Struggling to come up with an original metaphor? Just listen to yourself – or perhaps find an X-Ray Listener to talk to
At a quick listen, you’ll often hear similar metaphors from lots of different people, especially if they share a language and culture. An easy-to-read guide to these can be found in Prof Gerald Zaltman’s book Marketing Metaphoria.
But while people’s metaphors may appear similar at first… once you learn to elicit the details… everything changes!
As Wendy Sullivan and I said in our book Clean Language: “That’s because the metaphors we use in our language and our thought are far from being random. They are grounded in our embodied experience — the reality of being a person living in a body, on a planet with gravity.
“In Philosophy In The Flesh, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson point out that the youngest baby will quickly learn that warmth means affection, love and intimacy; that important things (like parents) are big. The toddler learns to put things into containers and take them out again, and to walk towards the things he wants. All these human experiences generate a set of metaphors we can all relate to.
“For example:
- Affection is Warmth: “They greeted me warmly.”
- Important More >
Posted by Judy in Body-Mind
Metaphors don’t mean anything. They are the thing – anything and everything.
The spontaneous metaphors in our language are a literal description of the metaphors which constitute our thoughts, both conscious and subconscious.
The metaphors are not in our thoughts – they are our thoughts.
Or as Prof Steven Pinker puts it, they are “The Stuff of Thought“.
Humans think by comparing and contrasting and combining things – by making metaphors.
As Gregory Bateson said, “Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.”
It’s not uncommon for students of Clean Language, particularly on intensive courses, to experience a few days of great confusion – and existential angst – as they realise that pretty much everything is a metaphor for everything else.
We are like fish swimming in a sea of metaphors. And just as fish don’t notice the water, we usually don’t notice them.
It’s possible to notice them, and to make all kinds of meanings from them. But like the tree in the forest, the metaphors are there all the time.
- Many thanks to Matt Rock at the University of Arizona for a question which prompted this posting. More follows later in the week!
Where do you stand on choice?
I confess that I rather like it when I have only a few options. My recent fat loss success has been based on following a very restricted-choice diet.
And of course I love to use David Grove’s Clean Language – a systematic approach to questioning and listening based on just 12 questions (reduced to three or four for beginners). It restricts me in a wonderful way. I don’t have to think hard about what I’m going to ask next – I just keep going with the system until the magic happens.
I really don’t like having a near-infinity of possible choices. Here’s an example.
If you’re a coach (as I know many readers of this blog are) you may be familiar with this problem: I want to increase the number of coaching clients I work with on a regular basis.
Marketing wisdom holds that I should therefore identify a “niche” to help my ideal clients find me easily online… but because Clean Language is such a flexible technique, and I’ve helped all kinds of different people with all kinds of situations and enjoyed it, the idea just leaves me bamboozled… and stuck.
I feel like the American pensioners mentioned in Richard More >
Did you know March 2011 was Listening Awareness Month? No, I hadn’t heard either
But this article from the Chicago Tribune is interesting – and highlights some of the ways that Clean Language can help you become a better listener.
In the piece, Travis Bradberry offers five strategies for better listening: my tips on using Clean Language to help are in italics.
- Don’t take notes at meetings. Using the Clean Language technique of parrot-phrasing, repeating back their words, will hep you to remember key points.
- Clear your mind. You don’t need to be planning your response when you know you’re going to be asking another Clean Language question.
- Absorb the feedback. Clean Language almost forces you to do this: you need to have absorbed enough of their exact words to ask your next Clean Language question.
- Don’t argue, understand. You can use the Clean Language questions to get increasingly clear about what they mean. In Dutch, the questions are called “the clarifying questions” – with good reason!
- Study your conversation partner. Clean Language pays particular attention to gestures and uses gestural information in a specific way. I blogged about it here.
So, to become a better listener, learn Clean Language! Simples!
- Want more? My new YouTube video series will help you start using Clean More >
Posted by Judy in Body-Mind
I don’t know if you’re already aware of this, but your body is doing your thinking.
In the Guardian’s excellent This Column Will Change Your Life, Oliver Burkeman summarises the basic idea of embodied cognition as “the striking idea that thinking, in some sense, is done by means of the body.”
Which implies that if we change what we do, what we think will change automatically. Four tips from Burkeman, backed by research:
- For added willpower, grip tightly.
- For perseverance, fold your arms.
- For recollection, adopt the same posture as when you formed the memory.
- For creativity, adopt a facial expression or physical posture that contradicts how you’re feeling
And of course, it doesn’t need NLP mastery to know that standing up and moving about is a great way to encourage yourself think more positive thoughts.
Burkeman distinguishes “embodied cognition” from “the power of metaphor” to influence our thoughts, “as in the finding that people who’ve just ascended an escalator give more generously to charity than those who’ve just descended.”
However, I think he’s mistaken. In fact, metaphor is exactly how embodied cognition works: thinking is done by means of the body… with metaphor as a crucial part of the body’s thinking mechanism.
Which is why Clean Language, with its power More >
