NLP Practitioner Training Courses | Experts Forum - NLP Metaphor

NLP Metaphor - Jonathan Altfeld

michaelbeale@ppimk.com — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:04:31 GMT

NLP Metaphor - Jonathan Altfeld

Discussion between Jonathan Altfeld and Michael Beale, July 2010

NLP trainer, Jonathan Altfeld, has an extremely unique background in Artificial Intelligence, prior to starting the Mastery InSight Institute in 1997, that makes him a bit of a rare breed.

Jonathan Altfeld Metaphor Download

(Please allow up to 2 minutes for the podcast to download)

Favourite stories, metaphors, teaching tales etc

michaelbeale@ppimk.com — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 07:31:29 GMT

Stories, Metaphors and Teaching Tales

Can be used to teach, entertain, suggest useful suggestions and a lot more. What are your favorites? Please add them.

Thanks to Heather Roberts for:

The Scroll

There was a young (well, sort of) girl, who possessed a lot of gifts. She loved sharing these gifts because it made people happy and that made the girl happier too. She often dreamed of herself as rich and successful, and that made her happy too.

She had learned many things under a great man of wisdom from a far away land. The man was a travelling hermit, and she would never know if she would learn from him again, so she sought his followers and found out more about the great wisdom that he had observed from other great masters.She became a master herself. Being around those who knew the knowledge she was enthused and happy, and helped a great many people. But she knew she had to leave and join the world of warriors and merchants, and she was scared by those sorts of people and their world. She knew she had gifts to give them, but she didn't know how to do it.

One day, whilst in the world of warriors and merchants, she noticed how, although she was full of knowledge and her mind was full of great ideas, her water well was drying up and due to thirst her legs were so heavy she could hardly put one foot in front of another. She was becoming weak. The weaker she became the less she dreamed. The less she dreamed...

Then one day she received a scroll. It was from another wise man who was also a merchant and a warrior. The scroll told her about lots of things she could learn in order to be excellent. It reminded her of the power of dreams and that night she dreamed about being successful, so she could share more of her gifts.

In the morning she decided to gather all her courage to ask the wise man one question: How can you be wise man, a master, a warrior and a merchant all at the same time? The girl sent the scroll and waited knowing there would be an answer sooner or later.

NLP Metaphor - Doug O'Brien

michaelbeale@ppimk.com — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 21:31:28 GMT

Metaphor - Discussion between Michael Beale and Doug O'Brien, March 2008.

Doug O'Brien is a Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP, and a Certified Hypnotherapist. He now conducts numerous seminars of his own around the globe.

(Please allow up to 2 minutes for the MP3 file to download if you would like to listen to this discussion.)

http://nlp-expert.co.uk/metaphor/Doug2.mp3

Michael : Good afternoon Doug. Firstly thank you very much for coming back yet again to talk to us this time about metaphor.

Doug : My pleasure Michael, thank you again for having me.

Michael : Excellent. Can you give us a brief introduction of who you are again, just in case anyone didn't catch the other podcast.

Doug : Sure. I'm Doug O'Brien I'm a NLP trainer and hypnosis trainer in New York city.

Michael : How would you define metaphor?

Doug : Strictly speaking a metaphor is a simile - an analogy that is not using the word 'like', or 'as'. So for an example if I were to say 'I am a rock' that's a metaphor - I'm not really a rock. But if I were to say 'I'm like a rock' that's a simile or analogy.

A metaphor is a stronger, if you will, representation of a situation or a person, that's not strictly speaking, objective, it's more subjective representation. And its useful in therapeutic situations, when I person wants a new suggestions and ideas, that are indirect to a client.

Michael : Can you give some examples - some fairly short examples of sorts of themes and sorts of mini-metaphors that you would use?

Doug : Well, gosh, you know it's really dependant on the content and the situation. What specifically you'd want to use in what content or situation. In other words, therapeutically you might choose different suggestions and different metaphors then you would use in a business context.

But they're useful everywhere, and everyone should use them whatever business or context they are in. So whether your business is people-helping and you're using therapeutic metaphors, or you're using them in business and you're using them to enlighten your talks.

