Packing Patience Important For Travel, And Also At Work - Tennessean

“To lose patience is to lose the battle.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Like millions of others this past holiday season, I was one of the unfortunate victims of “Southwest-gate” (pun intended).
We decided at the last minute to make our first-ever attempt at snow skiing the week before Christmas. It had been a few years since we’d been on a big family vacation, and we figured it would be good to spend quality family time together doing something adventurous.
Getting a flight delayed or canceled is of course nothing new. Nearly every flight I’ve been on over the past six months has been a flip of the coin as to whether we would take off a few hours late or a few days late. But especially during the holidays, when life is supposed to slow down a bit, being stranded in an airport is enough to push even the most patient among us over the proverbial edge.
But patience, as they say, is a virtue. And whether it’s business or life in general, it’s one of most important lessons to learn. And just like anything that’s hard to master, patience takes practice.
For our family, practicing patience started at the very beginning of our trip—the always formidable TSA security line.
Packed with holiday travelers, I was one of the lucky ones to be plucked out of the TSA-pre-check line (that I had patiently waited in for 15 minutes,) and had to start over at the main checkpoint. Game on.
Thirty minutes later, after my bag was pulled for a manual search because of an oversized shampoo bottle (I blamed my wife), we made it to the gate only to be told that our flight was delayed. No biggie. This is what all the years of practice was for, and I took it in stride.
When we landed in Colorado I took a deep breath. We made it and it was time to relax. As we waited outside in the freezing cold for a shuttle to take us to our hotel, I sensed our kids were getting restless. I told them not to worry—no pain, no gain—mastering patience (literally) takes time. We sat quietly trying to keep warm for 45 minutes before our shuttle van finally arrived.
But our full-body patience workout was far from done.
We waited an hour to get our skis. We waited in line for everything from chair lifts to hot chocolates. And my son was forced to wait repeatedly for me to slowly make it down the mountain, always at least 15 minutes behind him.
All first-world problems of course, but required a dose of patience, nonetheless.
And of course, the end of our trip was capped off with a canceled flight back home before we finally concluded our vacation (aka “patience workout”) a couple of days later than we had planned.
Just like travel, business can be unpredictable.
With a constant barrage of events that are out of your control, a day in the life of a company is not much different than a day in the life of a traveler. Just like a flight, you never know when a big sale or an important project will get delayed or canceled.
At work, patience is more than just a virtue. It’s a requirement. It goes hand in hand with perseverance—a critical trait that most successful people share.
So, while I admit traveling this holiday season wasn’t much fun, there was a bright side. It ended up being an opportunity for all of us weary travelers to exercise our patience muscles to prepare for returning to work for the year ahead (and to patiently wait for that Southwest refund.)
JJ Rosen is the founder ofAtiba, aNashville IT support andcustom software development firm.VisitAtiba.com for more info.