Are you in a time warp?

In his book, Negotiating the Nonnegotiable, author and negotiation specialist Daniel Shapiro identifies one obstacle to negotiation as falling into a time warp. It’s when you get so involved in the conversation that you lose all sense of time and place. The example he cites was a couple that was killing time before an event who ended up in an argument which repeated all the issues this couple had had in their long relationship and made them late for their dinner date.

He describes this as a trancelike state.

The steps he has identified to help overcome this trancelike state are:

1.       Recognize when it is happening

2.       Jolt yourself out of it

3.       Reorient yourself in terms of time or space

4.       Develop a new strategy to bring up distressing emotions.

I think about an argument that I had with my significant other where we went back and forth, just repeating the same things over and over again.  I had lost track of time, and I wish I had realized it in time and jolted myself out it.

My commitment to myself is to try to become aware of when I lose track of time and space and jolt myself out of it. I am still struggling with identifying emotions, so this will be a challenge for me.