English Listening Practice - Patience

welcome to the listening Time Podcast hey everybody this is Connor and you're listening to episode 10027 of The Listening Time Podcast thank you all for listening today my voice is a little bit weak because I'm a little bit sick uh so I'm sorry about that I appreciate you bearing with me I appreciate your patience by the way speaking of patience patience uh this is the topic of today's episode patience so I want to talk about this today uh and talk about some different situations in which patience is required uh it's necessary so I think this

will be a good topic for all of us because I think that pretty much everybody has room for improvement when it comes comes to Patience by the way we use that phrase room for improvement this just means that you have space to improve you are not perfect there are still improvements that you can make so we all have room for improvement when it comes to patience so this should be a good topic for today's episode and uh hopefully it will inspire all of us to be a little bit more patient in our everyday lives and

uh hopefully that will help us out so that's what we'll talk about today remember that you can sign up for my us conversations podcast if you feel ready to start practicing with real conversations between native speakers in each episode I talk to someone from a different part of the country from the the us and we talk about a bunch of different topics and you get to learn a lot about the us our culture different topics uh these conversations are really interesting and we speak naturally and I provide the transcript for you so you can follow

along and you also have the definitions of new words and phrases that you might not know that we use during the conversation so if you're interested in that the link is in the description below this episode that's patreon.com USC conversations and if you want my Advanced podcast episodes uh if you want to practice with me speaking at normal speed then make sure to sign up for my membership the link is also in the description below if you become a listening Time family member you get two new Advanced episodes every month and if you're a Spanish

or a Portuguese speaker check out my ebook if you want to read fiction in English those links are down below as well and as always if you like this podcast please give it a five-star rating and write a review and share it with anyone else you know who's learning English all right let's get started our are your ears ready you know what time it is it's listening time okay let's talk about patience so first of all I need to mention that I'm not the most patient person in the world uh this is an area in

which I need to improve a lot uh I am willing to admit that uh because I'm not the most patient person and I really want to improve in this area I uh look at my wife for example she's more patient than I am and I try to learn from her because uh there are times when we're both dealing with the same situation and she is patient and calm and I'm more agitated uh the word agitated means that you are uh bothered and anxious uh for some reason so I might be agitated and yet she's perfectly

fine and we're dealing with the same issue so uh I can see that other people uh have more patience than me sometimes s and I really want to improve in this regard I need to improve and I try to do so every day so I'm not talking uh from the perspective of someone who has tons and tons of patience uh I'm talking as someone who needs to improve in this area so what are some different situations in which we need to be patient the first one that comes to mind is when we're sitting in traffic

by the way we use that phrase sitting in traffic uh when uh we talk about being in your car and you're in traffic it's moving very slowly or sometimes it's not moving at all we say that you're sitting in traffic so this is the first situation that comes to mind when I think of patience because it's a very common occurrence and for me it's one of the most frustrating situations I hate being in traffic it's uh one of the worst things I'm sure a lot of you agree with me about this so if we're not

patient then traffic can really bother us it can really Annoy Us and sometimes it can ruin your day because you allow your mood to uh be negatively affected by the fact that you have to wait in traffic so this is something that we want to avoid because we can't control traffic it's completely outside of our control and if we get bothered uh by traffic this doesn't help us right we can't do anything to change the situation to make the traffic suddenly go away we have no control over that so I don't think it's worth it

to uh lose our patience uh to lose our cool and get really angry when we're stuck in traffic there's no benefit to that by the way when we say that you lose your cool this means that you lose your patience and you snap you get mad you get really frustrated right so we don't want to lose our cool just because traffic is bad so that's the the first thing that comes to mind because I'm guilty of this sometimes when I'm stuck in traffic I uh get frustrated and uh I let it affect my mood but

