The Magic of Metaphor
"Learning to read the language of symbols has a positive effect on your self-image and energy. You do not have to wait for a crisis to see things symbolically and accurately. You can start wherever you are." Caroline Myss, Sacred Contracts
This article is about learning to use your personal metaphors and symbols in order to read and understand your own symbology. Your metaphors enable you to know yourself and and understand your life in a new way.
Coaching with Metaphor
Are you aware that your clients use metaphor several times a minute? And that your clients reason and act in ways that are consistent with their metaphors? And that the nature of metaphor makes it ideal for working with out-of-the-ordinary problems and high-level goals? And that Clean Language keeps coaches' (unconscious) metaphors out of the coaching process, and facilitates clients' metaphors to change — and as they do, so do their perceptions, decisions and actions? If not, you need to read this article.
Like a kid in a sweet shop
 Over the past few years I've had the privilege of working with
Heston Blumenthal, whose restaurant, The Fat Duck, was named the
best restaurant in the world by The Restaurant magazine in 2005. Heston has given
me his permission to touch on that part of our work that has used
Symbolic Modelling in a generative frame.  This article explains why metaphor is a natural way to describe illness
and health, the importance of recognising patients'/clients' metaphors,
and how working within these metaphors can activate an individual's personal healing process. "All theories of organisation and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that persuade us to see, understand, and imagine situations in partial ways." Gareth Morgan
This is a two-part article: Part 1 draws on the ideas of Gareth Morgan, a pioneer in the use of metaphor to read, analyse and facilitate organisations to change. Part 2 shows how Symbolic Modelling uses client-generated metaphors to facilitate individuals to understand and change themselves and their organisations.
Learning Metaphors
Learning is a highly complex process about which we know very little. But one thing we know for sure is that people learn in different ways. How can we have a sense of the way our students learn -- just by listening to what they say? A very practical approach is to take note of the metaphors in their language.
Meta, Milton, Metaphor: Models of Subjective Experience
In the beginning was the Meta Model. Richard Bandler and John Grinder's brilliant linguistic methodology for exploring and influencing a client's model of the world — in the direction of sensory experience. Then came the Milton Model. The linguistic art of utilising non-specific and conceptual experience for therapeutic ends. The marriage of these two models produced an offspring: Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). But what if there was another type of experience — metaphoric and symbolic — never coded by Bandler and Grinder?
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