Metaphors as a shortcut to aliveness

Have you experienced this? You sit with your client and you sense a pressure cooker of feelings opposite you. You gently inquire about feelings, then body sensations, but all you get back is:

• thoughts

• attempted solutions

• wonderings about whose fault it is

• hopes

• failures and learnings

Answers, that come from the left, the instrumental part of the brain.

In Nonviolent Communication we name feelings and needs to create an empathic connection with ourselves and the other person. What if the other simply doesn’t pick up on this? Coaching someone who has no literacy of feelings and needs turn easily into teaching the concept of feelings and how they relate to needs, the true longings in our life.

But it comes with a cost. As a coach, you are not a teacher. Moving into teaching can easily disturb the trust needed for the client to allow being accompanied, to dare to share what they haven’t shared before, and to own what has been disowned. Instead, what if you had more skills at hand?

Why don’t you allow yourself to broaden your skills to connect? There are many ways to create an empathic space, inquiring about feelings and needs only being one of them.

I want to introduce you to a playful, creative skill that engages the right brain hemisphere of the person you are sitting with. The right hemisphere or the relational brain is where the client can connect with what is alive in them.

So, instead of offering words for the feelings and needs you sense in them – try offering a metaphor or simply asking: “That’s like what?”

Be prepared to experience unexpected openings and a real sense of being understood.

Metaphors can land like the freshness of a summer rain after weeks of drought. They can capture the essence of a complex truth in a nutshell. They crystallize what’s at stake for the other person into a simple, digestible nugget. And they contain their own logic, like dreams, that can be traveled like Indiana Jones in a jungle and lead to a treasure chest of insights about their original dilemma.

Ok, that was perhaps too rich. One at a time would work.

Through an accurate metaphor, the person you support connects to their lived experience and it opens for understanding and new perspectives.

Try it! Ask your person: That experience, it’s like what? Or suggest a picture where you pull elements from nature and pollinate them with a surprising element. Our left hemisphere loves surprises!

#empathy#coaching#hemispheres#brain#coachingpractice#MindsetShift#InnerGrowth#PersonalDevelopment