Patience and Teamwork

Patience is one of the hardest skills to master, yet it is also such an important skill as well. Maybe it is because I am still young and eager to get my life going, but patience is something that I have always had to work extremely hard to have. Whenever I want something done, I always want it done as soon as possible. Now this can be a good skill as well, allowing me to be productive and proactive on certain things. But it is also the cause of unnecessary stress and expectations, particularly when I want something done that is completely or partly out of my control. It is important to develop patience in order to be the most effective team member. 

Patience is one of the most important skills to have when working in groups. Other people work at different paces so as an effective group member you must be patient for them to finish their work. This sounds obvious but is often a cause of mistrust and communication breakdowns within a team. One team member may feel like they are doing most of the work because of their impatience and stop trusting their team as a result. This can snowball into less communication between team members and ultimately failure. This is something that can be applied to many scenarios, like family dynamics, relationships, work, sports, etc. What I have found is that trust is at the center of patience. You must be willing to trust your team in order to be able to give them patience. Developing trust is its own separate complex topic as trust looks different between every single team. This is something that most of us will always likely have to work on, but patience is important to have in order to have functional teamwork and collaboration.