How to know your gift from God (Part 2)

Say you consider yourself "impatient."  If you have a fixed mindset, it means you think this is just how you are, and that you can't change.  You think some people are born patient, and others born impatient.  But if you have a growth mindset, you realize that impatient people have practiced impatience--and have become very good at it!  The same is true with patient people.  No one is born patient or impatient.  No one is born knowing how to dance, or play drums, or anything else.  Everything we are, and everything we do, has come from learning, and practicing what we learned.

Now, we are born with different likes and dislikes.  And those likes are gifts from God, the motivations behind your actions, the actions that you practice and become good at.

Think more about this.  What's the difference, in actual experience, between someone who is effectively practicing patience, and someone who is "naturally patient," whatever that means?  Say the effective practice or experience of patience simply means listening without interrupting.  You and I are talking, and I listen without interruption.  What if I'm working on that, trying to break a habit of interruption.  And what if someone else has already established that habit.  What would be the difference, if in this one conversation, I listened without interruption?

There would be no difference. 

The act of patience is the same, for the one who is working on it, and for the one who has perfected it.  Now their internal experience may be different.  The one who is working on it may feel a pressure to speak, while the one who has perfected patience may not feel that urge.  And perhaps you would sense the urge from the one who is struggling.  But it's very possible that you wouldn't.  It is written, "No one knows the thoughts of a person except the spirit in the person."  So you wouldn't necessarily know that I'm struggling to listen without interruption unless I shared it with you.

The practice of patience is patience.  The practice of listening without interruption is the experience of listening without interruption.  

Click here for part 3.