Michael : And what impact do you think stories have?

Doug : Well I believe that it gives people in a sense, permission, to think in a different way. It's an over-used cliche at this point, but 'thinking outside the box.' But it is still true that most people think inside the box, if you will. In other words, a metaphor comes from a puzzle that has nine dots drawn in a shape, and you take these nine dots and you give someone the instruction to connect these dots with four straight lines. Without doubling back off the line or taking their pen off of the paper.

And most people fail because they think that the box is a parameter, that they have to stay within that. In order to solve the problem you need to go outside those dots - you need to go outside the self imposed restriction of what looks like a box. You can go way outside.

So it's a great metaphor - to go outside those nine dots to think differently and create a response. Now the idea that Einstein once said I believe is that the same level of thinking that got you into a problem won't get you out of the problem, you have to expand and change your way of thinking.

And metaphors allow you to do that, they allow people to do that, give them permission to do that. In fact it sorts of forces people to do that - because if you're offering them a metaphor, in order for them to make sense of it their brain has to think in a very very different way.

Michael : So building on what you've already said to some extent, just give us some specific uses for metaphors - maybe for more things than thinking outside the box or even of examples of where thinking outside the box could be useful.

Doug : OK. One of my teachers, Dave Dobson recently passed away, so I'm thinking a lot about what he taught me over the years, and one of the metaphors that he used is that he's a pebble-kicker. People would ask him 'Dave, how do you do therapy? How do you do change work in people?'

And he said 'Well I am a pebble kicker. I'm a guy that's standing outside of a mountain, and I'm kicking pebbles,' Pebbles would mostly fall down and stop and not do anything, but every now and again you'd kick one of those pebbles and it skittles, that maybe have accumulated from previous kicks of yours, and those collective pebbles start to scutter down and find some bigger rocks, and those collective rocks fall down and start to hit some bigger rocks and some boulders, and pretty soon you've changed the whole face of the mountain.

See, I think that is how you do therapy.

Because it's telling people that whatever you do with a client, you're not sure you're going to change them - you're not sure what you're client is going to do with that information. It's very disrespectful I think, to have a client, as a person doing psychology or NLP practitioner or something to say 'I'm going to change him!' or 'I fixed him.'

'I fixed him?' I don't think so! What you did is offered them an opportunity for them to fix or change themselves - we as therapists are pebble-kickers, we must keep kicking pebbles.

You know, Erickson told a very similar story actually. Somebody asked him the same question - 'How do you do psychotherapy?' 'How do you change work with someone?' and he said:

"Well, when I was a boy, I was always walking home with my friends, and it's quite a distance, back then - we had to walk quite a way. And as we were walking home suddenly this horse came running by - it was a white horse - nobody from our group recognised it. And it ran into one of the farmers' field and started drinking water out of the farmers trough.
And the farmer came running out and said:

'Hey! Get your horse out of my trough!"

and we said

"Well that's not our horse!"

"Well where did he come from?"

"Well we don't know!"

And Erickson said 'Don't worry, I'll make sure it gets home properly.'

So Erickson jumped onto the horses back and he directed the horse back to the road. And basically said 'Giddy up'. The horse headed in that direction - but giving it free range of where ever it wanted to go. Every now and then that horse would stop and start eating some daisies, or get distractions, so Erickson would pull it's head back up and get it to put its' attention back on the road. And after a while the horse turned left and headed down another road - and followed that, and turned right down another road - and then walked into this other farms field.

The farmer came to round it up and went:

"Hey, what are you doing with my horse? How did you know where to bring him?"

And Erickson said "I didn't know where to bring him, but I knew that the horse knew. And all I had to do was keep it's attention on the road."

And he looked at the people that were listening to him, wondering what the hell he meant. and he said:

"I think that's how you do psychotherapy."

Michael : Ok, a different sort of question. In NLP, emotion states, or physical/emotional states are very important, when you tell stories or metaphors, do you tend to build in different states? And different sequences of states?

