Seeing Time

LIFE LEADERSHIP DIGEST – Article by Steve Trivett – 23/08/2019

We have a sense of time passing and an awareness of life happening in-the-moment. Thoughts and emotions come and go in an instant, but we hold on to what matters to us as memories – positive and negative.  The brain records them as mini-movies, enabling us to relive them in great detail, depending on what we can recall and embellish to make them appear coherent and less embarrassing. It will be your version based on where you placed your attention and your ability to make distinctions at the time.  Others will see events differently, depending on where their attention was placed and the distinctions they could make. Time passes as we perceive the events we associate with it.

It will be your version based on where you placed your attention and your ability to make distinctions at the time.  Others will see events differently depending on where their attention was placed and the distinctions they could make. Time passes as we perceive the events we associate with it. For example, painful events often appear to be longer-lasting and have more detail.

Creating stories

It’s our capacity to use language and create stories that enable us to make sense of time passing and the sequencing of events.

Our culture and our language embeds our consciousness in the ‘clock time’ and can blind us to the importance of ‘human time’ when we seek to make sense of things in a particular context.  The “arrow of time” takes us relentlessly to an imagined future that puts us in place and time. We can then relate and assert our experiences (creating a concept of past) and connect them declarations of our hopes and plans (creating a concept of future). We have two life movies running in our heads.  One movie of things that have happened and the other about events still to come. How they are perceived greatly influences the life you live in each moment.

Living in-the-moment

We modify our “movies” by changing the meaning they hold for us. The past flows with us like thinking aid with all its emotional baggage. It influences what we can accept as fact and what possibilities are open to us to live the life we want. Consequently, the future is not really ‘out there’ as we create it in the conversations we have with ourselves and others.

Clock time then is an important backdrop for human time. For example, spreadsheets enable us to structure our thoughts and actions as we can see the patterns that cause us to imagine and anticipate what could happen in the future to feel satisfied with when we get.  We create our worldview “inside” us to make sense of what happens “outside” us. All our assessments are made in the present by combining past assertions and declarations for our desired future.

We perceive a context and express it in a very personal way. Our thoughts give birth to new possibilities, new patterns or new ways of seeing the same things in a different context. When we see a situation we created we may be inspired or depressed, depending on whether it matches our sense of self (our inside-out perspective), what society expects or values in us (our outside-in perspective), a vision of what is required (our top-down perspective) or the relationships we seek to maintain (our bottom-up perspective).

What’s more, we observe the impact of the process and the value of the outcome (our inside-out perspective). This is really self-dialogue with ourselves in a given context. When applied to a context, it can be transformative — becoming something we see as a desirable future context. Life is also reflective and defines how we have interpreted our past context.

In today’s workplace, time is of major importance when judging reliability and performance.  Increasingly stress is being generated from tighter deadlines and unrealistic targets. Time seems to get fewer when resources are in short supply. It is ‘human time’ that creates a separation between expectation and delivery. Past and future are integral to the present context. In ‘clock time’ the past is left behind and the future has not yet arrived. The spreadsheet mind creates a context as if it were a line of discrete events.

How do you see time?

There is a tendency for people to fall into two broad groups. One group thinks of the past as behind them somewhere. They see the future either straight ahead or in front of them. Those people see events through their own eyes and experience the past and present as now.  Being in the moment is important them and looking objectively at their past or planning for the future doesn’t come easily to them. This can change when the context changes and detailed plans are needed.

The other group see time as a line running across in front of them, sometimes straight or as a curve.  They often use their hands from side to side as they explain how events flow in front of them. They make better managers of time, better able to monitor progress, but they may overlook what is actually happening now. In this video, Hinze Hogend explains how the brain uses past experience and future predictions to create a coherent sense of being in this moment. This “being” includes our language, emotions and the body’s senses and movements.

Below is a diagram that gives you an idea of what the brain is doing in milliseconds when it constructs an emotional response that also serves as a prediction. The emotion you are displaying at this moment is constructed from a myriad of observations and different intentions that have become embedded in your nervous system as your worldview and is shapes your Way of Being in the world.

Fascinatingly, the memory changes over time as the images we associate with an emotion change. They can fade and lose their relevance.  We can also develop habits that become “hard-wired” that we embed and find very difficult to break out of. They generate compulsive behaviour that gets reinforced by how we interpret and cope in a specific context. One way is to revisit the event and question the thinking that’s triggering the emotion. That is, to reframe and see the event differently to change the prediction the brain makes next time to produce a new way of being and becoming.

The past is gone and the future is yet to arrive

We know tomorrow never comes and the future can only be anticipated by taking actions today—which changes things tomorrow (which of course is today). Our tomorrow is what we do now. Likewise, the actions we took yesterday (which of course feels like it’s happening now, but isn’t) will mean the present that we are living in now makes our contribution to tomorrow (which becomes today). We can envision a future state for ourselves if we can shake off old ways of thinking.

Ontological approaches work because they focus on changing the language, thoughts and body states that have stopped working for us ‘today ‘with new ones that can work for us ‘today’.  What we do today shapes what we can do the next time the same event or experience arrives. To be effective, we need to  “be” a leader in any context.  Knowing about leadership is not enough because it doesn’t have previous experience of being in time to act in. For example, if you know how you will react to anger in a constructive way, the outcome will serve your intention.

All parts of us have to work as an integrated whole to deliver an authentic, balanced performance.  It’s similar to the relationships between a producer, director, scriptwriter and actor in a movie. They engage to collaborate and negotiate their different perspectives. By restructuring the way we see the context we find ourselves in, we adapt in-the-moment to make sense of our capacity to get actions that get a result we are happy with – even if it’s a compromise.  

We can create what we can imagine (from the inside-out) in a given context (that comes at us from the outside-in), in association with others (collaborating from the bottom-up) towards the desired vision of what is possible (viewed from the top-down). This is the nature of dynamic change where these different sources combine to produce the story for a new life movie.

What’s important?

For example, the Brexit decision facing the UK in 2017 was causing chaos because there was no shared vision that everyone felt they could have a stake in. The assumption is that what people care about is the choice made at a particular point in time. But the context has changed and timescales are getting shorter.  One side has a plan for going forward into the future, whereas the other side is focusing on what is happening in-the-moment. They see time differently and this determines the language used, the mood state adopted and the way they behave towards each other.

References

Timeline Therapy by Tad James.

Fifth Generation Management by Charles Savage.