult fitness and conditioning program for adults who want to lose weight, get (and stay) in shape, or learn self-defense in a supportive environment.

Instructors can answer questions or be contacted 24 hours of the day, 7 days a week at 630-663-2000. You can also contact us here. True Balance Karate is at 406 Ogden Ave Downers Grove Illinois, 60515 (next to CVS) Check out our Facebook!