The Most Important Patience Skills (With Examples)

Every once in a while, a situation rolls across your path that would make any rational person burst with rage. Whether you’re training an inexperienced new employee who’s testing your last nerve, have been waiting in a check-out line for over an hour, or are taking care of a customer’s irrational complaint that’s pushing you to the edge.

There is a particular soft skill that greatly contributes to resisting the urge to explode in response to these workplace irritations. It’s called patience.

What Does It Mean to Be a Patient Person?

Patient people are the ones whose skin doesn’t crawl at the sight of something going wrong. They’re not overcome with anguish, anxiety, or aggravation the instant that life isn’t going their way. Patience is often used to describe a person’s attitude when interacting with someone else.

For example, take a mother who is teaching their child how to ride a bike. The child is afraid that they’ll fall, and they’re hesitant to get on the bicycle because of this fear. A person who isn’t patient would begin getting frustrated with the child until they eventually gave up on teaching them at all.

On the other hand, a patient person would calmly accept the child’s fear, stand by for support, and not feel any rash emotions from a potentially difficult situation.

Being able to manage yourself and be a patient person can have many benefits in your professional life.

6 Career Benefits of Patience Skills

Remaining calm, cool, and collected is useful in some fields, and necessary in others. Strong patience skills make working in a professional environment much easier in more ways than one. Below are a few key examples of how patience can benefit your career.

1. Improves communication and collaboration. When at least one party in interaction is demonstrating patience, it gets more effective communication done. This is because the patient person is always keeping themselves grounded and not letting the stress of a particular situation get in the way of their communication.

   People who display patience at work have a better time collaborating and coordinating with their co-workers.

2. Creates endurance to achieve long-term goals. Any long-term goal worth accomplishing takes a lot of two things: effort and time. Many people abandon their more demanding goals because they simply don’t have the patience to stick with them.

   A patient person acknowledges that good things take time and are willing to wait for the outcome of achieving their objective.

3. Lowers stress. A person who is not constantly burdening themselves with frustration over other people’s actions and tough situations is less stressed in general. Patience allows an employee to understand a scenario at work for what it is, but not get overwhelmed and stressed out about it.

4. Demonstrates leadership skills. Most employers start looking inward at their team for signs of potential leadership skills from the first moment of hiring. One of the signs that an employee might be cut out for a supervisory role is that they’re extremely patient.

   Demonstrating this patience in your career could set you up to receive a promotion to a leadership position.

5. Enables more logical decisions. Frantic emotions, like anger and tension, often lead to hectic choices being made in response. One of the major benefits that being more patient can have on your career is that it gives you the tools to take a breath and make the most logical decision. This is extremely helpful in positions of leadership.

6. Strengthens professional relationships. People prefer to work on a team that exudes patience from every employee. When you demonstrate patience at work, it signals to the rest of your team that you’re open for discussion and working towards a solution to any situation together.

   This mentality fosters stronger professional bonds and a more effective workplace.

How to Highlight Patience Skills on a Resume

Hiring candidates who demonstrate patience positively impacts the entire professional team. This is why employers are so keen to find this soft skill in the people that they hire. Highlighting your patience abilities on a resume is an excellent way to portray yourself as a professional with the mental and emotional tools to work through any situation practically.

Consider the following advice for including patience skills on a resume.

1. Discuss skills related to patience. Patience is an ability that happens to work in conjunction with other soft skills. While there is the option to list patience in your resume skills section, adding additional soft skills that are related can also help give a well-rounded applicant profile.

   A few examples of skills that are related to patience include:

   • Teamwork

   • Collaboration

   • Communication

   • Conflict resolution

   • Adaptability

   • Customer service

2. Describe your former duties to illuminate your patience in past roles. One of the largest chunks of a resume used to convey information about a candidate is their work history section. Use this area of a resume to your advantage by implementing soft skills you’d like to highlight in the description of your former responsibilities.

