Ok, all my “impatient” friends… here’s one for you today.
I know being impatient gets a bad reputation. And a lot of us who have trend in this direction get shamed for having no impulse control, but let me just put in a plug for the love of impatience for a minute.
If we assume that everyone is different, and that those differences matter, and that “mattering” means that you have something to contribute to me that I need in order to function as a perfect whole, then the contribution of impatience is to get us out of inaction.
And so many of us SO regularly get caught in inaction patterns, where we know what we should do and can’t. (We’re going around the thinking clock and coming to the action point at 12, and then the gravity of thinking “well, am I really ready” puts us into thinking mode again, and we have to go all the way around the clock again until we get to the action point again.) And I was in that spot for almost a decade about moving to Minneapolis.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved Bozeman. And every person I met there and was friends with was worth knowing and spending time with. But after having been here for just nine months now, I can say with absolute certainty that I should have moved years ago. Maybe even before the pandemic.
I knew I needed to be here. I knew I needed to leave Bozeman. But every time I would start thinking about it, my heavy-thinking brain would stop me.
Sometimes it was the commitments that held me (but let’s be honest, no commitment that I had was really dependent on me; every one of them would have found someone else to do it). And sometimes, it was Mikhail. (I didn’t think he could make a cross-country move without his anxious little heart giving out.) But it was really fear.
And when I finally let my Activator be in charge, last September, when I came out here for a research trip, and I got an apartment on the second day of being here, a lot of my friends were thinking, “whoah, Activator, you haven’t thought this through,” but I had. (And even if I hadn’t, honestly, it would still have been the right decision.)
When I would talk to my Activator friends about moving, I could feel their impatience for me. It had a visceral quality. And I knew I wasn’t letting my Activator do what it was meant to do, when I would let the thinking spiral start again.
In the past, I’ve used the Five Second Rule (Robbins) as a shortcut into that impatience. And you know I’m not a “thinking is evil” person. But wow, when Activator does its thing, and it really was only resistance stopping you from doing the thing, it’s pretty amazing to have it done. (Especially if you have ANY level of Achiever in you at all.)
But also, your Activator friends, who are dying of impatience when you say you want something and then don’t activate on it, and we know it’s coming from a fear place (and we know we actually will be okay, and the thing we’re about to do is actually safe to do, even if we let the thinking clock start again)… have some sympathy for them, as well.
Activator is made to catalyze. That’s where the impatience comes from. (And yes, sometimes we do need to wait. And yes, my Connectedness can see why now was a better time than previous times.) But the next time we use the word “impatient,” can we take just a second to re-frame it?
When people are impatient, they are being active. The action point is there. The loop is open, and they can see how good it would feel to close that action loop.
So I want to take a second to thank all the Activators in my life. Past, present, and future. I’m grateful for all of you. In my “we can do hard things” year of resilience, you are priceless.
Becca