HAVING FUN WITH METAPHORS

“The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities.

Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of his creatures when he made him.” Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Metaphors verge on magic because you are using one thing—something you know pretty well to stand for and represent a way to understand something else. When you think and speak metaphorically, you wave a magic wand as it were over one thing so that now you see it through the lens of another thing. It’s like magic.

#1: “With all the work I have to do, I’m struggling just to keep my head above the water.” #2: “So how long have you been dog paddling? If you’re tired of treading water, take my hand and I’ll pull you into the boat.”

As you are now playing with the metaphor, both of you can have fun as you expose the metaphor and play around identifying a more empowering metaphor. Of course, to have fun with metaphors, you have to first sensitize your ears so that you can hear them and recognize them. That’s probably the biggest challenge since thinking and speaking in metaphors occurs mostly at an unconscious level. I recall reading that someone once told Tony Robbins that he was “carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.” Tony’s reply was, “Why don’t you set the world down and move on.”

Amazingly, metaphors are often used in complaining about problems. When we have problems that we don’t fully understand and that we don’t know how to solve, we so often revert to metaphors.

Once you have tuned your ears to detect metaphors, the critical question to answer is, “What is being compared to what?” In “I’m drowning in paperwork” — the target subject is paperwork and the source domain you are using to understand it is drowning. That evokes a picture of lots and lots of paperwork, papers so high that you are trying to swim but cannot but you are doing down under it all where you won’t be able to breathe. Now we’re ready to play with the metaphor. You might look at a wastebasket and say, “There’s your life vest!” “Or maybe it is a drain ... you could use it to drain the pool.”

“All he ever offers me are half backed ideas.” “Great! Now you know how to solve the problem. Give him some time off so he can more thoroughly bake his thoughts.” If he complains that that will not work, then be ever-so-much-more playful. “Maybe he doesn’t have enough heat in the oven of his mind. What could you do so as to encourage him to increase the heat?” Or, “Do you think that he has a big enough oven to bake his thoughts? Maybe he needs to expand the oven so he can put some fully grown up ideas into it.”

“I just feel like withdrawing into my shell and never coming out again.” Sometimes what you’ll want to do first is a pattern interrupt— something that jars the person awake, something that surprises the person so that she becomes fully conscious to what she just said. “Is the shell nicely decorated on the inside?” “Why don’t we all come over and have a party inside your shell?”

When you meta-state with a metaphor, you bring something known and set it over what is less well-known or something that’s problematic and in doing that, the metaphor becomes a frame. Then along with it comes various implications, beliefs, and assumptions. Because of this structure, metaphors can do a lot more to you and within you than you might ever suspect. And sometimes, just sometimes, a single metaphor can completely revolutionize your life. If you don’t believe me, take the blue pill and believe whatever you want to believe. Take the red pill and you can begin to discover how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Dr. Carl Lloyd, a close friend of mine wrote this example of playing with metaphors. “I told him one day, "Tex, I feel like I have let God down." Without even a blink, he replied, "Carl, you can't let God down because you don't hold Him up!"