Doug : That's a great question. Do I do that? In certain circumstances. For example when I do these seminars across the country to help people quit smoking or to loose wait. For situations we're in, I absolutely do that. That is my goal, is top chain states together.

So I'll start a story, and I'll start on one side of the room, to spatially anchor the story and the state that that place elicits on one side of the room. It might be a state for frustration, because the person that has tried to quit smoking or tried to loose weight often has the feeling of frustration, it's common to the people that are listening to the stories.

So I'll tell a story about that, and anchor that on, say, the right side of the room. And then I'll tell another story, that has maybe, nothing to do with the first story. This kind of open-loop idea. But it elicits, a state again, that is of curiosity, lets say - and then I'll anchor that in this next place, across, closer to the centre of the room, from the original anchor.

Then I'll anchor a third state, and I'll start wandering - walk over to the third place. It's a little further to the left for them. And I'll tell a story about when I felt determined, and I felt absolutely determined to make something happen.

Then I'll tell a fourth story and I'll walk to the far left side of the room, where I get into a flow state, and make things happen. And if it feels really good I'll make it a recursive thing where I - the more that I do the better it feels - or the better it feels, the more that i do. And I start a story like that.

And then I'll start suggesting that they might want to exercise, for example. so I'll walk over to the right side of the room and I'll start talking to them about exercising, and about how sometimes there's a feel of frustration and then I'll sort of go through a scenario that might be a suggestion and rehearse within their mind, what they're going to be doing - starting from frustration going to a place of curiosity - going to a place of determination - and a place of 'Wow, they're working out every day!'

I've move across the room to these anchored spots based on those previous stories that I've told.

What I'm trying to accomplish is that the feelings, these states, that I've attempted to engender and illicit from the crowd by telling those stories in the first place, are now anchored to those spots on the floor. So now if I go back and start to talk about exercise and weight loss, and I start talking about the idea of 'oh gosh, diets don't work' and 'I've been here before and it's been so frustrating' and telling a story that they've had experience with. and it's also been frustrating.

So they're feeling that feeling of frustration, when I'm talking about this or that, and I step into the next step which is a feeling of curiosity and shift my own tonality and I shift my body and I'm standing in a different spot, congruent with that state of curiosity - so hopefully everyone in the audience is also getting that too - that feeling, that shift, to a state of curiosity.

And I'll be talking about maybe next week, tomorrow, whatever, it might be that they might get curious about what form of exercise they might like to do, whether it's whistling, or swimming or dancing, or anything - drumming - anything which moves the body. So maybe they'll say 'huh, you know what? I'm going to do that?'

Then they'll go on from explaining what they might do tomorrow - I'll walk to the next place on the floor and determination is there - yet again shifting my physiology as to sort of model that state of determination - changing my tonality for that as well, which I earlier used when I told my third story, about determination.

And then finally, get to that forth place. Where we're in this, recursive, flow state, where every time I do it I feel good so I so more of it and I'm talking about that flow of exercising everyday and gosh it feels so good to move. You body wants to move! your body was made to move! And the more that you move and I'm in that forth space on the floor where they're really responding to that state.

Then I might even go back and do that a couple of more times, so they really get that chain - every time they feel frustrated we go to curious - every time they're curious we go to determined - Every time they feel determined they go into that flow state. So it becomes a chain that goes from ultimately - one direction, from frustration straight through to flow.

Michael : So in the future when they become frustrated, they'll automatically go through that chain?

Doug : Odds are much better.

Michael : Odd are much better.

What other things do you do, if you're sitting down specifically designing a metaphor - you come up with a possibility of doing sequencing of states - is there anything else that you might think about as you design the metaphor?

Doug : Again it depends on the context. If I'm doing a business consultation, for example recently I did a couple for a company here in New York city, and it was about customer service, and typical things and they typically get these trainings over the years, so I wanted to be a little bit different - so I sat down and thought 'well what does a person in customer service come up against on a regular basis?'

And I had known some of these people for a while so I was able to question them and find out what they did come up against in real life - and again I wanted them to think outside the box because one of the things that Dave Dawson taught me is that if the metaphor that you come up with is obvious then the person doesn't really have to think about it - they just go 'Oh yeah, I know what you mean!' It's like taking advice. And advice is cheap. Therapy should cost good money.

