Tortoise Thinking: Does the Future of Leadership Depend on Patience?
- Tamar Balkin
- Jul 30
- 10 min read
"Take the pressure down, Cause I can feel it, it's rising like a storm. Take hold of the wheels and turn them around. Take the pressure down. Someone turned the pressure on. I called your name, and you were gone"
Pressure Down by John Farnham (Click here for the song)
Regular readers know that the demands on leaders today are immense. Reflecting on the themes I’ve explored in my blogs (to read them all, click here) over the past five years, I found myself asking: Is there one capability that underpins effective leadership across all these challenges?
As I revisited the research on patience and its role in human behaviour, a clear insight emerged. Patience is not just a coping strategy; it may be a critical driver of leadership effectiveness and perhaps the essential trait for successful leadership in 2025.
“In the most basic sense, patience is the propensity of a person to wait calmly in the face of frustration, adversity, or suffering. Patience is enacted across a wide range of circumstances and timeframes.”
Schnitker, 2012
What is patience?
Psychology researchers define patience as the psychological capacity that enables individuals to tolerate discomfort, delay, or uncertainty without becoming agitated or overwhelmed. It is relevant in a wide array of human experiences, from minor daily irritations to sustained periods of hardship. People exhibit patience (or a lack thereof) in circumstances as varied as parenting, navigating bureaucratic delays, or persisting through organisational change. These moments are not marginal they are central to human functioning.
Researchers differentiate between three types of patience:
Interpersonal patience: Facing annoying people with equanimity. Researchers found that those who are more patient toward others also tend to be more hopeful and more satisfied with their lives.
Courageous patience: Waiting out life’s hardships without frustration or despair. e.g., an unemployed person who persistently fills out job applications or a cancer patient waiting for her treatment to work. Unsurprisingly, researchers found that this type of patience was linked to more hope.
Daily hassles patience: The typical events of life, like traffic jams, long lines at the grocery store, and a malfunctioning computer. Research shows that daily hassles and frustrations harm physical health and well-being, perhaps to a greater extent than major life events. People who have this type of patience are more satisfied with life and less depressed.
What about the impact of time on patience?
In my psychology undergraduate degree, I learnt that one's perception of time often differs from the actual time measured by a clock. In the context of patience, researchers have begun to examine the concept of wait-time construal, the subjective belief about how long one should be expected to wait in a given context. These beliefs are shaped by factors such as prior experience, personality traits, motivation, and socio-cultural norms.
Studies indicate that when individuals are highly motivated to complete a task quickly, their perception of how long the task should take tends to shorten. As a result, they are more likely to underestimate its duration and become impatient when it extends beyond their expectations. Interestingly, the presence of explicit cues or reminders about the passage of time can lead people to overestimate elapsed time, which reduces their tolerance for delay. In contrast, when attention is fully absorbed in the present moment, such as during flow states or mindfulness, the perception of time contracts, enhancing patience.
Thus, how a person construes and experiences the passage of time influences their capacity for patience.
“Patience may enable individuals to tolerate flaws in others, therefore displaying more generosity, compassion, mercy, and forgiveness,”
Schnitker and Emmons in their 2007 study.
What are the benefits of patience?
Motivation and goal achievement Patience supports sustained effort toward long-term goals, particularly when individuals face obstacles or slow progress. Researchers have found that patient individuals not only experience greater goal satisfaction but also exert more effort in pursuing those goals. Regular readers know that perseverance and goal achievement lead to increased life satisfaction and positive mood.
Human Flourishing Patience enables the realisation of human potential through the cultivation of meaning. Within the framework of self-determination theory, patience may facilitate the fulfilment of core psychological needs autonomy, competence, and relatedness by allowing individuals to remain engaged with intrinsically meaningful goals, even when progress is slow. Patient individuals tend to report higher self-esteem and lower loneliness. Researchers have found that patience is more than just a way to cope with the realities of life; it is a key component of how people grow and thrive.
Positive Organisational Behaviour Researchers have found that within organisational settings, patience may serve as a critical enabler of reflective decision-making, inclusive leadership, and psychological safety. Researchers have found that patience in organisations fosters more ethical, deliberate action, particularly in complex or ambiguous environments. When paired with assertiveness, patience allows for principled persistence without reactive escalation.
Relationships with others. Patient people tend to be more cooperative, more empathic, more equitable, and more forgiving. The interpersonally patient people tend to be less lonely and more accommodating of the nuances of human behaviour. Patience also plays a crucial role in fostering healthy interpersonal dynamics within organisations. In professional environments, patient individuals are more likely to navigate conflicts constructively, support their colleagues, and remain focused on collective objectives rather than succumbing to frustration or impulsivity.
Tolerance and Perspective-Taking Recently, researchers have begun to look at whether patience supports openness to diverse perspectives. The practice of waiting without judgment or premature conclusion allows individuals to remain cognitively and emotionally available to alternate viewpoints. Which has positive implications for inclusion, dialogue, and social cohesion.
“The famous adage, ‘Patience is a virtue,’ originated in a poem from the 1300s—so it’s not exactly a new concept. Rather than a virtue, which implies morality, Kate proposes that patience is an emotional action.1 “When that emotion of impatience arises, we can manage it and regulate it through the process of patience,” she said. “That really takes patience quite out of the virtue realm and situates it in the nerdy research on emotion regulation. It’s not quite as poetic, but I think it’s much more practical.””
Does patience come naturally, or can we learn it?