   For example, an individual who works as a teacher can report their duties in a way that shows how patient they are with their students.

3. Include patience in your resume objective. A resume objective is an opening statement to a candidate’s resume. It’s usually no longer than three sentences and introduces the hiring manager to the person they’re going to be learning more about.

   It’s common to include a soft skill or two into your self-description. If patience is crucial to your role you might want to include it as a skill in your resume objective.

Example of a Resume Highlighting Patience

Interview Questions About Patience

After properly assessing a candidate’s resume, the next step in the application process is bringing them in for an interview to review their abilities further. During this meeting, there will probably be at least a few questions about your patience soft-skills, especially if you’ve listed this as a strength on your resume.

Review the following common questions about patience to prepare for your next interview.

1. Do you consider yourself a patient person? When an interviewer wants to get straight to the point about a candidate’s skills, they’ll ask this question. It asks the interviewee to self-evaluate their patience skills. To answer, give an explanation beyond “yes” or “no”. Describe why you consider yourself to be patient.

2. Tell me about a time your patience was tested at work and how you handled it. This is a situational-type question that still measures a candidate’s patience abilities. It asks the applicant to reach back into their employment history and pull out an example of demonstrating patience at work.

   The hiring manager will be looking for a description of the situation and a clear explanation of how you used your patience to solve it.

3. Do you have any pet peeves at work? How do you deal with them? Since patience often comes into play during a period of annoyance, a hiring manager might choose to ask you about your pet peeves to get a read on your skills in this area.

   When responding to this question in an interview, start with a definition of the pet peeve and an explanation for why it’s frustrating for you. However, focus most of your answering energy on describing how you handle pet peeves at work with patience.

5 Tips for Developing Your Patience

While patience is a useful skill that can benefit any working adult, it’s a quality that a lot of people are lacking in. If you’re one of the many people who have a short fuse and a low level of patience at work, then you might benefit from working on your skills in this department.

Check out the following five tips for developing your patience to learn more.

1. Stick to activities that force you to wait. A great way to enhance your patience is by committing to activities that force it upon you. Doing projects that involve a level of waiting or patience develops this skill to use in other areas of your life, such as at the office.

   Some examples of waiting activities that develop patience include:

   • Fishing

   • Doing a puzzle

   • Cooking or baking

   • Growing and maintaining plants

   • Learning a new language

2. Take a moment to stop and breathe during frustrating situations. While this piece of advice might make you stop to roll your eyes, ignore the cliche nature of it for a moment. When you’re in a moment of frustration, at work or otherwise, you’ll often lose yourself to the aggravation of the interaction.

   Taking a beat to breathe and remember that the problem isn’t the end of the world can change your whole perspective and strengthen your patience.

3. Reflect on circumstances that you lost your patience in. Losing patience during a difficult situation happens to everyone at some point in their career or personal life. The next time it happens to you, don’t just repress the memory of it instantly.

   Reflect on the circumstances that lead you to lose your patience. Examine why it happened and come up with ideas of what you could do next time to create a different outcome.

4. Adjust your mindset at work. Having patience at work is really all a matter of shifting your mindset. Start reminding yourself consciously throughout the workday to be more patient in your professional interactions, and think about frustrating situations with a more open mind.

5. Don’t take everything so seriously. One of the best ways to develop your patience is by constantly remembering not to take everything so seriously. A lot of anger and impatience that boil over in people is a result of taking their circumstances as absolutely dire.

   Whatever is frustrating you at the workplace isn’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, and that knowledge alone can help you be more patient.

Patience Skills FAQ

1. Why is patience a soft skill?

   Patience is a soft skill because it’s a personal attribute that enables you to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. Unlike hard skills, which are teachable abilities/skill sets that are easy to quantify, soft skills make communicating with and working with other people easier.

   With patience, you’ll be able to maintain a calm and rational demeanor when waiting for long periods of time or dealing with stressful situations. Doing so will make working with others much easier.