What he said is if the metaphor is a little bit more obscure - I don't think he used that word - but a little further afield, not so obvious, then the person really has to chew on it, think about it - and those inner wheels keep turning.

So I wanted it to be a little stranger, or less obvious of a metaphor. So I started thinking, if I was in that situation, if I was in customer service, I make these calls - I hear a problem but I wasn't really able to solve it for them for another couple of weeks - that was the situation that they were running into - what would that be like?

And I thought to myself 'Ok, what would be another person, what would be another situation where people would be in situations like that?'

So I thought maybe a waiter in a restaurant, maybe a bartender where people wanted a certain scotch that wasn't available a lot. Some sort of situation - I was first thinking which people, and then I thought further afield - I thought 'What about animals? What sort of animal might be in that situation?' Maybe a cow that was watching a particular type of hay, or clover, but it was only March and the clover hadn't grown yet, and he was frustrated.

And then I thought even further afield. What if it was an object? What if it was an inanimate object that I was going to give a little life to, maybe it was a bicycle that wanted new wheels. Maybe it was a car, that wanted new seat covers, or as frustrated that it needed a new paint job.

So I started to find some stories that would make the metaphor less obvious to the listener, so they would have to keep thinking 'What was that story about bicycles all about? We're talking about customer service!" So they'd be thinking about it, more and more and more.

Because when you do that, the unconscious mind really does have to keep turning and wondering, where as if it's totally obvious it'll go 'Yeah. Yeah, I know what you mean.' and you might as well be giving them advice. What's the difference?

The conscious mind can say yes or no.

Michael : How did you learn to tell metaphors or make up metaphors?

Doug : Part of it is my heritage, I think. A little Irish there. But it's also, I learned it from people. I learned it from Dave Dawson. I learned it by reading Milton Ericksons' stories, I learned it by taking seminars from David Gordan who wrote the book on therapeutic metaphor after studying with Erickson. I wanted to learn about it so I read about it, I tried, and wrote ones.

I was a musician, back in the day, and this might be a metaphor, I don't know - I'll let you decide. Back in my youth I was a musician, I was a music major in college. and I learned back then that if you wanted to get good at something, wanting it wasn't enough, you actually had to sit down and practice. And curiously, the more you practiced the better you got. A pretty curious phenomenon, but it appears to be true that the more you practice the better you get.

So I applied that from time to time in my life, outside of music, in say metaphors. So I listened to, I listen to storytellers, like Garrison Keillor who does a radio show over here called the Prairie Home companion, where every week he just gets up there and tells a story, maybe from five minutes to half an hour, where he's just telling fictional stories about a place in the Midwest called Lake Wobegon - and started to listen to his stories, and how he captured the audiences attention, not just with his stories, but also with how how he told them, the infliction that he used, the pacing that he gave.

And I listened to Erickson tapes and videos, I watched the first ten seminars with Dave Dawson and other various people. Tony Robins was my first NLP trainer, a masterful story teller. Richard Bandler, masterful story teller.

So I listened, and I tried myself. I thought 'Let me do that.'. And it's interesting because when you first start doing it it's a little uncomfortable as well it should be, because you're doing it for the first time - but just like driving a car or riding a bicycle, the first time you did it it was difficult, and you get better - and the more that you do it the better you get.

Michael : Before I ask you to give your contact details. Is there anything that you'd like to add about the whole subject of metaphor and story telling?

Doug : Nothing really except I would like to reiterate that it's not just therapy. The best people in every line of work I think, tell stories. They really do, because it enlivens what they're talking about.

So whether it's in business, in management, anywhere. Coaching - stories capture people imagination, and that's what's going to be the thing that enlivens anything that you're talking about. And will make it fascinating and interesting for people to listen.

Michael : Is there anything that you'd like to plug that you're doing at the moment?

