A practice for cultivating patience

I recently caught myself feeling a flash of impatience with ChatGPT for taking too long.

“Too long,” in this case, meant more than five seconds, after I’d given it an enormous brief and asked it to compress hours of administrative work into a moment. 😬

As I noticed the impatience rising in my body, I had to smile.

It reminded me of a routine I’d seen a comic do years ago about the quiet miracle of flying at 35,000 feet, and how quickly we forget it when the Wi-Fi drops.

Even as innovation dramatically changes what’s possible, our expectations seem to race even faster.

When I was 13 years old, I read a self-help book that suggested a practice for cultivating patience. The instruction was simple:
1️⃣ Open a box of paper clips.
2️⃣ Slowly remove them, one by one.
3️⃣ When the box is empty, put them all back one by one.
No rushing. No multitasking. Just presence.

I remember reading that page and thinking, I could never do that! I think I may have even stopped reading the book completely at that point.

Even then, I was oriented toward speed, efficiency and productivity.
The idea of deliberately doing something slow, with no tangible outcome to show for it, felt deeply unappealing.

So I skipped the exercise and moved on, assuming patience would arrive later. Instead, I quietly trained my nervous system to expect constant acceleration. (To the point that throughout my career at P&G, I could regularly be seen literally running through the halls to and from meetings! And I wasn't the only one!)

But only recently have I started to notice the more subtle impacts that pace has.
- A narrowing of attention
- A restlessness in moments meant to be spacious
- A low-grade friction when things unfold at a human rhythm

Slowing down has become a recent practice. Not as a rejection of ambition, and not as an aesthetic choice, but as a form of self-leadership. This looks like:
- Letting a thought (my own or someone else's) finish forming.
- Letting silence do some of the work.
- Letting myself resist the urge to optimize every moment. (This one has been the hardest!)

I still don’t think I’m ready for the paper clip exercise yet. But I finally understand the wisdom behind it.

There’s something quietly powerful about staying with what’s happening, rather than rushing toward what’s next. I’m learning to use those small moments of impatience as invitations to return to presence.

✨As leaders, what might shift if we paid closer attention to the moments when speed feels most urgent, and asked what they’re actually asking of us?

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