Chapter 13: Travelling in Time to Improve Your Life................................................
People view time differently: some are rooted in the past, others gaze firmly
into the future, and some live in the moment. Research by Professor Philip
Zimbardo shows that how you perceive time is pretty much unconscious and
yet can have a significant influence on your behaviour. Understanding whether
your own focus is on the past, present, or future, and getting the balance right,
can have a dramatic effect on your levels of happiness and success. (Check out
Chapter 8 to discover how to spot someone’s perception of time.)
If we ask you to define what you’re made up of, you may say ‘sugar and spice
and all things nice’ or ‘hair, skin, and blood’. But of course the whole person
that makes up ‘you’ is much more than your component parts. The term
for this reality is Gestalt. A Gestalt is a structure, or pattern, which can’t be
derived purely from its constituent parts. So, when thinking about you, some-
one’s mind makes the leap from your components to the whole you.
Your memories are arranged in a Gestalt. Associated memories form a
Gestalt, although the formation of a Gestalt may start when you experience
an event that first triggers an emotional response: a Significant Emotional
Event, or SEE for short. The SEE is also referred to as the root cause. If you
experience a similar event and have a similar emotional response, you link
the two events. This process continues and suddenly you have a chain.
One of psychology’s founding fathers, William James, likened memories to a
string of pearls, in which each related memory is linked along a string to the
one before and to the one after. During any work with your time line, if you
snip the string before the first occurrence, the Gestalt is broken (as the illus-
tration in Figure 13-1 shows).
Figure 13-1:
A memory
Gestalt.
Discovering Your Time Line
Memories are arranged in a pattern. If we ask you to point to the direction
from which a past memory came, where would you point? Similarly, if you
were to point to something you’re going to do in the future, notice where
you’re pointing now. Can you also point to where your present is? If you draw
a line between the memory from the past, the one in the present, and the one
in the future, you’ve created your very own time line.
