Waiting
How to be patient without losing your cool
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The homescreen of my cell phone contains a widget that cycles through a dozen or so images of affirmations that keep me motivated, encouraged, grounded, and balanced. Some days, I gloss over the affirmations in my haste to open my apps. But other days, the affirmation hits me like a ton of bricks, slipping through a crack in my feelings facade to speak to the little voice inside who wishes to be heard. Tuesday was one of those days. This was the affirmation:
You see, I have a little voice inside my head that doesn’t like waiting. Thinks waiting is a waste. Believes that waiting is wasteful and that life is too short to waste. Sometimes, the little voice gets hold of a megaphone and shouts my impatience at those around me; other times it grabs the reins of my calendar and to-do list (and, to be perfectly honest, grabs at Shannon’s time and to-dos also), wresting control of everyone’s actions in a subversive, subconscious power grab under the banner of Get Stuff Done.
The problem, lately, is that waiting is out of my control. It is forced upon me daily.
Here is a sampling of the things I am waiting for:
Some prospect to answer my outbound outreach
A client to respond so we can schedule a call with them
A client to take our advice
Our Google Ads to show conversion
More people to commit to a 2027 creative retreat
Our French banks to acknowledge us
Our real estate agent to get back to us
Mortgage lenders to approve us
So many of these items come courtesy of owning a business and taking on ambitious, creative projects. Though in hindsight, it’s not only us entrepreneurs that have to play the waiting game. When I was a full-time in-house marketing leader, my waiting list contained dozens of open tabs: waiting for feedback from my peers, waiting for direction from my CEO boss, waiting for pipeline to close, waiting for OKRs to be finished, waiting for a promotion, waiting for vacation. I could have been Chief Waiting Officer back then. Now, some days, I feel like we are co-founders/Presidents of Waiting at Bonfire.
Have I found some ways to cope? Yes and no. Must I find some ways to cope? Yes, definitely, because the waiting isn’t going away.
Keep reading to see where my waiting angst comes from (maybe you will relate?) and some of the many, healthy things I can do while waiting. Whether I choose to do any of them is my own problem.
Purpose-built to never wait
I spent my formative career years in the “move fast and break things” era of startups, which we have come to learn was neither healthy for employees nor all that beneficial to society. Old habits die hard, though, and I can see that my behavior still tilts toward moving fast whenever possible. A lot of good comes from this: work gets done, things get shipped, we learn quickly. But it also comes at the cost of deep thinking, consideration, and sometimes quality. When I was learning on the job 10 years ago, those thoughtful qualities were intentional casualties of moving fast. Everyone was okay with it. We were a workforce built to move fast.
One of the consequences of this mindset is an aversion to collaboration because involving other people tends to slow things down. It’s true what they say: you can move faster alone; it’s also true that you tend to move further, together.
The irony of early-stage startups is that you’re part of a team, but as a marketer, you’re often working by yourself. Young companies are notorious for under-resourcing marketing. Therefore, it’s easy to build habits of pace and efficiency when you’re the only one writing blog posts or crafting emails or making ads. What I found enjoyable about that work was the sense of ownership and creative control I had over my day-to-day activities. If only I could control everything forever!
Come to find out, those hyperfocused years of work took place in a bubble. Once I left the bubble—into management, into entrepreneurship—I lost control. Maybe I never really had it to begin with, maybe I only had the illusion of control. (After all, who was the one making the big-picture strategies I was always waiting on? Not me.)
What to do while you’re waiting
Waiting isn’t going away anytime soon, and I’ll never have the amount of tight control over my day-to-day that my brain desires. Rather than bemoan this fact, I am trying to embrace it. Here are a few ways that I try to make the most out of waiting, even if it’s not always what I want.
1 - Slow down. Take a break.
Many, many people would see the “problem” of waiting and think to themselves, “Great! I’ll just chill out and take it easy until the waiting is over. Hand me a magazine and iced coffee.”
I do not have to turn waiting into a productivity exercise. Imagine that!
A while back, we wrote about the problem with hurrying all the time and that there are real benefits (5 of them at least, we counted) to chilling out and taking it easy.
Creativity requires time.
Patience is a differentiator.
Urgency matters less than you think.
The goalposts will keep moving anyway.
You might hurry past something really great.
It’s amazing how often I try to convince myself that waiting is appropriate so long as I can justify it with something productive or performative. What if, instead of converting waiting into work, I used the lull as an opportunity to take a break? It should be no surprise that when it comes to rest vs. rally in times of stress, I default to rally. But sometimes lately I’ve given in to the allure of rest, of using waiting as an opportunity and a gift to reclaim the time I would have spent hustling in favor of time spent relaxing. Resting. Napping. Refilling.
2 - Prepare for what’s ahead.
At the risk of undoing my advice above to use waiting as an opportunity to rest, another way I deal with the waiting game is to, well, get to work. I use the extra time to get ready for what’s coming next.
In practical terms, this can mean putting together a handful of case studies for a series of outbound outreach I just completed for our new AEO offering. Or it could mean building a spreadsheet model to share with bankers in hopes that they say yes and want to hear more about our projects. Sometimes, the pre-planning is necessary because in my haste to move fast I end up getting ahead of myself, e.g. reaching out to people with a pitch I have yet to fully think through. Waiting saves my bacon, in those cases.
Waiting also gives me space to do some of the more experimental and creative work that I enjoy, the work that I tend to deprioritize when the demands of the business dominate my day. Having a few free hours while waiting for emails to arrive in my inbox can be just enough time to do some creative writing, to dream up new business ideas (it’s a compulsion, I’m afraid), to make connections with old friends, or to just sit there and think. It’s remarkable how little I think during a busy day!
3 - Get to know yourself better.
Why does waiting bother me so much? If you’ve made it this far, you know some of the reasons for why I built up such an intolerance for waiting and how I’m trying to reverse the trend. One of the best uses of time when I’m sitting around waiting for stuff to happen is understanding why it bothers me so much.
What’s so bad about waiting?
What does it say about me if I can’t have everything I want exactly when I want it?
What might it be like if I didn’t have control?
What if I never hear back from someone?
How much am I actually waiting vs. how much am I just making an excuse to put things off?
And on and on and on.
Posing these questions helps me better unpack my relationship to waiting, which tends to lead to my relationship to a lot of other things: control (clearly), achievement, success, freedom, and—gulp—mortality. I can get pretty deep! When life is coming at me at 100 miles per hour, there’s very little time to do deep reflection like this. Waiting gives me time to think and it gives me an impetus. I might hate it in the moment, but I’m grateful for it in the big picture.
What’s your relationship like with waiting?
Do you love it for the time and space it gives you? Do you reluctantly embrace it because you, well, have to sometimes? It’d be great to hear from you.
A 5-day retreat in the French countryside to kill your creative procrastination, once and for all.
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