I definitely shouldn't do this so that's one that I need to work on another situation in which we need patience is when we're dealing with a difficult person we've all been there we all know how this is by the way when I say that we've all been there what I'm saying is we've all been in this situation so we've all been there we've all had to deal with a difficult person uh in some situation or another and uh sometimes we can lose our cool and we can allow this situation or this person to frustrate us

to the point where we act uh differently we don't do what we should do or maybe we talk in a way uh that isn't the best so I'm sure you know what I'm talking about uh sometimes we have to deal with difficult people and it's important to not let them uh bring us down to the level where we're getting really mad uh for no good reason right sometimes we get angry at another person uh for a legitimate reason obviously I'm not talking about that I'm not talking about being angry with a person because they've done

some horrible thing they've committed some Wicked crime crime or something like that that's not what I'm referring to I'm referring to situations where a person is just hard to deal with and you need to be patient with them so that can happen in the workplace that can happen uh just in public at stores with employees at certain companies in a lot of situations so dealing with these people requires patience and it's good to uh act patiently in these situations because sometimes we are the difficult people sometimes I am the difficult person or you are the

difficult person and other people have to deal with us so I think that we should uh be patient with people because sometimes we need people to be patient with us so it goes both ways and another situation in which we need to be patient is listening to people you might not think of this as a situation that requires patience but it does because people talk and we should try to listen and sometimes people talk a lot or their story that they're telling takes a long time and you can get bored or you can start to

uh get distracted or you can stop listening for example and we sometimes lose patience uh when we have to listen to other people talk because everybody loves to uh talk about what they want to talk about people like to uh be the ones to share things and talk about things but not everybody likes to listen and that's a more important skill is being able to listen when other people talk to you and that's something that we should all uh try to improve on and make sure that we're patient and we are listening to people and

we are genuinely caring about what other people are saying and if you do this if you demonstrate patience in this situation you're going to have better relationships people are going to like you more you're going to have fewer uh argu arguments maybe uh the other person is going to feel more uh cared about for example and you'll have better communication overall so I think that we should all practice uh with uh just being able to shut our mouths and listen to other people speak and not just immediately try to uh uh talk and interrupt and

say what we want to say we should let the other person finish uh before we uh start giving our opinion about something for example so that's another situation another time when we need to be patient is when we're learning a language this is very relevant to all of you and to me because I'm a language learner learning a language takes a long time I constantly get questions from people uh asking about their language learning process and usually they express frustration that they aren't improving uh fast or they feel stuck or they feel like their progress

is uh not what they want it to be they feel like they have a problem they ask me questions and they frame the question kind of like uh saying that there's something wrong with them why aren't I improving how I should be uh I have a problem with this what's wrong with me what should I be doing differently I constantly get questions like this and these are legitimate questions I'm not saying that these aren't good questions however what I want to say is the vast majority of the time uh when people ask me this question

uh it's not uh like these people are uh studying in the complete wrong way and they're wasting their time time and they need to completely change uh everything about their language learning routine it's not that usually they are just uh advancing slowly and they don't realize it and they don't realize how long it takes to learn a language okay let me give you an example of my language learning process I've been speaking Spanish for over a decade not a year or a couple years not five years not eight years no I've been speaking Spanish for

over 10 years over a decade now okay my wife is a Spanish speaker uh she only speaks to me in Spanish okay I lived in Mexico for six years my whole life was in Spanish for 6 years and yet today over 10 years later I'm still in the process of learning Spanish not actively I don't actively study Spanish however I'm constantly learning new things new words there are things that I don't understand uh there are things that I misunderstand there are things that I need uh people to repeat because I didn't get it and I

make mistakes all the time all of this is uh what I deal with and I've been speaking Spanish for over a decade I've lived in the country for many years my wife only speaks in Spanish to me and yet I'm still improving I still make mistakes I still have an accent I still don't sound anything like a native speaker Etc so just know that learning a language takes a really long time in terms of getting to a very high level of course you can reach an intermediate level uh in a pretty short period of time

if you dedicate a lot of hours to it uh and you can even reach an advanced level in a relatively short period of time depending on your motivation and how many hours you're dedicating to it however when uh your goal is to become really good at a language that is inevitably going to take a long time when I say that something is inevitable what I'm saying is that it's unavoidable so there's no way to avoid this if you want to reach a really high level in English then that's going to take a really long time

