Mining Your Metaphors

Change the metaphor, change the self.

How might a business coach use a client’s metaphors?

I’m a business and leadership coach. Can you give me an example of how using metaphors might help my clients?  H.W.    

Many business and life coaches use Clean Language to help their clients get clear on what they want and need, to explore consequences of possible actions, to work on personal issues that are impacting their work, to enhance their leadership skills, to plan for the future, and more!

To give you an example, I  had a client who runs a business. He wants to have his employees work together as an effective team, but two employees aren’t communicating.  Using metaphors and Clean Language questions, I facilitate his exploration of the situation. The client first discovers “knots around his middle”. Such in-the-body metaphors can pop up unexpectedly; what does this have to do with the employees?  More on that later.

My client’s next metaphor is that, as a leader, he is like a coach of a sports team, sharing values and goals with the team members. But further exploration reveals a fundamental problem: a sports coach is an expert in the sport. But this business man is not an expert in marketing or sales or human resources, etc.  He realizes this is the crux of his dilemma: how can he make decisions when he doesn’t have the expertise?

So I ask, “What kind of coach is a coach with an effective team when he’s not an expert?” Client’s answer: a film director.  A director has the overall vision and determines the direction ‘team members’ will take, but he’s not an expert in acting, lighting, sound, set design, etc.  Still, he makes the decisions, and he is free to be creative.  It turns out that creativity is an important part of this client’s vision that he hadn’t considered before the session. And this is not unusual—discovering a new dimension that linear, logical analysis might never have uncovered.

And so, after one session, my client has an empowering metaphor for his role in building an effective team.  And the knots? The client sees them as limiting creativity and possibilities, tied up as he was by his belief that he had to let the experts decide what to do in their respective areas.  But insight alone as to what they might be about is not enough, in this case, to remove the knots. The client senses they serve a purpose, too. More to explore in another session.


Lost and Found: An Artist’s Brain Revealed

I am intrigued by memory, how it is stored and how it is accessed, and what metaphors have to do with it all, so I was fascinated to attend a dual lecture given by researcher Mike McCloskey from the Cognitive Science Department at Johns Hopkins University and artist and mother Margaret Kennard Johnson in conjunction with an exhibit at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore featuring the recovery artwork of Lonni Sue Johnson.  A successful illustrator before an attack of encephalitis in 2007 left her with severe temporal lobe and frontal cortex damage, she had produced delightfully whimsical and often insightful drawings, brimming with visual puns and clever conceptual conceits.

Lonni’s illness has basically destroyed her working memory. She remembers her mother, her sister, a few old friends, and little else. She can retain new information for no more than a matter of seconds.  While she can read words, she quickly loses the context, and trying to follow ideas from one sentence to the next is futile. Yet she can read music, and still remembers how to play the viola. Surprisingly, her language is intact. Her personality and her sense of humor are the same, though she remembers very little about her own history.  I watched a fascinating video of a conversation with her, when, given the slightest of prompts about 9/11, she was able to retrieve some details about the event: that it was about a big building in NYC, that it was sad, that there was an explosion, a declaration of war.

As tragic as brain damage is for a victim, for brain researchers, it offers a special opportunity to study how the brain works.  Her story raises fascinating questions about the nature of mind and memory.  About what is lost and what might only be consciously inaccessible. About what is knowledge and what is a skill. About just what one’s personality is– is it or isn’t it dependent on the memories that we imagine helped shape it? To what degree is the subconscious intact and functioning when the physical and conscious mind is damaged?  And what role might word-making and art-making have in neuroplasticity, in laying new neural pathways in the brain to areas we may not suspect capable of playing a role in a particular ability to compensate for the ones that were lost?

The Walters exhibit shows the many stages of Lonni Sue’s drawings over the three years, incorporating her obsession with word puzzles, theoretically an instinctive urge to heal using what skills she has retained and the power of images on paper to extend the time she can hold onto an idea that would otherwise slip away like water through her hands. Representational art-making is always metaphor-making (“It’s like this in my perception”), and to make art is to tap into the storehouse of metaphors in the brain. I was left pondering what further role her metaphors may play in Lonni Sue’s healing.

