When someone tells me they are stuck, I listen for the metaphor before I listen for the detail.
The detail is rarely the way through. Half the time, the detail is what is keeping the situation stuck in the first place. But the metaphor, the everyday phrase the person reaches for to describe how it feels, is almost always a clue.
"I'm going round in circles."
"It feels like an uphill struggle."
"I'm talking to a brick wall."
"I can't see the wood for the trees."
"I'm at a crossroads."
We use these phrases so casually that we forget they are pictures. And once you start to look at the picture rather than the situation, something interesting happens. The picture begins to tell you what to do next.
Here are five everyday metaphors I hear often, and what each one is really telling you.
The insight in this one is simple. You are expending energy without making any progress.
The temptation, when we notice we are circling, is to think harder, try harder, push more energy into the same loop. It rarely works. The harder you push, the smoother the circle's path becomes.
So, the question is not how to push harder. It is how to interrupt the pattern.
A few useful prompts:
Interrupting the pattern is what matters. A related idiom, drawing a line in the sand, can also help. That one asks you to walk away and not look back.
Find out more about circling here.
The insight here is that effort is front and centre. You are working hard. Probably too hard.
What this metaphor rarely tells you on the surface, but almost always reveals on a second look, is that the top is often very close. That is precisely why the climb feels like a struggle now. The early part of the hill was steady. The summit is where the gradient steepens. So the struggle is not a sign of failure. It is often a sign of being nearly there.
Useful questions:
Sometimes the answer to that last question is no. The hill is not yours. Or it is yours, but not for this season. Putting the boulder down for a while is not giving up. It is being honest about which hill is worth your energy.
There is a poem for this one too, called Pushing the same boulder up the same hill.
The insight in this one is important. The person is not actually a wall. It just feels like there is a wall between you.
When we say someone is a brick wall, we are usually frustrated. We have tried to be heard. We have tried to explain. They have not shifted, and so we have built a wall in our mind where, in fact, there is a person.
The question then is not how to break through the wall. It is whose wall is it, and how can it come down a brick at a time?
A few prompts:
We often blame the other person for building it. And yet we usually have the ability to take it down, even one brick at a time.
There is a poem for this one, called Talking to the brick wall. Find out more here.
This is the phrase that gave my book its title, so it is one I have sat with for a long time. The insight is that you are getting distracted by the trees and the paths.
You are inside the wood. The bark and branches are in front of you. A couple of paths lead off in different directions. What you cannot see, from where you are standing, is the shape of the wood itself.
The wood is often outside the wood. At the other side of it. The way to see it is rarely to look harder at what is in front of you. It is to move, even slightly, to a place where the wood can be seen as a whole.
Useful questions:
And no half paths. No going halfway down one route and changing your mind. That depletes you and gets you nowhere.
There are several poems for this metaphor, plus the book of the same name. You can get a copy of my book here.
The insight here is that the choice feels heavy. There is a sense that the wrong turn will cost something significant, so the energy is all going into the deciding rather than the doing.
But often, when we slow down and look at the crossroads itself, the question changes. It is not always about which path. It is sometimes about whether to choose at all, or about something else entirely.
A few useful questions:
Often, the answer to that last question is yes. All paths get you there. The real question then becomes how you want to travel, not which path you must pick.
Sometimes, too, we think we are at a crossroads when in fact we are somewhere else entirely. A corner to turn. A dead end. Or going round in circles, spotting crossroads as we pass them, each one looking like a decision, none of them really being one.
There is a poem for this one, called At a crossroads.
The five idioms above are not unique. There are many others. What they all share is that they bypass the part of the mind that wants to argue with itself, and they speak directly to the part of the mind that already knows.
That is why metaphors matter.
They bypass overthinking. Defensiveness drops. Options appear that logic was hiding.
So they are not decoration. They are information.
When I work with people, I often spend the first part of a conversation simply listening for the metaphor they reach for without realising. Once we have it, we have something to work with. Not the situation, which is usually a tangle. The picture underneath the situation, which is almost always cleaner, and almost always pointing somewhere useful.
You do not need to commit to a long programme of work to get the benefit of this. The metaphor you are already using is doing most of the work. A single conversation, looking at it from the outside, is often all that is needed to see what it is trying to tell you.
Choose the one you are already using. See what it is trying to tell you. If something here resonates, one session may be enough to help things move again.
To find out what a one-to-one session with me involves, get in touch at Alison@alisonsmith.co or WhatsApp +44 (0) 7770 538159.
