I’ve mentioned before that I have started my journey to become a ‘Master Practitioner’ of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). A journey that started about 5 years ago when I qualified for my practitioner certificate. something which has had a profound effect on my life.
The first part of my Master Practitioner journey covered a lot of ground but, for me, there was one standout moment that came when we started discussing language.
Language is a key part of NLP therefore we go through all the things you were taught in English classes at school (which I remember none of) and build on them. One of the key areas being the use of metaphors.
To quote the Cambridge dictionary website;
A Metaphor is an expression, often found in literature, that describes a person or object by referring to something that is considered to have similar characteristics to that person or object.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/metaphor
In NLP terms it goes much deeper than that and metaphors are used in stories to invoke a emotional or other psychological response. If a story written using metaphors is written in such a way, while an audience may hear the same story, each person will take different meaning from that story and have different emotional responses to it based on what aspects of the metaphor sparked a response.
I therefore wanted to share with you one story from a book by Nick Owen called ‘More Magic of Metaphor’. The story is called the difference that makes the difference and I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what the stories means to you.