To begin to understand whether we can learn to be patient, researchers found it was useful to distinguish between trait patience, which is a stable personal tendency, and state patience, which refers to the ability to be patient in a specific situation.
Trait patience. Researchers have identified a number of traits/attributes that may increase the likelihood of a person having a natural tendency to be patient. Individuals who naturally lean toward agreeableness and empathy tend to be more sensitive to the social impact of impatience. This heightened awareness increases their motivation to self-regulate, making them more likely to respond with patience. Researchers have found that those with stronger executive function are more capable of exerting the cognitive effort required for emotion regulation, in situations requiring patience.
State patience is influenced by a range of situational factors that shape how individuals experience and respond to delays. Researchers have identified three key elements. First, the relative desirability of the future versus the current state plays a significant role, it is harder to remain patient when the present moment is unpleasant or when the anticipated outcome is highly desirable, making the wait feel more intense. Second, the blameworthiness of the delay can heighten impatience, particularly when there is a clear person or party perceived as responsible for the hold-up. Finally, features of the delay itself, such as its unpredictability or perceived negativity, can further erode patience, especially when the delay feels unfair or unnecessary.
“Among the most powerful and flexible forms of emotion regulation are cognitive strategies that either alter the way we attend to a stimulus (distraction) or the way we interpret the meaning of a stimulus (reappraisal).”
McRae K, Hughes B, Chopra S, Gabrieli JD, Gross JJ, Ochsner KN.
How do we build patience?
Researchers have found that people can improve their capacity for patience through emotional regulation techniques.
Cognitive reappraisal is the deliberate process of changing how we think about a situation to alter its emotional impact. It can involve viewing the situation from someone else’s perspective, which not only fosters empathy but also opens up new ways to respond, such as giving someone the benefit of the doubt. A key element of this process is challenging automatic interpretations by deliberately separating facts from assumptions. When we shift our focus from imagined motives, biases, or worst-case scenarios to what is known and observable, we create space for more balanced thinking. Reframing the situation, shifting the meaning or focus of the event, helps reduce emotional intensity and enables more constructive responses.
Attentional distraction involves deliberately shifting attention away from emotionally charged information before an emotional response fully takes hold. Research has identified several techniques that support this process. One involves consciously redirecting attention from one aspect of a situation to another, or even away from the situation entirely. Another is the use of concentration, a cognitive strategy where individuals fully engage their mental resources in a chosen activity. By intentionally focusing on something specific, they are better able to manage emotional triggers and maintain regulation. A third technique is savouring, which refers to mentally revisiting positive emotional experiences. This form of positive rumination can help prolong the benefits of those emotions and act as a buffer against negative affect. Together, these attentional strategies support emotional regulation by guiding where and how mental energy is directed.
Neuroscientists have found that both cognitive reframing and attentional distraction successfully reduce emotional experience and amygdala activity while engaging prefrontal regions important for working memory, selective attention and cognitive control more generally. Combining attentional focus with cognitive reappraisal not only has a cumulative effect on emotional regulation but also increases the likelihood of these strategies being used together in future situations.
“The consequences of patience oppose the consequences of impatience: calm composure rather than agitation, restraint and perseverance rather than impulsivity. These expressions likely in part reflect activity in the parasympathic nervous system that counteracts the arousal of impatience via the sympathetic nervous system”
Sweeney
Emotional regulation flexibility
Researchers have found that true patience involves the active regulation of agitation or impulsiveness in the moment, and is marked by calm composure, restraint, and perseverance. Researchers have found that emotional regulation can reduce impulsivity and increase the willingness to delay gratification, thereby strengthening patience. Regular readers are aware of a range of emotion regulation techniques (click here for my blog on the Third Space and quick relaxation techniques).
Recent research has demonstrated the benefits of emotion regulation flexibility, this involves using different emotion regulation strategies depending on the context. The capacity to shift attention and reframe situations, especially when focused on long-term outcomes, is linked to more positive emotional experiences in daily life and lower levels of psychological distress. These findings reinforce the idea that the effectiveness of emotion regulation depends on context; no single strategy works best in every situation.
What about Well-being?
Regular readers will be familiar with the idea that psychological well-being encompasses positive emotions, a sense of purpose, and the ability to engage meaningfully in relationships and activities. While major life events can be disruptive, it is often the daily hassles and frustrations that more significantly undermine both physical health and emotional well-being. Emerging evidence suggests that patience is positively associated with subjective well-being, adaptive coping, and overall thriving. By buffering against negative emotional responses during stress, patience serves as a direct contributor to mental well-being.
Additionally, people who are more socially integrated and enjoy supportive, rewarding relationships consistently show better mental health, higher subjective well-being, and lower rates of illness and mortality. Researchers have found that patience facilitates adaptive emotion regulation, especially under conditions of stress or ambiguity. Thus supporting both immediate well-being and long-term psychological resilience.
Final thoughts and a word of caution:
Patience should not be confused with passivity or the acceptance of poor behaviour. It is not about tolerating the unacceptable. Rather, patience creates the space for purposeful, measured action. It enables leaders to respond rather than react, to make thoughtful, strategic decisions under pressure.
If you or someone in your network may benefit from coaching, please feel free to get in touch: tamar@balkincoaching.com.au
To schedule a meeting, you can book a time via my calendar: https://www.calendarbridge.com/book/jotPVTT
To read my previous blog posts, please click here: https://www.balkincoaching.com.au/blog-1
References:
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