210 Part III: Opening the Toolkit
When Kate worked in Zurich, a city in which you can set your watch by the
trains running precisely on time, she had some fascinating conversations with
a Swiss colleague who had married a Nigerian man. The marriage ended in
divorce and one of the reasons cited was that husband and wife had very dif-
ferent attitudes to time:
When we lived in Africa, we’d make arrangements to visit somebody or to
do something at a particular time, and then on the way we may bump into
somebody else. Our detour could take days while we went off to another
village or waited for another relative to appear. I could never rely on my
husband to keep to commitments and he couldn’t understand my haste. It
was infuriating for both of us.
Time also gives your memories meaning. With NLP techniques, you can
switch the meaning you give to a memory by changing the quality of the
memory as well as its relationship to time. In this chapter, we explore how
employing time-line techniques enables you to work with time and memories
to your advantage, including the ability to release yourself from negative
emotions and limiting decisions. These tools give you the means to create
the future you would rather have, without the influence of disempowering
past memories.
Understanding How Your Memories Are Organised
Think of something you do on a regular basis, such as reading a book, driv-
ing to a shop, working at your desk, eating in a restaurant, or brushing your
teeth. The event needs to be something that you can remember doing in the
past, imagine or experience doing in the present, and also imagine doing in the
future. As you access the memory or use your imagination, you code it with
sensory data such as sounds, pictures, or feelings. When you access an image
of the past, for example, you may also notice a difference in the quality of the
pictures, to do with brightness, colour, movement, two or three dimensions,
and so on. These qualities, or attributes, are called submodalities (you can
read more about them in Chapters 6 and 10).
By going into the past to examine a memory and then into the future – via
a pitstop in the present – you have experienced a little ‘land-based’ time
travel. (You can experience the airborne variety a little later in the section
‘Discovering Your Time Line’.)
We ask you to consider these attributes in order to help you realise that a
structure exists to your memories. You instinctively know whether a memory
is in the past or whether you’re creating an experience in your imagination.