What it is about her story that peaks your curiosity?

The Edge Effect in Metaphor Landscapes

In the counseling/coaching technique I work with, Clean Language, we use the term ‘metaphor landscape’ to describe the inner world of a client that is populated by personal metaphors  or symbols laid out in specific locations, like a map. While each client’s landscape is unique in its details and their interactions, I find some symbols are used frequently: rivers, lakes, and mountains; flowers, birds and fountains; trees, fields, and roads.

Perhaps it is because these “personal ecosystems” appear repeatedly with my clients that two words caught my attention as I was thumbing through a permaculture gardening book recently. The terms ecotone and edge effect are new to me.  An ecotone* is a transition area—a place between two plant communities, for example, the area between a meadow and a forest. Ecotones may be distinct lines, such as one created by a farmer on a mower, or they may be broader areas, such as many mountain slopes or wetlands.

Often these transitional areas have species of flora and fauna common to the ecosystems of either side, as well as additional ones that thrive in neither of the other two. It is this characteristic that is described as the edge effect*: the tendency of such an area to have a greater diversity of species than exist in either of its bordering communities.

Clients’ metaphor landscapes demonstrate an edge effect, too.  It is in those moments on a metaphoric bank, just before a client wades into a river, or goes through a gate or leaps onto a boat, when the client faces some significant, even transformative, change. Here on the threshold, the client may know things not only about the two worlds, the one behind and the one ahead, but also about things which are found in neither worlds, but which are crucial for staying a new course.

Symbolically, the space between worlds may be a single step, like through a doorway, or it may involve numerous steps, like across a bridge or down a hallway. Sometimes the distance is measured in time as well, as in a journey on a boat between two ports. However wide or narrower the space, however long or short the time spent there, it is a space that holds information unique to this overlapping of world views.

To think of these terms ecotone and the edge effect as metaphors is a wonderful way to describe the significance and potential this “in-between” time or space holds.  They are good reminders for therapists and coaches not to rush clients heedlessly through such spaces, but to explore them for their potential riches.

These spaces in a metaphor landscape are not always comfortable places to be. How appropriate then, that the word ecotone comes from eco– and the Greek word tonos, meaning tension. To move from one way of being to another may require significant preparations for readiness and a rallying of resources.  The steps before the shift can seem hair-splittingly small. It’s easy to gloss over a client’s statement as a common turn of phrase when s/he says  “I want to be able to start to change,” but notice: there is a want, an ability to start, a starting, all before s/he gets to the changing!  Each step may involve consequences to explore, a decision to act, and courage to be mustered to step away from the known and into the unknown.  All the more reason to pause at such choice points to learn more about resources and resolve, about the process needed for change.

Often clients come for help when they are living in a broad “ecotone”, in a space between two worlds or ways of being.  As we explore both where they may be stuck and where they want to go, these new metaphors will remind me to consider “the edge effect.”

 

 

 

*Definitions taken from wikipedia.org entries for ecotone and edge effect

Metaphors for Tough $$ Times

A lot of my clients are anxious about their financial security. Can metaphors help?  C. C., Denver, CO

In today’s difficult economic times, many people are stressed out about their circumstances. If you are a helping professional working with struggling or anxious clients, you’ll be glad to learn that metaphors can help. Wondering how that could be, when jobs are in jeopardy and bills need to be paid now?

While metaphors aren’t likely to cause employers to start hiring again (actually, they could…but that’s a subject for another blog), you can help clients develop vivid metaphors  for an inner state or way of feeling to feel more resourceful and more hopeful now.   If  your client can summon more optimism, feel more in control, or find strength to face a storm, s/he will reduce the flow of stress hormones in his/her body, a benefit in multiple ways, and have more energy to devote to problem-solving… and joyful living.