Doug: Well I think I may have mentioned this before, but my website Ericksonian Info - Online Resource about Milton Erickson Hypnosis and Psychotherapyis a real source of pride for me, I think it's a wonderful source of information on ericksonian hypnosis and various related subject area. We're got contributors like Steven Gilligan there, and David Gordon, and Robert Gilts, and even outside of NLP and hypnosis, people like Dan Newman.

Ericksonian Info - Online Resource about Milton Erickson Hypnosis and Psychotherapy is the site that I'd like to plug, and also the more commercial site Neuro Linguistic Programming and Ericksonian Hypnotherapy - Douglas O'Brien and Associateswhere you can find out about seminars that I'll be teaching, things like that.

Michael: And if somebody wants to contact you what's the best way of doing it?

Doug: Well email is fantastic, they can do just Doug@ericksonian.com that works very well. and within the united states they can also call toll free on the telephone 877dobrien and that translates to 3627436

Michael: Excellent thank you very much indeed.

Doug : It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Stephanie Philp on Metaphor

michaelbeale@ppimk.com — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:14:53 GMT

NLP Metaphor - Stephanie Philp

Metaphor - Discussion between Michael Beale and Stephanie Philp, February 2008.

Stephanie Philp is a certifying trainer of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) at an internationally recognised level and based in Auckland, New Zealand. I've been fortunate enough to train with some of the world's top NLP Trainers, most notably Dr Richard Bandler, co founder of NLP. I'm certified as a coach through the International Institute of Humanistic NLP and Hypnosis and also qualified in Ericksonian Hypnosis.

http://nlp-expert.co.uk/metaphor/Stephanie.mp3

Michael : Good morning Stephanie.

Stephanie : Hi Michael, how are you?

Michael : Great. Really pleased to have a chance to talk to you today about metaphor. To kick it all off, would you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do?

Stephanie : Sure. My name's Stephanie Philp, and as you can probably tell from my accent I'm originally from Staffordshire over there in England, and I've lived in New Zealand for longer than I lived in England, quite a long time. Based in Auckland I've got a company called Metamorphisis, and I train NLP practitioners, people in corporate organisations, and also I do NLP coaching with people.

Michael : We're going to be talking about metaphor, so can I throw you right in and say - what's your definition of a metaphor?

Stephanie : Well that's an interesting question. I looked in the dictionary so I could get a proper definition, because I tend to lump metaphor, similes, analogies etc, together, because it's quite closely related. And they're all useful in the work we do in training and coaching people, but it might be useful to hear the definition. So a simile compares two different things in order to create a new meaning. We're made explicitly aware of the comparison by words like 'Like' or 'As', and one way to remember similes is 'similar to' so we might have 'brave as a lion' 'thin as a rake', 'white as a sheet', 'thick as two short planks.' So that's simile.

Then we've got metaphor, so a metaphor is a figure of speech that uses one thing to mean another, and uses comparison between the two. So a metaphor implies a comparison between two dissimilar things, without the use of 'like' or 'as'. So a metaphor really carries more power than a simile because it's more direct. So in metaphor you are saying something is something else, and you require the mind to make a connection usually by making appropriate images.

So where as in simile you'd say 'he is as brave as a lion', the metaphorical equivalent would be 'he is a lion.' and you may notice how the two create different images in your mind.

So the third one is an analogy, and an analogy is comparable to a metaphor and a simile in that it shows you how two different things are similar, but it's a bit more complex, so rather than a figure of speech, an analogy is more of a logical argument.

The creator of an analogy will often demonstrate how two things are alike, by pointing out the shared characteristics, with the goal of showing that the two things are similar in some ways - and similar in more ways as well - so an analogy is a set of comparisons like 'x is to Y as A is to B.' And you may remember these types of questions on school exams, like 'cat is to kitten as parent is to... >fill in the gap<' so the interaction of the comparisons tells us about the things that are being compared.

