Do you make ‘mountains out of molehills’, or are problems just ‘a drop in the ocean’? How you proportion your perceptions is fundamental to the structure of your subjective experience. Your map may not be the territory, but if it’s to be of much use you’d better know its scale. This article is about the nature of scale, how to begin modeling it, and what happens when you change the scale of things to come.

“How big is it? How long does it last? These are the most basic questions a scientist can ask about a thing. They are so basic to the way people conceptualize the world that it is not easy to see that they imply a certain bias. They suggest that size and duration, qualities that depend on scale, are qualities with meaning, qualities that can help describe an object or classify it. … Scale is important.”

James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (p. 107)

When Scale is the Problem

We first heard about the psychology of scaling several years ago during a David Grove workshop. David talked about the “inappropriate scaling” of a perception. He noticed that client’s metaphors sometimes presuppose an out-of-proportion-ness, often between the perceiver and what they are perceiving. A classic example is: “I’m overwhelmed.” When the client examines their perception they usually report that the symbol representing them is small relative to what is overwhelming. When asked “And that’s overwhelmed like what?” they reply with “a huge wave knocking me over,” or “being buried under a mass of paper,” or “thousands of arrows coming straight at my heart.” Other common examples of metaphors that imply a problem of scale are:

Bighead

Over cooked

Out of proportion

Too big for his boots

Eyes too big for my belly

I bit off more then I can chew

An old head on young shoulders

Making a mountain out of a molehill

The bigger they are the harder they fall

Weight of the world on my shoulders

You’ll never amount to anything

It’s bigger than the both of us

Diminished responsibility

Big fish in a small pond

A drop in the ocean

In over her head

Under valued

Tracing the source of an inappropriately scaled perception may sometimes lead to a traumatic event. The radical psychiatrist and author of The Divided Self, R. D. Laing, described how he avoided feeling the pain of being beaten by his father by imagining his mind was a tiny point outside his body.

Scaling events in a particular way will have been useful and adaptive at the time — the system made the best choice it could — but this may result in unwanted consequences in the long term. Fortunately we can learn to re-scale our perceptions so that we more appropriately perceive our interior and exterior worlds.

David Grove says that when an inappropriately proportioned perception becomes “life-size” relative to the age/size of the client, you know a significant change has taken place.

Definitions of Scale

According to Collins Dictionary, there are several interrelated meanings for the noun ‘scale’:

A sequence of marks either at regular intervals, or representing equal steps, used as a reference in making measurements; or a measuring instrument having such a scale.

The ratio between the size of something real and that of a representation of it; or a line or number for showing this ratio (e.g. the scale on a map).

An established standard; or a relative degree or extent.

Common to these definitions is the relative or referential nature of a scale. They enable us to rank or measure things by finding a comparable attribute or characteristic. A scale can be digital (discontinuous) or analogue (continuous) and usually has ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ thresholds or boundaries.

Scales can be classified by what they measure: Time (Duration, Frequency), Space (Distance, Area, Volume) and Form (Temperature, Brightness, Loudness, Hardness, Speed) as we shall see below.

Scales of Time

One of the most ubiquitous of all scales is time scale. We mistakenly tend to view ‘clock time’ as reality independent of human perception, forgetting that it was not until November 18, 1883 that the notion of a standard time was imposed by the railway companies of the USA, and that a global, uniform method of determining and maintaining accurate time signals was not instituted until 1912. After studying The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, Stephen Kern concluded:

The introduction of World Standard Time had an enormous impact on communication, industry, war, and the everyday life of the masses; but explorations of a plurality of private times were the more historically unique contributions of the period. The affirmation of private time radically interiorized the locus of experience. (p. 313)

The malleability of personal time is the basis of many NLP ‘timeline’ therapeutic techniques.

In his study of metaphors of time scale David Grove noticed that people often have a consistent unit of time which they use to identify certain classes of events — a personal “time signature”. In other words, there is a pattern to the way a person ‘punctuates’ (or ‘segments’ or ‘chunks’) time. Examples of how these units of time are revealed linguistically are:

It came to me a flash.

It was over in an instant.

A split second later it was gone.

Everything changed in the blink of an eye.

I got angry just like that [click of fingers].

In that moment everything became clear.

Give me a tick to think about it.

It happened in a heartbeat.

My whole life changed that day.

I was born between the wars.

I’ve had this problem for donkey’s years.

I’ve wanted it for aeons.

When expressions like these are explored with Clean Language they invariably prove to be containers of great significance for the client.

Scales of Space

The notion that things are located in space is fundamental to our perception of both the material and the imagined world. Locating anything anywhere requires the measurement of both distance and direction, and hence a scale. Below are just a few of the many metaphorical expressions which presuppose that the spatial scale of a perception is having a major effect on the meaning the speaker is making:

I’m out of my depth.

It’s a long, long road.

We’re being left behind.

There’s no turning back.

He’s too close for comfort.

I need more space to think.

Nothing can come between us.

Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.

This company is heading in the wrong direction.

One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.

Scales of Form

As soon as we notice that an attribute or characteristic can be used to compare things, we will have (consciously or otherwise) created a scale. This is true whether we have noticed something that is easily measured like height or weight, or something less easily compared, like happiness or artistic expression. Once we perceive differences on a continuum we have scaled them.

Scientists and engineers often invent devices to measure and quantify our subjective scaling: