Steve Andreas > Books Authored > Six Blind Elephants > Chapter 7

Introduction

�What would you like people to say about you at your funeral?�
�LOOK, he�s MOVING!!!�

In the joke above, the scope of your attention changes from thinking about what you would like others to remember about you in the past, to what you would like them to notice about you in the present�indicating that you are still alive, an example of how a change in scope can change categorization. Once family therapist Jay Haley was actually asked a similar question in an interview, �How would you like to be remembered?� and Haley answered, �I�d like to be remembered as the oldest living teacher of psychotherapy.�

Perceptual scope can be changed by making it larger, smaller, overlapping, or different. This is what has sometimes been called a change in �frame size� in the NLP reframing patterns. This can be done with either space, or time, or both. When the scope of an experience changes, the amount and kind of information that we attend to changes. This often results in a change in the criteria that we apply to it. Any change in information and/or criteria changes the way we categorize it and respond to it.

The simplest way to change your response in a problem situation is to change the scope, and find out if it results in a useful change in categorization and response. You can attend to more of it, less of it, or to different parts of it, in either time or space. This is a pure process intervention, because when someone changes scope alone, any change in categorization arises entirely out of their own experience.

For instance, imagine that you are in a small space, with nothing else nearby, and notice your feeling in response to this.

If you expand the scope of what you see, you might notice familiar surroundings, family and friends.

This larger scope will probably change your response, because there is more content to respond to. In this example, both the amount of information and the kind of information changes as you increase the scope.

When someone is narrowly focused on a nasty argument with their spouse, they may feel bad, and decide that they need to divorce. When they expand their scope in space and time to include all the other more positive aspects of their relationship, they can gain what is often called the �big picture,� or �a new perspective,� and be capable of a much more balanced and useful response. That is usually a much better starting point for examining a disagreement and begin problem-solving to discover how to resolve differences.

Again imagine that you are in a small space with nothing else nearby....

This time, as you expand the scope of what you see, continue to see the same kind of empty surroundings....

As you make that scope of what you see larger, your feelings will probably change. You may begin to experience a feeling of isolation or loneliness�like being in the middle of the barren Sahara desert. When the kind of information doesn�t change, but the amount of information changes, that change in quantity may result in reaching a threshold that shifts the quality of your response to it.

The word �enough� always indicates when a criterion reaches a threshold of quantity��large enough,� �long enough,� �pleasant enough,� etc. So even when a change in scope doesn�t change the content or the criteria, a sufficient change in quantity alone can result in a change in categorization and response.

For instance, when you eat a small amount of a favorite dessert, it probably tastes exquisite. If you eat substantially more, it probably doesn�t taste quite as good. And if you really stuff yourself with it, it would eventually begin to taste disgusting.

People who are troubled by binge eating tend to resist their favorite foods by dieting and controlling what they eat, with the result that the favorite foods become even more attractive and tempting. Then they binge, and eat so fast that they can�t really taste and enjoy what they are eating, and then return to their diets. This extreme oscillation ruins the normal feedback that signals us to stop eating when we have had enough.