Let me give you another example, when I'm teaching metaphor on my practitioner training, we have a warm up exercise called 'you know, X is like Y' game. And one person choose a context, like relationship change, learning etc. Another person chooses an activity from which to draw analogies, like cooking, skiing, running. And the third person gives a sentences linking the two. So we could say 'cooking a great meal, is like a relationship, it takes time, love and tender, loving care' or 'Training people is like building a house. You have to make sure the foundations are solid, before you start adding structures.' So it's a great exercise for developing flexibility. Because almost anything, as I'm sure you know, is an analogy to anything else.

Then you've got idioms and things like that, but I don't think we've got time to go into all of those!

Michael : So what do you think is the impact of metaphor, or some of the different impacts you can have with metaphor?

Stephanie : well I think it's another way of getting the message across, or stimulating a person to look inwardly to find their own resources. So when I'm training I use lots of stories, I use them to introduce topics, they create curiosity and open up the mind for what I'm about to teach. I've used stories of work that I've done with clients so that participants can get the benefit of my experience, including mistakes. I tell jokes - and it's really interesting, jokes are wonderful metaphors and great for breaking state and illustrating language patterns. Shall I tell you one?

Michael : Ok tell us one.

Stephanie : Ok - You've probably heard it, but it's quite a good one for presuppositions. So this blokes in bed, and he hears a knock on the door - so he rolls over and looks at the clock and it's half past three in the morning. 'You've got to be joking' he thinks to himself. So he roles over and tries to get back to sleep, but the knock gets louder so he goes downstairs and there's a guy on the doorstep who goes: 'Hey mate, can you give me push?' So the guy who's got out of bed says 'Oh for goodness sake, it's half past three in the morning! Bugger off.' That sort of thing, you know. And he gets back to bed, and when he's back in bed his wife says 'what's the problem?'

He says 'Oh there's a guy out there wanting a push.' and his wife says 'Oh if that happened to you when we were young before we had three kids - remember that night we broke down and you wanted a push - where would we have been then if the person had said no?'

So he feels a bit guilty, so he goes downstairs and he can't see the guy, so he says 'Hey mate are you still out there?' The guy says 'Yeah.'

'Do you still want a push?' The guy says 'Yes please!"'
He says 'Well where are you?' and the guy says 'I'm over there on the swings!"

This is a great joke for illustrating presuppositions because the presupposition is that he needs his car pushing. After all, most normal people wouldn't wake somebody up at three o'clock in the morning to play on the swings. So it's a different meaning here that creates the joke.

Michael : Where else are typical places where one can use a metaphor? Can you give some other contexts where they could be useful?

Stephanie : Well, again, to provide themes - so you might tell a story, or tell a joke to set a theme for something that you want to talk about in a speech or in training again. For therapeutic purposes, so often you could use stories to help clients out of the holes that they've gotten themselves into, and even that, saying somebody is 'in a hole' that's another metaphor. And I've had some pretty amazing results with that too.

To open up a persons way of thinking so that they can make connections with the issues that they may be experiencing. To create rapport. So if you just go to a barbecue, or any other sort of function, you'll hear people telling stories, because that's one of the ways that we get rapport. To explain complex information, so even the NLP communication model, where we talk about the map and the territory, the idea of the map in our head is really a metaphor. We haven't really got maps that are in our head - it's just a representation of reality.

To help someone access new resources to overcome a problem. So in a story a hero or heroine could overcome a problem by using special tools, or a particularly inventive idea, and this can stimulate a client to think differently about their own problem.

One of the best ones - to create trance and relaxation. so the story starts to put a person into a relaxed state and then you can start weaving Milton Models into the story and create a very deep trance as well.

To give feedback - to tell a story about how somebody else did something and how that helped their performance.

And embed commands - I've got a particular one that I like that I use if I have a client who is working very hard and not taking care of themselves - it's about mother Teresa who apparently was working really long hours and not taking care of herself, and she ended up sick in one of the hospital beds in India - and the Mother superior saw Mother Teresa in the ward lying in bed and said 'You! What are you doing there?"

And Mother Teresa said 'Well, I was working long hours and I got sick.' and she carried on like that, and the mother superior said 'You! What are you doing there?' So Mother Teresa repeated her story, so the mother superior said 'How dare you? How dare you think you can look after other people without looking after yourself?"

