Three Reasons to Make Metaphors a Coaching Habit

In his marvelous novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote “Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.” And while this may be a wonderful sentence to read, I take the opposite approach: let’s make metaphors a go-to habit in your coaching practice.

Remind Me What a Metaphor Is

If you’re struggling to remember what a metaphor is, try this definition on for size: “A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two ideas.” (And yes, thank you, Wikipedia, for that clear and distinct definition.) Here are some examples of metaphors.

• “Chaos is a friend of mine.” (Bob Dylan)

• “Conscience is a man's compass.” (Vincent Van Gogh)

• “All religions, arts, and sciences are branches of the same tree.” (Albert Einstein)

In these instances, Dylan makes friends with chaos, Van Gogh is guided by his conscience, and Einstein states that religions, arts, and sciences all have the same roots and trunk.

This is all well and good, but why do I want to use metaphors when coaching, be it with organizations, teams, or individuals? Because of this: metaphor doesn’t just help us to describe, it helps us to understand.

Why Metaphors Work

Many of us think of ourselves as having right-brain and left-brain qualities. Methodical, analytical thinking is often classified as being a left-brain skill while skills such as imaginary thinking, imagery, and the arts are associated with the right side of your brain. Metaphor, however, bypasses the analytical side and goes for what we might only subconsciously know. Metaphors bubble up new understanding and new learning up to the top of our thinking.

Remember those three reasons I mentioned about how effective coaching uses metaphors? Here are those reasons.

1. Metaphors improve communication because they make it easier to decode complex information. “Metaphorical thinking … is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover, and invent.” (Maria Popova worked through James Geary’s excellent book I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World on her brainpickings.org blog).

2. Metaphors provide insight. “Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words,” writes James Geary. In other words, the use of metaphor gives me clues as to how a team or individual views what they have experienced and helps me to understand what a person or team is thinking.

3. Metaphors build creativity, spark insights, and open doors to new ways of thinking. Metaphors help us to access greater levels of creativity. I would be remiss if I didn’t quote Maya Angelou here, who wrote, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” I have yet to meet the person or organization or enterprise that does not want more creativity.

And just in case you are thinking that you don’t know how to use metaphor, you can! Children begin to use metaphors almost as soon as they begin to use language. While you might have forgotten what the definition of a metaphor is, I have no doubt that you use metaphors effectively and well each and every day. You have a more solid linguistic foundation than you might think.

Using Metaphors in Your Coaching

Metaphor is specifically called forward as a coaching skill, one taught to coactive and agile coaches alike. There are many ways to use metaphor, but I’m including some specific examples here that I have used successfully.

Coaching Conversations

Metaphors can help coaching conversations to come alive. Here are some ways to bring metaphor into your coaching work.

• Be curious. Stay curious. Listen to the metaphors that a team uses and try to understand those metaphors at a deep, visceral level.

• Use the person’s or team’s metaphors. If your team is talking about climbing mountains, join them in that metaphor, foregoing the impulse to introduce a new one. Ask them what the trail looks like, what it feels like to breathe air in the mountains, what kind of hiking boots they need. Use your powerful questions to help build resonance with that metaphor.

• If a client or team is stuck or bogged, be ready with your own metaphors. It’s always a good idea to have tried-and-true metaphors at the ready so that you can offer them up at the right time. And if a metaphor doesn’t resonate, be ready to let that metaphor go and to try, try again with a different figure of speech.

• Use metaphors to move to action. Allow the metaphor to help you to build momentum, build enthusiasm to help your client or team or organization to find their own resonant choice.

Team Retrospectives

In working with teams, one of my favorite tools to use is Rory’s Story Cubes. Yes, this is a children’s toy, but it opens the door for creativity and imagination, both of which are necessary and needed in teams. The story cubes come in two forms: physical dice and an online app. There is a basic form of both the dice and the app, but there are additional expansion packs with themes such as mystery, intergalactic, myths, sports, and so on. Both the physical dice and the online app are go-to tools for me, and yes, I’ve purchased as many expansion packs as I could find.

Story cubes are a powerful tool because because they make metaphor more accessible. Half the bridge is there for you, that image on the die, so all you need to do is connect the two.

• Use the cubes to tell the story of the previous sprint. If the team is in the same room, have each person draw the cube they selected on a white board as they explain how their choice of story cube was representative of the sprint. For example, a team member might say, “Well, that house-of-straw story cube is how some of our stories came into this sprint: flimsy, without foundation.”

• Use story cubes to spice up those three basic retrospective questions: What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? What experiments should we try? For example, a team member might be asked about possible experiments to try, and she might respond with, “The octopus story cube is a reminder that we need to branch out to working with other teams.”

• Use story cubes to reimagine a different way forward. Let’s say that a team is stuck in a particular way of thinking. Roll the dice and have the team use the images to spark ideas about things to try.

Metaphor can also be used to deepen powerful questions. Notice how each question strengthens because of the metaphor used just before it was asked.

• If change is a generative act, what changes do we want to see? What are we trying to create? (I’m paraphrasing the Dalai Lama and Tracy K. Smith here, both of whom referred to change as a generative act. There are likely many others who have stated something similar.)

• Mary Oliver wrote, “Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?” You can carry that metaphor’s strength forward by asking, “Where do we need to breathe more life into our practices?”

• In The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick reminds us that “With words, we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow.” What do we need to remember as we move forward?

And that is it! I’m hoping this post gave you new insight into why metaphors are needed and effective in a coaching practice as well as new ways to use them. Let me know how you use metaphors in your own work, and leave your favorite metaphor in the comments section.

Photo credit for this blogpost is Linda Nickell. Find her on Instagram as @coznlinda.