Metaphor: the solution for tricky topics

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If you’re a communicator who wants to be more persuasive, you should study the use of metaphor. Our one-day course on this topic is one of the few available in Australia.

We established this specialist course because of increasing interest in the metaphor section of other programs.

The training is often done in-house so that the group can work on relevant case studies on a confidential basis.

Newsmakers and other communicators try to keep their message simple – but this can be hard sometimes.

Try explaining petrol pricing in less than 2-3 minutes, or the reasons for a regulator’s adjudication in a health/chemical/drug matter in a sentence or two.

In fact, in almost any issue where there are more than two interacting variables, we can tie ourselves in knots trying to explain something to the average punter. (Spot the two metaphors in that sentence.)

The answer has traditionally been to use metaphor. By tradition we mean that if you go back through history, you’ll find philosophers, religious leaders, statesmen and inventors are all using this device.
 
What is metaphor? The most common definition is ‘a comparison between two things, based on resemblance or similarity.’ The philosopher Aristotle said that metaphor was an act of giving something a name that belonged to something else.

This is well and good – we are all familiar with the metaphors of our culture about too many cooks spoiling the broth, or looking before we leap. And we admire, if not get enjoyment from, the use of metaphors in the hurly-burly of political life. Think of Paul Keating.

Some linguists are now taking metaphor much further: it’s not just a nice option, they say – it’s a necessity.  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors we live by (Uni of Chicago 1980), consider that we simply can’t get along without metaphor.

“We have found…that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action.” they say.
“Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

Having seen the impact of metaphor and symbolism at the unconscious level – in hypnosis for example – I would agree with Lakoff and Johnson.

In one recent example of the value of metaphor, a public relations chief at a federal regulator and I decided to devote a media refresher course entirely to the use of this device. 

We had the top four or five executives of the agency at the session. All were experienced media operators.

But for this advanced session, I led a discussion on the nature of metaphor, and compared several methods used to create new metaphors.

As we worked through a complex case study on the whiteboard, the pennies dropped rapidly. 

We then asked the participants to develop and use metaphor in their practice interviews.

The topics were complex, technical and strategically sensitive. Normally subjects like this would be a nightmare in a news or current affairs setting.

But when participants dropped their metaphors into the practice interviews – we got gasps and smiles of recognition all round.

Here, often for the first time, were clear, concise and persuasive explanations of the agency’s leadership and control in its field.

It was this experience which made me decide to offer and publicise a training program specifically in metaphor and its applications in news, current affairs, speechwriting and presentation skills.

Roger Fry

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