On Timing and Timeliness

These are two very different things. Well, no, let me take that back. Timing and timeliness are words that describe the same thing. The difference comes from our perspective. The uniqueness comes from how we understand something’s timing or timeliness. In just a few short words, I hope this turns the wheels in your head and challenges you to stretch your current stage of cognitive development.

How you understand and value timing or, hopefully, timeliness, will depend on your consciousness. Our minds, like our muscles, can grow and do amazing things. Bigger, more capable minds have frames that understand complexity. Smaller, less evolved minds only grasp that which falls in simpler frames. Timing is simple, while timeliness is more complex.

Consider the value of timing. When we value timing, we value very pragmatic decision-making. Viewing the timing of our position is deterministic thinking. After all, timing is something that happens to you. Consider the evaluation of the decision to buy a house on the gang ridden Venice Beach thoroughfare called Abbot Kinney Boulevard in 1981. In that frame, there would have been a socialized understanding (which is characteristic of earlier state consciousness) that it was bad timing to be on the corner of Abbot Kinney and California. Later, having such a home on what has since become the most desirable address in Los Angeles one might propose what great timing the purchaser had in their choice for home ownership.

Timeliness, on the other hand, challenges the socialized context of timing. Timeliness adds control. It’s self-authoring (which is characteristic of later stage consciousness). Timeliness could have said 1981 was an opportunity. Where timing is helpless, timeliness allows us to help others and ourselves. Those who believe in timing seek and defend a position with confirming information. This fixed, simple frame view only has so much latitude. Those who embrace timeliness seek disconfirming information (the current housing market has upside), see mutuality (this house in 1981 is both good and bad news), and is self-authoring (time is happening to me, but I have a say in what emerges).

Are you subject to timing like a helpless observer, or are you interested in what emerges from the timeliness in your life?

 

Logan Gelbrich

@functionalcoach