The Magical Mystery Of Metaphor

NLP is very much about looking forward into the future rather looking back into the past. When we do look back into the past, our memories which are stored in our unconscious minds often present themselves in the most mysterious ways, don’t they? Last week, I sat having a cup of tea with a friend and for some reason, we started to recall all the wonderful games that we used to play as children. It was a lot of fun to recall them and they brought forward some delightfully happy experiences, right into now. One of the games that really stood out in my memory was called Buckaroo.

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Buckaroo was a lot of fun and as a child, always made me laugh and jump with delight. The game was all about a moody mule that you had to prepare for a gold mining adventure by saddling him up and then piece by piece, adding all the gear you would need to be a successful gold miner. The exciting thing about the game was that the mule would only agree to carry so many resources at a time and when he felt overloaded, he would give an almighty buck and all your equipment would be scattered over the living room floor. If it was your piece of equipment that made that mule buck, then you lost the game.  

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The mule would feel the weight of the mining gear and buck with no warning! He could remain calm or suddenly kick up a storm and send all the important resources for your trip flying and you never knew what would set him off. The overload was different every time you played the game. I worked out that to win the game and keep the moody mule calm, you had to be really focussed and steady of hand, one false move and that mule would buck with so much vigour that everything would be thrown into the air and fall to the carpet for collection. I often thought I had lost the odd piece of mining equipment or two, only to discover it hiding under the sofa later in the day or find the cat playfully batting it around the floor with that special brand of feline curiosity.

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You never knew when it was going to happen and when it did, the results were spectacularly chaotic.

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If you’ve ever chatted with someone who has learned NLP to a great standard, have you noticed that they speak and think slightly differently to other people you speak with? Their language is used differently and it has a profound effect on you as you listen. Why is that? NLP is all about the language you use to yourself and to others and how that language creates powerful internal representations at the unconscious level which in turn affect our emotional state, our physiology and our behaviour.

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Consider for a moment that every time you speak, you have an unconscious impact on the way someone feels. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if every time you speak you could have a positive and useful impact on the thinking of not just yourself, other people too?

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The reason for sharing the delightful opening story with you is that part of the linguistic content of NLP is communication through the elegant use of stories, or metaphors, which are stories with an underlying meaning. We find stories so utterly compelling because our unconscious mind, the architect of all our learning, change and behaviour, responds rapidly and powerfully to metaphor and symbolism.

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The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.

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Metaphors are comprised of a number of interrelating components called symbols. Whilst we may never fully explain a symbol’s meaning, we can still know it is significant for us and the more its symbolism is explored, the more its significance emerges.  

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Symbols with unique personal significance connect people to their personal history, their spiritual nature, their sense of future and the hidden aspects of their life.

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Much of our everyday language and thinking is metaphoric.  Metaphors allow people to express and give form to complex feelings, behaviours, situations and abstract concepts.  Most metaphors make use of the material world to describe the abstract.  Symbolism means we can connect with a pattern that has personal significance.

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Imaginative symbolic expression is seeing objects and events in your mind’s eye, the hearing of sounds and internal dialogue and the feeling of emotions and other sensations, which together create a personalised virtual reality.  By noticing, respecting and working with this reality, we can help ourselves and others to discover the metaphors they live by and to make incredible changes to their thinking and their reality.

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Metaphor and symbolism are just a part of the fascinating and joyful journey into our conscious and unconscious use of language that we study during our Enhanced NLP Coach Practitioner Certification Training. Image yourself sitting in that training and suddenly creating a compelling new metaphor that will change your thinking and renew your passion and zest for life, now that’s exciting.

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When we feel that we are carrying too much, when we feel overwhelmed by our burden, the creation of chaos often follows. Important resources are lost or mis-placed and we just feel like bucking everything off.

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When we remain calm and focussed and look to the future and our certain discovery of that pot of gold, we are able to carry our resources easily and effortlessly, without the burden of the past weighing to heavily on our backs and cope with any burdens that come our way that would previously have overwhelmed us and caused us to buck, just like a moody mule.

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