The way you think about time can transform your reality. That’s essentially the claim of a book I’ve been avidly reading this weekend, The Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd.

It’s one of those books that draws you in and keeps you turning the pages. While all about were up to their necks in pre-Christmas preparation, I was immersed in the joy of learning something new.

In the authors’ terms, I was adopting a “present-hedonistic” time perspective, while the scurrying shoppers were taking a “future” perspective.

If I’d spent my time on the phone to my birth family, reminiscing about the good old days, I’d be in “past-positive”; ruminating on how I’d messed up, “past-negative”; meditating and praying for salvation after death, “transcendental-future”; or gritting my teeth for inevitable trouble, “present-fatalistic”.

(By the way, Zimbardo is the chap who supervised the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. He’s no lightweight – but the book is an easy read.)

In NLP terms, these time perspectives would probably be equivalent to meta-programs: people can have the flexibility to adopt any of these perspectives, but tend to have strong habitual preferences. Those preferences will profoundly affect the way you behave and your overall life outcomes – for example strong “futures” can run their health into the ground with constant striving to achieve, while a “present-hedonistic” perspective is associated with drug and alcohol abuse.

But as with the other metaphors that underpin your thoughts, you’ll typically be completely unaware of your own time perspective preferences. They’ll appear to be “just how life is”.

Becoming aware is the next step: there’s a survey you can do to test out your preferences, here.

And once you’re aware, the next step is to enjoy becoming more flexible.

So I’m now experimenting with building my time-perspective flexibility, using some of the tricks in the book. I’m relatively low on “past-positive”, so I’m making a conscious effort to practice thinking about good times in the past. I’ll aim to enjoy the Christmas visiting while practising “present-hedonistic” mode. And when it comes to making big plans for 2012, “future” will come into play.

And of course, I’m reflecting on how this understanding should influence my professional practice as a coach. The question “What would you like to have happen?” naturally invites a future perspective: completely appropriate if coaching is about achieving goals. But is there anything else?