   As a soft skill, patience is also a valuable thing to include on your resume or in an interview. If you’re a patient person, write that down under the skills section of your resume. Also, be sure to rehearse a story or two about a time you were patient before your interview.

2. What is a good example of patience in the workplace?

   A good example of patience in the workplace is being able to teach a co-worker a new skill or working with a child who’s having a tantrum. Here are those two examples:

   1. You were assigned to teach a new co-worker how to navigate Slack, a communication program they’ve never used before. It’s taking them longer than you expected to understand it, but you patiently continue guiding them. Instead of becoming frustrated and making the situation worse, your patience allows you to effectively explain the program with a resolve few other employees have.

   2. As a newly hired teacher, it can be overwhelming dealing with young children at times. However, when James began having a tantrum over not liking the math portion of the class, you patiently communicated with him about it. At first, he continued to cry and complain, which could have easily gotten to any teacher, but your patience allowed you to keep your cool until the child calmed down.

   Examples like these are perfect to use in interviews, because they showcase how well you handle yourself during situations that require patience. And, regardless of what kind of job you’re going for, patience is always a valuable skill.

3. Why is patience important to success?

   Patience is important for success for 7 major reasons. These include:

   1. Positive decision-making. Patience gives you the mindfulness to stop and focus on the present moment. In doing so, you can take the time to make positive and well-thought-out decisions.

   2. Tolerance. When you have the ability to expect obstacles and deal with them diplomatically, it increases your tolerance for others. You’ll be able to communicate with people of different ages, genders, and cultural backgrounds with ease.

   3. Enhances team culture. As a communication skill, patience allows companies to build a more positive team culture. Having patience makes it easier for us to treat others with respect, and listen to their ideas.

   4. Self-control. When you have patience you’re less likely to make irrational and impulsive choices. You can also work through negative emotions in far more constructive ways.

   5. Appreciation. When you have the patience to wait for something you want or tolerate behavior you don’t like, you’ll feel far more rewarded when you achieve the desired outcome.

   6. Reputation. Like other positive communication skills, patience will lead to others appreciating and respecting you more. In turn, that will give you a more positive reputation.

   7. Opportunity. And reputation, combined with all of these other benefits, will give you more opportunities. Nothing says success like increased opportunity.

   Altogether, these benefits of patience will allow you to become far more successful in the workplace. You’ll be able to handle a variety of different situations and people efficiently and positively.

4. Is patience a skill for a resume?

   Yes, patience is a great skill for resumes. As a valuable soft skill, patience can easily be incorporated into a resume for any job.

   While you’ve probably learned to focus on hard skills, soft skills like patience are highly desired by employers. That means that whether or not you have several hard skills available to write on your resume, it’s still worth adding “patient” to the skills section of your resume.

   Think of it this way; an employer can easily train a cashier how to use a cash register if they’ve never used one before, but they can’t simply teach someone how to be patient. That’s why patience is so valuable.

5. How do you list patience skills on a resume?

   You can list patience skills on your resume through your work history descriptions. While it’s easy enough to list patience as one of the skills on your resume, you can also use some of the bullet notes in your work history descriptions to expand upon the ways you exemplify it.

   For instance, you can show patience on your resume by mentioning how many new team members you trained, the process of completing an important project, or a time you held strong and solved a conflict. Here are some examples of work history descriptions that showcase patience:

   1. “De-escalates arguments and other potentially harmful situations through adept communication.”

   2. “Maintains timely and consistent communication with an editor once per week.”

   3. “Successfully trained 7 new employees on company computer systems.”

   When you include these types of descriptions, your potential employer will read about the ways in which you are patient, rather than just seeing “patient” as one of your listed skills.

Author

Sky Ariella

Sky Ariella is a professional freelance writer, originally from New York. She has been featured on websites and online magazines covering topics in career, travel, and lifestyle. She received her BA in psychology from Hunter College.