 

You can take these four simple steps to discover and strengthen a supporting inner resource:

  1. Ask your client to recall another time when s/he felted stressed about a challenge. What personal quality or characteristic(s)  did s/he use to cope? It might, for example, have been courage, an ability to stay calm, or stubbornness.
  2. Get a metaphor for that quality with a simple question. If the client says, “Well, I guess I was brave,”  you ask, “If you were to draw a picture of that brave, what would it look like?” Invite your client to actually draw it or just describe it aloud.  Perhaps s/he would draw a surfer riding a huge wave or a lion tamer with a whip and chair, controlling a roaring lion.
  3. Help your client get a vividly detailed picture of this resource by asking these simple questions about what s/he describes.  Use only the exact words/short phrases s/he uses!  The point is to get your client more familiar with and to strengthen his/her own resource, not to make suggestions about what you think would be helpful–and that includes adding or changing even small details!
  • Is there anything else about that [client’s word]?
  • What kind of [client’s word or phrase] is that?
  • Where is that [resource word]? O the inside? On the outside?

Examples: Is there anything else about that “surfer”? What kind of “riding” is that “riding”? Where inside is that “brave”? On the inside? On the outside?

Keep on asking  “what kind of…” , “anything else about…” ? and “where is… ?” questions until your client has a well-developed metaphor, full of sensory details.

4.  Encourage your client to return to this image whenever s/he want to feel that resourceful way again.

And if you try this exercise with a client, comment here on how it goes!

Compliments: The Other Side of the Judgment Coin

If you participate in a personal growth group or run one yourself, you probably have no problem with a common rule that no one criticizes participants as they share their experiences or feelings. Consider adding the rule that no compliments be paid either, for they are merely the other side of the same coin. Compliments and criticisms are both forms of judgment, and they can put pressure on the recipient to please others, whether it is to earn praise or avoid criticism.

It’s a remarkable experience to be in a group that suspends both criticisms and compliments. When listeners just witness, speakers begin to follow suit; they ease off judging themselves. Without external or internal judgment, they become more open to whatever lies within.

Compliments can backfire in another way. They can trigger a receiver to argue the case as to why the compliment is not true, aloud or internally. “It’s true I did that [good deed], but he doesn’t know I resented it.” “But I spoke nastily about her behind her back.” “Actually, I could have tried harder.” “She doesn’t know about this other thing I did.” And so on. The possibilities are endless. Instead of feeding self-esteem, compliments can reinforce self-condemnation.

Even “I” statements (meaning speakers refer only to themselves rather than to the one who has finished speaking), imply a judgment.  A person unsure of him/herself can easily interpret the comment as suggesting, “You should have handled it/responded my way.” “I” statements at their worst cast doubt and self-rebuke; at best, they pull the attention to “I” and distract the original speaker from processing his /her own experience.

Now, I’m not trying to suggest there is no place for compliments in this world! Only that, in a personal growth group setting where expectations and rules are clearly stated, it can be both freeing and healing to suspend judgment of any kind, to listen, and, if you’re going to make a comment, make it a clean one. Using Clean Language is one way to assure that you are not using judgmental language. Asking simple questions and repeating the sharer’s exact words, you add no content that s/he has not already acknowledged. You offer no interpretations, no comparisons. You keep the sharer’s focus on what s/he has just presented, allowing him/her the time and space to process what has emerged.

If you facilitate or participate in a counseling or growth group, try doing without criticisms and compliments. Both are un-clean. Both are forms of judgment. Positive or negative, they still encourage the sharer to take someone else’s opinion into account, consciously or subconsciously.

I suggest an appropriate response to someone who has spoken about himself or herself is to ask a question that invites further self-exploration such as, “And is there anything else you know about that?” or “And what difference does knowing that make?”

Or simply say, “Thank you for sharing.”

Gina Campbell, offering Clean Language trainings since 2005

gina_campbell

A Certified Clean Practitioner with a Masters degree in a developmental counseling field and decades of teaching experience. Read more

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