What is your relationship to time?

What is your individual relationship to time? I’m not referring to how much you live in the present or whether you are running from your past, I’m talking about the relationship we each have with the clock. On the spectrum of early to late arrivals, are you someone that likes to arrive way before the agreed time for any event and in fact finds it nigh on impossible to be late or are you that person that is routinely unpunctual? Of course there are those who are somewhere in between but not many it seems. As a rule, we don’t look kindly at those in opposing camps. Late arrivals are seen as lazy and disrespectful by time keeping individuals who themselves are viewed as being unfathomably well organised or irritating clock watchers by less timely individuals.

During a Myers’s Briggs session, I remember experiencing a lightbulb moment whilst focusing on an exercise connected with judging and perceiving and realising that many, of the few, disagreements that my husband and I had were around how we organised our time - we were (at that time) polar opposites. I am extremely diary led whereas Dave, my husband, likes to leave time open and hates me booking him in for anything. You can see where this causes marital disruption.

A coaching client recently mentioned his ‘difficulty with time’ and went on to describe the challenges this was causing him in his working life. It struck a chord as I have always felt a prevalent unease with time. The default me often experiences the present as if it is standing still. I’ll check the time, start doing something but presume the time is the same even though when I think about it, I have been involved in stuff so time must have moved on. In contrast to this, my own internal clock seems to be alive and kicking, often waking up just before my alarm and finding myself quite capable of accurately predicting a measure of time, for example the three minutes it takes for my tea to brew (it’s a family thing!) or what time it is before looking at any clock. So I don’t suspect any serious brain damage has taken place (touch wood!). Due to my maturing years and tonnes of practise, I’ve managed to get on top of arriving on time although it still doesn’t feel natural. Although, often early, I’m guaranteed on the journey getting there to have done some sprinting with continual checking of the clock to make sure I haven’t reverted to the ‘real me’, where time plays no part.

The strangest thing is that running parallel to my fight with time is another alternative push pull with the ticking clock - time allocation. In fact, I have two Suzannes, one that meticulously carves out minutes, hours to fit in all the many tasks that need doing and the other that wants none of it. Both have uses and both slightly bicker with each other. On holiday, I’m either packing in as many crazy, wonderful experiences in whatever location we happen to be in or I just want to wake up at no given time, read books and do nothing except walk to the nearest stretch of water or cocktail server.

I asked my husband the other day how he ‘saw’ time (careless, as I think he’s more auditory than visual!). He said he liked to, ‘put it down’ at times and abandon himself to some very definite timeless ‘play’ - escaping into the post apocalyptic world of Fallout/playing tennis etc. But his description of time when he needed to really get down to working was about ‘grabbing or dominating it’. My mind/body connection to time is like a child being dragged along, no direct influence or control of how it all plays out. It rules me.

Cultural attitudes to time are well documented. Factors such as weather, age of culture, industrialisation, population size and whether a culture focuses more on the individual or the collective play a huge part in their differing approaches to time. Countries such as the US, Germany, Switzerland and the UK seem to largely view time as linear, or sequential. Time is a commodity - it can be saved, spent or wasted so adherence to timeliness is paramount. In contrast, places like China, Thailand, Brazil and Spain tend to treat time as more flexible and cyclical. The completion of the task or multitasks at hand are more important than when they start or finish. This is a massive generalisation of course and the problem here is that by lumping demographics together we risk properly identifying other distinct influences. Those from our individual histories - our formative years family, friends, and workplace and how they compliment or further complicate our navigation of the 24 hour clock.

Current understanding of how our brains perceive and operate with time is still fairly limited. Different parts of the brain are involved as are the neurotransmitters dopamine and adrenaline but the full extent is not yet known. Some research points towards us having individual internal clocks distinct from our biological or circadian clocks - work that one out.

Our sense of time is not only potentially a heady mix of nature and nurture but also very individual. How it plays out in our lives is important to our relationships and all that we do. By giving this area the focus and investigation it deserves we can help our clients navigate transformational learning.

So what can you learn from all this? Firstly, to understand what your own sense and individual relationship to time is. It’s useful (and rather fun) to expand this area of self awareness. Most of us literally live and die by the clock so this is a relevant topic to address in our client journeys. I’ve every confidence that they will have a view on it in relation to themselves and those that they work, live or are friends with. Our partnership with time forms a central component of our modus operandi, so it’s about time we gave it some focus.

If you’re stuck about where to start, here are 10 sample questions to get you going.

• How do you operate with time in your daily life/on holiday?

• How (if at all) do you visualise/hear days/months? Describe what you see/hear? Not yet heard of anyone who tastes or smells the past, present or future but that could be down to my lack of experience.

• What physical reactions do you have to time? (Describe where they take place in the body?)

• How do you organise projects and tasks in relation to time?

• How do you work with routine?

• What feedback have you had about you and your timekeeping?

• How similar are your loved ones in how they work with time? (How does that affect you?)

• What are your earliest memories in relation to timekeeping?

• What would you change about yourself and the way you operate regarding the clock? Talk more about that.

• What do you notice whilst talking about this?