Neuro Linguistic Programming

(Wang) #1

Chapter 13


Travelling in Time to


Improve Your Life


In This Chapter


▶ Understanding your time line


▶ Releasing the hold that negative emotions have on you


▶ Changing beliefs by going back along your time line


▶ Discovering how you organise time


▶ Creating your future along your time line


Time is a core system of cultural, social and personal life. In fact, nothing
occurs except in some kind of time frame.

—The Dance of Life (Edward T Hall, Anchor, 1984)

T


ime displays a strange, elastic quality: it goes fast when you’re engaged
in something interesting and stretches when you allow yourself to get
bored. Are you one of the time-rich people who has all the time in the world,
or are you time poor and always short of time? Perhaps having time, like
money, depends on where you focus your attention. Although day and night
for the rich, poor, young, and old always lasts 24 hours, the perception of
time is different. Some people are stuck in the past, others have their gaze
firmly staring into the future, and some people just live in the moment.

The ‘American–European’ perception of time is a result of the Industrial
Revolution, when people had to be at work in the factories at a specific time.
This idea of time has a linear format, in which one event or transaction fol-
lows another. The concept of time in Latin America, Africa, Arabic countries,
and some countries in the Southern hemisphere, has a multi-dimensional
structure, allowing people to operate much more ‘in the moment’. Each idea
of time contains strengths and weaknesses as well as the potential to cause
conflict in cross-cultural exchanges and working.
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