So that last part is an embedded command to the client - that she has to take care of herself - but it's not me that saying it, it's the mother superior.

Michael : So moving on slightly, where and when do you use metaphors. Is there anything you'd like to add? You've covered some of that before, but is there anything you'd like to add to that question: Where and when do you use metaphor?

Stephanie : I think when you start looking at metaphor you realise that there aren't many places where you can't use it. And the other thing is, because we talk in metaphor it isn't very easy to go very long without using metaphors - that when you hear other people metaphor, within that metaphor is the solution to the problem.

So someone might say 'It's like I've got a brick wall up in front of me.' So I'll ask them about the wall, and if there's a way over it or through it. And they know because it's there metaphor, and it often taps into their resources to adapt and change. And often if you do some change work with them, the wall might have a gate in it when you've finished, or it might be replaced by a hedge, or it might not be there at all.

Michael : Moving on from that - when you design a metaphor, what are the very top level elements for people that you think are important to think about?

Stephanie : The first thing is that the person understands the metaphor. It sounds obvious, but sometimes we can be really enthusiastic about something that we like, but that somebody else can't relate to. For example in New Zealand rugby is our national sport, so if we can use a metaphor with somebody that likes rugby then that's great - but if you use it with someone that hates rugby then you're going to get out of rapport at least, or really confuse them at the worst - so it's really important that they know what the metaphor is.

I remember years ago we were teaching a seminar and the co-trainer and I practiced having an argument, for an exercise we were doing - some guys overheard us, and didn't realise until the next day that it was a role play - that it was just us practicing, so we said 'oh yeah that was a red herring!' and not one person on the course knew what a 'red herring' was. So they said 'what's fish got to do with this?'. So we had to explain what a 'Red Herring' was.

And the other thing is map out a persons metaphor from scratch to find out some metaphorical connections that you can use - so if a person has some huge problems, they might have to climb a mountain or something. So defining a problem is about defining the elements in it, so it might be more than one problem that's contributing to the problem - so establishing the metaphor or symbol for each key part of the challenge, or for the problem.

So a mountain climb might be a challenge, a wound might be a past upset, so find symbolism that the client can relate to, and if you're not sure if the client can relate to the metaphor just pick something basic like going for a walk or something that anybody can relate to. And then find out what their outcome is, whatever it is - whether it's finding a job, whatever it is, and then find something that the person enjoys that you can also incorporate into the metaphor, or any real life obstacles that are likely to come up - maybe emotions that could be experienced.

Then people that could help; they might not be people in the metaphor, they could be things or animals. There are other things, it get quite complex, but a lot of metaphors can be simple and be just as effective.

Michael : What skills do you have that enable you to do this?

Stephanie : Well I suppose because it's something that I'm interested in, I do pay attention to, and filter metaphor. I collect stories and write down my own stories about things that have happened in my life so that I have something that would suit any occasion. And then I've got of experience working with metaphor and working with other peoples metaphors as well.

Michael : How did you learn to do this? Have a number of things happened to you where metaphors have suddenly clicked, or that telling the metaphors have suddenly clicked with you?

Stephanie : I learned a little bit on practitioner training, or master practitioner, I think. It was something that I enjoyed, so started doing for myself. Start collecting stories, and I just found it so useful that on my practitioner training I spend two half-days on different parts. The more I learn about it, the more fascinated I become with it, so when I teach it on courses as well I always have people that say 'Oh stories, I don't really know if that will be useful.' but when they do it they really get a buzz out of it - they get really passionate about it, and they start collecting their own metaphors.

Michael : What do you believe about yourself when you're telling a metaphor, or designing a metaphor?

Stephanie : I believe that I'm good at it and that I can make a difference. And that people have all the resources that they need to succeed, and that metaphor will help them - so that's what I believe about the person.

Michael : Do you have a personal mission when you do this? Who are you when you're telling a metaphor?

Stephanie : Well my mission is to assist people and to tap into their uniqueness and inner depth. And to find a beauty and aspiration, and peace and love, that they have within them - which sounds very chunked up, but that's what my mission is -that's my mission when I'm telling metaphor.

