What does patience in football look like? Patience is a virtue so they say.

Patience also happens to be one of the spiritual gifts of the bible. We’re told that love is patient (and kind). It is coupled with self-control, steadfastness, endurance, being slow to anger and waiting amongst other things. It is a different sort of patience but it draws on the same key strengths: anticipating a future event with temperance or self-restraint. But also, acting now as if you have already reached your goal. Patience demands that you don’t wait until you’ve made it to be the type of person you want to be.

Being patient in a click and swipe culture

Our lives seem to be hard-wiring us for impatience. The great success of Tik Tok and Twitter in capturing a large audience has been to compress and make available bite-sized chunks of video or text. Our attention spans now demand a ‘watch and swipe’ rhythm with each moment giving us enough instant micro-dopamine hits to keep going for hours.

But back to exercising my patience ‘muscle’ without that quick hit of dopamine to keep me engaged. It’s a switch that’s hard to flip on and yet opportunities to practice patience are abundant in my life. Patience in my football life means waiting on being selected for the starting 11. But it is also means waiting for the results of my university entrance interview, my math exam results, the delivery of my new football boots (thanks to my big bro who wanted to splash some cash on me) and the the list goes on. Waiting. And more waiting.

The lens for patience in football

What I’m learning about patience is that it can only be grasped with perspective. In trying to restrain my impatience recently, my coach said:

Your career will not go in a straight line Max. Don’t expect to go from here (indicating low) to here (indicating high) right away. It will be more like this (indicating a zig zag pathway).

Getafe International Academy Coach

This helped enormously! Apart from aiding me as a visual learner grasp the lesson quickly, it was a great encouragement to do the hard work. For it is only with hard work that I will get from where I am now to my goal. It was a light bulb moment.

Since then, I’m starting to feel more contentment with a trajectory that looks from the outside (and feels like from the inside) to be zig zagging. While I don’t seem to have much momentum and it feels some days like tacking into the wind to try to get the wind behind my back, my coach is right.

Are you impatient for results, now? Tell me how you harness your goals to stay on your pathway.