The Wait

In this 6th episode of Chocolate Psychology, Dr. Tricia shares a personal insight that helps her cope with the frustration of waiting. Waiting is especially frustrating when we are forced to wait without understanding the rationale or potential outcome for the delay in execution. Yet, viewing waiting as a potential silent process that can generate better outcomes offers a different perspective that can help us cope with the energy drain of the wait.

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Transcript

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Hello, this is Dr. Trisha, and this is the sixth episode of Chocolate Psychology, a place where I hope you find encouragement, information, and a little bit of energy or comfort to take you through your day. So I hate waiting. And in this episode, I'm going to do a little bit of milk chocolate, which is maybe a different angle on something that doesn't make either of us feel better, but makes the discomfort of waiting a little bit more palatable. At least that was my takeaway, so I'm going to share it with you. First of all, for context, what I mean by waiting is where we know what we want to achieve, and there's some kind of delay in execution. That kind of waiting, or the kind of waiting where we really don't know and we want to move, but we don't know where to go or how to get there. So that makes us wait also. Two examples, I'm remembering that there was this day I was going hiking earlier with some people, and everybody met, and then they were talking in the parking lot for like 30 minutes, and I just didn't understand why we couldn't start hiking, which is why I got out of bed so early and talk along the way instead of standing and doing nothing and then hiking. Right now there's an organization I'm working with and I love them, but we know about something we want to achieve. We know approximately how to get there, and so there's still this pause on execution, and it drives me crazy. I just don't understand. So what helped me is that this past weekend I was working on the half bath and the downstairs of my house. First, I don't love decorating, I like the creation, I like the project completion, but the decision making and the tedious detail, I don't do it at all. In a perfect world, I would just delegate that, except that it's pretty hard to delegate things if you don't know what you want in the first place. When I started the half bath, actually, it was that I didn't start because I was in a lot of pain when I moved into my house, and so some of what I thought about was pretty labor-intensive, and I also didn't know exactly what I wanted the outcome to be. So after about a year of looking at blank walls, I decided to do something temporary that didn't feel like a big uh financial or effort investment, and it would be a little bit better than the blank walls. Well, what happened was that slowly I started building on that thing that was supposed to be a temporary fix. And this past weekend it came full circle into something that is so much better than I would have had if I had a perfect idea of what I wanted at the beginning or the bandwidth or effort to execute on some of the more traditional decorating modalities. And it made me realize that maybe there's a an underlying rhythm or something special during the periods of waiting. I tend to process waiting as just wasted time or nothing happening, and I'm aware of the emotional drain. But this just made me wonder if there's other areas of life, like the bathroom, where either because we don't know what we want or because of other people involved, we have to go at a pace that's a lot slower than what we prefer. And it maybe made me wonder if sometimes there's extra creativity or innovation or just better ideas that might be able to emerge through the process of waiting that might give us something that's infinitely better than if we had achieved what we wanted as soon as we wanted to achieve it. This is Dr. Trisha, and that's your chocolate psychology for the day.