What is the purpose of a metaphor for new patterns?
Finding out about our behaviours is a good reason to use these metaphors purposefully. The context of decision making in this case.
A client of mine, -we’ll call him James- and I were working on reducing his stress levels experienced when taking a decision. Since James runs his own business, these moments are very frequent and it was important to find a more resourceful way of making decisions with confidence.
It was during the coaching that he discovered his decision making process was flawed, he would take decisions on the fly and without any strategy on assessing the impact of the decision and how it would affect his business.
This, he felt, caused him to change his mind several times and even go back on his own decisions having to cancel and face up to penalties etc. the breaking of a contract. Naturally this aggravated the already considerable stress levels experienced every day.
I knew him for a while and he was proud of his style of making decisions, it did give him success in the past, athough only in initial stages of the process, now the venture had reached a further stage this behaviour was limiting. He was limited by this behaviour and could not see any other ways to do it.
My role in life coaching perth and a development coach for business. I first had to help him see how he took decisions on a day to day basis, then show him the best way forward.
Your goal can be achieved using the modalities and submodalities and checking the measurable points in its success, visualising and keeping to the outcome you desire is all part of the process.
I see a “new decision” as a new resource which would then become a factor in creating the final vision, the result you want.
The opportunity presented itself, one day while I was visiting James at his home. He had a lot going on was a creative person.
Our discussions led us to decide to pear an apple tree that had been neglected for ages.
James appeared enthusiastic and eager to cut down those old branches, but from his body language, I soon realized that he had no vision of what the tree would look like at the end of his chopping and cutting, nor indeed into what shape the tree would grow in the new season.
At the same time I realized how this activity, pruning the orange tree, could be used to work on his “decision making style”, we could use this activity to illustrate the shortcomings and the consequences of his habitual “ decision making process”
So I eventually stopped him and asked him which branches he intended to prune and chop out, and what he thought the tree would look like in the next season, when it put out new growth, as result of the pruning.
It came to him he could not give an answer as he launched into it without thinking.
How would the tree look in the next season and other considerations we spent time on, to enable a picture to be formed.
After the pruning I wanted it to match up to his vision of how it should look.
It did not take long for James to realize that this activity, “the pruning of the orange tree” was a metaphor for his decision making process: the session then turned to finding parallel situations and meanings in two contexts, with amazing results: a practical gardening activity turned into a very important life lesson in decision making, with immediate results: a new decision making style with which James carries out challenging decision, and in fact, all of his business.
What makes metaphors successful when you want to create new patterns of behaviour?
Another article topic I will cover will be the meanings of linguistics and the notions of metaphors in a philosophical sense.
Frances Macari