okay that's just how it is we need to be patient and similarly another situation in which we need to have patience is when we are trying to achieve a goal uh learning a language is one goal that's one example but when we want to achieve any goal we need patience if you want to lose weight that's not going to happen tomorrow right uh you can't just expect that to happen in 24 hours you need to stick with it for a certain period of time before uh you actually see these results by the way the phrase

stick with it just means that you continue doing something so you need to stick with it and be patient and eventually you'll see results but not overnight the word overnight refers to from one day to the next you're not going to see results in just one day you need to have a little more patience than that or if your goal is to learn some new skill maybe you want to learn a programming language or something like that that's not going to happen overnight you need patience you need to accept that this is going to take

some time and uh eventually you'll reach your goal right if you stick with it but patience is necessary when we set goals and we want to to achieve these goals and another situation that requires a lot of patience is when we're going through government processes this is probably the worst one for me this is the thing that is the most frustrating and tests my patience the most when I am going through a government process and the government takes a long time to do the process and uh respond to me or to do what they need

to do this can be really frustrating I need to have more patience when it comes to this because this is inevitable we all deal with these processes uh we all live in country that have uh governments that are uh not efficient and not very uh well-run and are not uh the best institutions with the best customer service and all of that all of us are in this situation regardless of uh which country you live in so we need to have patience and know that these processes are going to take a while and uh we can't

do that much to influence this uh so when my wife was going through the immigration process to live in the US this took a long time this took multiple years so this was something that required a lot of patience and at times it felt like it was never going to end but of course it did and we got through the process and uh everything is okay now but during that period it was hard to have patience sometimes and that was something that really taught me to uh just wait and to not allow things that I

can't control to uh negatively impact my life and my uh daily life and my my mood uh I needed to kind of uh not focus on this process and just live my life be patient and wait so that was a big one and one more situation that I wanted to mention probably the most important one uh the most important situation in which we need patience is when you are parenting when you have kids when you have kids your level of patience is tested uh in a way uh unlike anything else so you're dealing with small

people humans that have not learned to act properly behave well communicate effectively they don't know this yet they don't have these skills especially at Young ages so if you don't have patience this is going to be very hard for you you're going to deal with a lot of situations in which you uh are annoyed or irritated or you feel desperate because you know uh how something uh needs to be but your kid doesn't they don't know this uh or they do the opposite or they uh do a lot of things that can possibly uh irritate

us and affect our mood and they can cause us to uh lose our cool sometimes and we need to be careful with this and we need to exercise patience and to really understand that kids need instruction and discipline and they need time they need time to learn these things and to learn how to behave properly learn how to communicate uh learn how to express their feelings in a good and uh normal way they need time before they can do all of this effectively so we can't expect them to just be born with the these skills

that's simply not reality and as a parent uh patience is necessary you need to understand that uh these processes take a long time uh these kids will need a long time before they really learn all these lessons and uh they can do things the way that you can do them as an adult so for me that's uh probably the most important situation in which patients is uh definitely required so those were some different situations but there are plenty of others I hope this episode was interesting for you and hopefully it got you thinking a little

bit about your uh patience levels and maybe it can and inspire all of us to be a little more patient and if you feel ready to practice with real conversations between native speakers then make sure to sign up for my us conversations podcast the link is in the description below this episode uh you'll love this these conversations are really interesting and it's great practice for your listening so make sure to sign up that's patreon.com SL USC conversations and if you want to join my membership and get my specialized training for your listening and your pronunciation

and my Advanced podcast episodes then make sure to join my membership that's patreon.com listeningtime and if you're a Spanish or a Portuguese speaker and you want to read fiction in English then check out my eBook The Links are also down below and if you like this podast I'd really appreciate it if you could share it with anyone you know who's learning English that really helps me out and please give it a five-star rating and write a review all right thank you for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of

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