Michael : As we're sort of coming towards the end of this discussion, do you have a favourite metaphor that you'd be prepared to tell us?

Stephanie : Favourite metaphor.... A few years ago I broke my arm, and I didn't know it was broken for two weeks because my leg was hurt and my leg was so sore that I didn't really pay much attention to my arm - but it was a fracture that had sort of split the bone from the wrist up, because I sort of landed on my arm.

And the doctor told me that I'd have to have Orthopaedic surgery on it, and he said 'I'll put it in a temporary cast for a bit, and when you come back we'll organise the surgery.' and in my head I was going 'Well that's what you think.'

So what I did was I went home and I visualised my arm healing, and I've got a pretty good imagination, so what I did, I imagined seven men in there like the Seven Dwarfs and they were whistling and they were scraping all of the bone off, vacuuming it all off and sealing it together with super glue. So I used my mind, and the dwarfs were these colourful little people I imagined my arms and my wrist being warm and the blood flowing, and said to myself 'my wrist is now totally healed, and I now have complete flexibility'

So I used all of my senses, I could even smell the super-glue, the only thing that I didn't have was taste - and it was a good representation for people of how we use modalities and sub-modalities.

The interesting thing was, I went back next week - I did this visualisation three times a day - I only had a week so I did them three times a day - I went back with my friend, they put the x-ray up, the new x-ray, and they couldn't find the break at all. My wrist had been healed in a week.

So I think that's quite a powerful metaphor to show people how strong the mind is, and how we can use modalities, or can use modalities or sub-modalities. I've got other metaphors. I've got more, but they go on for too long.

Michael : Are you saying that's absolutely true?

Stephanie : Absolutely. One week. And my friend was so impressed - she was a real sceptic, she used the technique to lower her blood pressure, which the doctor told her that she'd have to take medication for. She visualised her blood as a raging river and slowed it down, and the effect was that it lowered her blood pressure.

Michael : Before I ask if there's anything you'd like to plug or for your contact details, is there any last thing that you'd either like to emphasise, or to add in because we left it out, that's important about metaphor?

Stephanie : I'd like to encourage people to collect metaphor. Just to keep a scrap book or put them on your computer, because sometimes you can find them in newspapers or something like that. Start noticing or filtering for metaphor in peoples language as well, because that tells you a lot about how they're creating their problems. So that's all - I'd like to encourage people to collect metaphor.

Michael : Excellent. Now is there anything you're doing that you'd like to plug or bring to out listeners attention?

Stephanie : well first of all there's my website, which is MetaMorphosis Ltd - NLP Training and coaching so remember the .co.nz, and on there there's at least twenty pages of puns, jokes, metaphors, comments, funny comments - in fact theres a whole section on the site dedicated to humour - it's called 'humour'.

Then I'd like to plug my cd and e-book. They're both called 'Inside your mind.' The e-book is highly interactive and takes you to lots of hidden extras including audio clips on the website - it's a great introduction to NLP - so anybody that wants to get to know it, and wants some more information on it can - and listen to audio to actually explain things - it's a really good e-book for that. And it also includes information on sub modalities - so if you want to feel better or make your goals more compelling - and the CD is studio recorded and deals with how to decrease anxiety, shut up the internal terrorist in your head, core questions, the mind-body connection, and how language and internal representations affect this.

How to focus on what you want, and what happens when you focus on what you don't want. And how we make sense of our own and others experiences. And then I'll take you through some exercises in changes through modalities, changes through sub-modalities, changes in experience. And there's also another hand out with the CD that you can download so that you can do the exercises more easily.

Otherwise I'm available for training and coaching. And I have a half-day training called Inside Your Mind around the e-book and CD, and I facilitate practitioner trainings.

Michael : And again, your contact details.

Stephanie : The easiest way to get me is through the website which is MetaMorphosis Ltd - NLP Training and coaching my email is steph@metamorphosis.co.nz and all the contact details are at the bottom of every page of the website.

Michael : Excellent, thank you very much indeed.

Stephanie : You're welcome, my pleasure.