Anglo-European Time vs. Arabic Time

Time is such a central concept in most cultures. But did you know that there are two different kinds of time? And that the type of time you experience will drastically impact upon your personality? It determines whether you run early or late to appointments, how you linguistically talk about time and your type of time has an interestingly high correlation between whether you have a judging or perceiving personality trait! It seems that there are essentially two different ways of storing time in the human mind:

Arabic Time

Arabic Time is most common in areas such as the Middle East, India, the South Pacific, Caribbean and Africa. This notion of time suggests that time is what is happening now. They don’t strongly grasp the concept of appointments and if you run late (or early) that is okay. They won’t tend to notice if they are running late or mind at all if you arrive much later than arranged. If you are trying to find out when something will be done then watch out for the word ‘tomorrow’. Tomorrow for people running on Arabic Time means anytime in the future beyond tonight’s sunset up until months from now. They’ll get there, just don’t expect it done within 48 hours or you’ll be likely to be disappointed.

If we had an appointment with someone running on Arabic Time for 10AM on Thursday you shouldn’t be surprised if they turned up 30 minutes or an hour late. They are likely to walk in without a worry on their face about being late and stay with you as long as it takes to complete the task, regardless of how long was scheduled for the meeting.

Anglo-European Time

Anglo-European Time is a gift created by the Industrial Revolution. The problem that the Industrial Revolution faced is that to run a production line in a factory you need everybody in position at the same time. If somebody is running 30 minutes late it throws the production line into disarray. Not only does Anglo-European Time extremely value punctuality, it also values things done in a linear fashion, one after the other.

If we had an appointment with someone running on Anglo-European Time for 10AM on Thursday you would be expected to be 5 minutes early. You shouldn’t be surprised if they are phoning you to find out where you are if you are running 5 minutes late without letting them know. Expect them to be very judgmental of you if you run late. Interestingly, if a meeting is scheduled for an hour expect the meeting to conclude an hour after it was scheduled to start, regardless of whether you finished what you were meeting about or not.

How does this apply to Time Line Therapy?

One of the first processes in Time Line Therapy is the process of eliciting your Time Line. There is a strong correlation between Through Time people, who have a Time Line that does not pass through their body, running on Anglo-European Time. It is also very likely that an In Time person will run on Arabic Time and have a Time Line that does pass through their body.

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