How are you feeling today? Like a coiled spring? A cat on a hot tin roof? Slightly off kilter? A sack of potatoes? Down in the dumps? Whatever it is, you’re feeling it in your body, experiencing it as an emotion and articulating it in the form of a metaphor.
Artists and creative thinkers throughout the ages have used metaphor to inspire them. As Michael Michalko says in his recent post for Psychology Today, for Picasso, the letter 4 always had a nose; and Einstein visualised himself riding on a beam of light holding a mirror in front of him when coming up with his theory of relativity.
As Michalko adds, metaphors influence our thinking every day – especially those metaphors created by television, advertising and other media. There are metaphors that we accept and live by, sometimes without even realising it. Try these for financial metaphors for size:
Credit crunch
Fat cats
Masters of the universe
“We are in a recession”
How has accepting these media-created metaphors affected your spending? Your attitude to money and success? Your perception of hardship? Your ability to plan ahead?
It’s food for thought. Which is another metaphor, of course.
I’ve been a journalist of one sort or another for 30 years, and I’ve been responsible for creating or perpetuating my fair share of metaphors (some of them mixed). One of them was the New Romantics – but that’s another story.
Metaphors can be used as resources, though. If a client uses a powerful metaphor in a session I will run with it (metaphorically speaking). One client came to me with several issues, most of which revolved around excessive busyness. She came up with her own metaphor for her desired state, which was to be gently floating downstream.
We developed and explored this metaphor together and she was able to get a lot of useful information from it. Afterwards she told me how liberating it was to allow herself to “bob around on the water”.
It’s worth taking the time to spot the metaphors we constantly use, buy into and live by. I’ve just seen two advertisements on the Tube that use metaphors: “When you’re climbing the career ladder, make sure it’s against the right wall’; and “Make sure you have the right people beside you through every twist and turn”.
Metaphors are inside us and all around us. Use them wisely!
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