In the first pillar of the UNREDUCED framework, we explored the importance of naming the constraint. We looked at the difference between the circumstances we’re living in and the constraints we sometimes create around those circumstances. We explored how easily effort can become directed toward the wrong enemy, how stories form around our situations, and how we negotiate with ourselves to avoid fully naming what’s true.
Once the constraint has been named – however imperfectly – we’re able to move into the second pillar, Expand the Field.
The pressure we feel from our circumstances tends to narrow our perception to what is of immediate importance. Our thoughts and actions center around the urgent, the painful, the demanding, and the unresolved. Because of that, what we see around us shrinks, and possibilities that may still exist become difficult to perceive because they’re outside this tight range of attention. When we’re under strain, we often begin to assume that what we can currently see is all that there is, and the range of options that appears available becomes the range we believe actually exists.
Expanding the Field begins with questioning that assumption. It’s the discipline of widening perception again; the practice of deliberately noticing what remains available and what remains possible, even when circumstances are difficult. It asks us to resist allowing the limitation, the circumstance, or even the constraint itself to become the only thing we can see. And once we have separated the constraint from the circumstance, we gain the ability to revisit what still exists around us. We begin looking again at possibilities that may have disappeared from view, but were never really gone.
For me, this realization arrived in an unexpected way. My circumstance was caregiving. I was caring for my mother while working full-time and doing so almost entirely on my own. Like many caregivers, I had become accustomed to organizing my life around what needed to be done. The responsibilities and demands were real, and over time, I had come to believe that those demands defined the boundaries of my life. Eventually, I decided to hire a companion to sit with my mother for a few hours each week. It wasn’t a dramatic change; it was three hours. Three hours a week.
Looking back, what surprises me is not what I did with those three hours. It’s what those three hours did to my perception. The ability to step outside the house, to wander through places close to home, to notice what existed within reach of the life I was already living, revealed something I hadn’t understood before. I had spent years looking at travel - which was once a huge part of my life - as the thing I couldn’t do anymore. As someone who loves exploring new places, I had focused almost entirely on the opportunities that were unavailable to me. What those few hours a week revealed was everything I had stopped noticing.
I began paying attention to what existed in my immediate surroundings, noticing beauty in places I had previously overlooked. I began recognizing that there were other people whose worlds had also become smaller and that perhaps there was a way to create something for them. That realization eventually became a YouTube channel. The first YouTube channel led to a second one. That creative process led to writing essays. The essay-writing led to publishing children’s books. The books led to entirely new creative projects that I never would have anticipated. None of those things existed in my field of view before those three hours appeared.
What matters about that story is not the specific outcome. The point is not that everyone should start a YouTube channel or publish books. The point is that those possibilities were there all along, but none of them became visible until my perception widened enough to see them. My circumstances didn’t change. What changed was what appeared possible within them. And that realization is what sits at the center of this pillar.
The assumption that keeps many of us stuck is that the range of options we currently see is the actual range. We assume that because something feels settled, decided, or inevitable, it truly is. We become so focused on what is immediately demanding our attention that other possibilities become harder to recognize and what we can see begins to feel like all there is; possibilities that still exist become invisible because we stopped looking for them.
Expanding the field doesn’t require us to pretend our circumstances are different than they are, nor does it ask us to ignore limitations or invent opportunities that don’t exist. It simply asks us to look again. To question whether the boundaries we’re experiencing are really the boundaries at all, whether what appears complete is actually complete, and whether there may be more available than we can currently see.
If we never expand the field, the same options continue to appear inevitable, the same decisions repeat themselves, and the same patterns are reinforced. What begins as a temporary response to our circumstances can gradually become the lens through which we view our entire lives. The danger is not simply that life becomes constrained; it’s that we begin to mistake the limits of our perception for the limits of what is possible.
Expand the Field is the practice of refusing that mistake. It begins the moment we realize that what feels settled may not actually be settled, and that the boundary we are experiencing may not be the boundary at all.
So my question for you is this:
What in your life feels decided or inevitable... but may simply be the edge of what you’re allowing yourself to see?
Published 11 June 2026 - UNREDUCED™ Pillar Two