Ultimate NLP Practitioner Training Program

© Matthew G Barnett 2018 | www.cognitiontraining.co.uk | www.meetmattbarnett.com | www.headgearlabs.com

 Ultimate NLP Practitioner Training Program
Creating a Metaphor -
Metaphor Design
Hi There and welcome back to this section on the power of
metaphors, and in the previous lecture I gave you an overview
of metaphors and am I sure you can see how you might be able
to use this in your work. Metaphors are awesome if you are
working with kids as well. I have two little girls and one of them
went through a stage when her behavior wasn't quite what I
hoped so each evening I would tell her a metaphor about
chippy the mouse (her favorite cuddly toy) and sleepy mole and
I would do that as her bed time story and you know what? She
took those stories off to bed with her and her behavior
improved dramatically. So in this lecture I am going to show you
the process for creating a metaphor and you absolutely can
design a metaphor for pretty much any presenting problem that
someone brings to you… So let’s get stuck in.
OK so as I mentioned in this lecture I
want to show you the process of
designing a metaphor so that you
can, easily link a metaphor to a
presenting problem, identify the key
points of the metaphor, and deliver
the metaphor in a way that best
helps your clients. So how do we do
that. Well the first stage of a
metaphor design is to map out the
behavior that is an issue whatever
that may be. It could be anything at
all that the client has brought to you.
And this stage we refer to as a Pre-
map or Pre-mapping stage.
Nest what you want to do is take a good look at the behavior
and see if you can identify a process that the client goes
through a strategy that they run to produce the behavior.
Remember what you are looking for when you do this is any
specific internal representations that the client runs, any
significant sub-modalities and anything with any real energy
that goes some way to helping the client produce the unwanted
behavior.
Next up you want to determine what the client wants as a
result, the new choices as an outcome. It’s really important that
you get clear on what the desired outcome will be for the client
as your metaphor is going to lead to this point and result.
And then and this isn't absolutely necessary however you can
create anchors to the strategies that bring about the behavior
that the client wants to change as well as establish good strong
© Matthew G Barnett 2018 | www.cognitiontraining.co.uk | www.meetmattbarnett.com | www.headgearlabs.com
resource anchor and you can anchor those to the client’s elbow
or knee or somewhere like that so that they can be fired off.
OK next what you are going to do is take all of the nouns that
the client has used and that you have identified, and you are
going to turn those into key aspects of your metaphor such as
characters in your story. And what this does is displace the
referential index and allows you to map the strategies in. Now
I think it’s worth mentioning here that the actual story is
somewhat irrelevant really, remember what we are doing with
the metaphor is feeding back to the unconscious mind internal
representations and strategies in an ambiguous way such that
the unconscious mind can work with the story to consider
alternative outcomes. So as I mentioned I used to tell my
daughter stories about chippy and sleepy mole, and it could
have been anything else at all so long as the relationship
between them is maintained. And of course chippy and sleepy
mole have a special connection to my daughter and therefore
they are likely to be more successful as characters in the
metaphor. SO I think if possible you might do the same and
establish a metaphor that the
client can relate to, for example if
they are massive fans of classical
music you might somehow weave
that into your story.
Next you need to establish a
connection between the client’s
current behavior and the
behaviors of the players in your
metaphor as well as the client’s
current situation. This is called
establishing an isomorphism. And
remember this can be and should
be an ambiguous isomorphism
and I will show you how to do that shortly by using the hierarchy
of ideas.
OK and next you need to establish a connection between the
relationships between the players of the story and the
behavior, all the doing words, the verbs can be related to the
behaviors and strategies in your metaphor to produce similar
behavior.
Then what you will do with your metaphor is have the players in
the metaphor discover during the course of the metaphor, new
resources, attitudes, beliefs and cultivate new behavior. Now
remember that until this stage what we are doing with the
metaphor is effectively pacing the clients current experience
ambiguously through the story that we tell. And what this does
is it establishes rapport with the client’s unconscious mind and
of course once we have established rapport with the
unconscious mind, through pacing the clients current
experience, we are able to lead the unconscious mind through
use of the characters discoveries in the metaphor. My
 Ultimate NLP Practitioner Training Program

suggestion is to be ambiguous in terms of the discoveries by
using the Milton model language patterns such as
presuppositions and comparative deletions etc. Because this
will guide the client to place of accepting new behavior and the
ambiguous nature of the Milton model language patterns will
enable the unconscious mind to fill in the most appropriate
gaps in the story to ensure that the desired outcome is
achieved. Essentially the client does all the work once you have
led them to that point.
OK so let’s look at this as a process now, and how you can use
the hierarchy of ideas to design your metaphor and this is really
easy, and I actually find it quite fun.
So if you take a look at the diagram the first thing you want to
do is identify the current state or behavior and the desired state
or behavior and you can mark those on the sheets. And next
we use the skills we learned in the hierarchy of ideas to
establish a connected yet ambiguous alternative for the
metaphor and we do this by asking the question of the current
behavior. ‘What is this an example of’ So What is the current
behavior and example of’ and what this does is it chucks up the
behavior …
and the perfect size and color. And he went on to say how he
found it interesting that not a single tomato had been grown
too big or too small.
And of course what Erikson had been doing was using a
metaphor to relate to the clients overeating and to install the
belief that the client already knew exactly how much food and
water to take in to be the perfect weight and size. And as the
story goes the client when he got back home started to eat
properly and lost weight achieving the perfect weight for his
size without consciously knowing ‘how’ he had done it.
Now that’s pretty awesome in my book and just shows the sort
of power the metaphors can have and if you take a moment to
study this Erikson metaphor you will see that it meets the
design principals for metaphor design that I have just been
through with you.
So I think you might want to have a play with metaphors. And
see what changes you can have people make, quite without
knowing. As I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture,
metaphors work particularly well with children who are much
better at all this imagination stuff than us adults.

Next, we ask ‘what is another example of the chunked-up
behavior’. And at this point I think you want to be thinking of
relating this to something that you know the client will connect
with, such as a favorite pastime hobby or interest and link that
to the new behavior. So to look at this again, we take the
current behavior or state, chunk this up with what is this an
example of this, and then we establish an indirect and
ambiguous connection to the current behavior with the phrase
‘and what is another example of this’
So a great metaphor and a fairly famous example in the world
of NLP is Milton Erikson's metaphor about tomato plants.
Which is often used in trainings so let’s take a look at that now.
OK so that brings us to the end of our section on metaphors
and next up we will be looking at the technique in NLP that was
modeled from the work of Virginia satir in the early days of NLP
the Meta Model. Which is a great tool that you can use with
your clients straight away. SO let’s move on to that now and I
will see you there.
“Remember what you are
looking for when you do

So Milton Erikson, as you know was a medical doctor and

this is any specific
therapist and the story goes that one of his patients came to
him with the presenting problem of overeating. Now rather than
internal representations
getting deeply into therapy Milton Erikson as was his incredible
skill managed to guide the client to make changes by simply
that the client runs, any
having a chat with the client as a Pre-frame to the session. He
spoke to the client about how we were looking forward to
significant sub-modalities
working on his garden and mentioned that he had planted
some tomatoes in his back yard and that he found it interesting
and anything with any
that all he had done with the tomato plants was water them,
plant them in good soil and somehow, they just kind of knew
real energy that goes
how to grow. He went on to tell the client that, the tomato plants
needed very little in terms of intervention from him, he doesn't
some way to helping the
need to tell them how much water to drink or which nutrients
to take from the soil. They just seem to know. And somehow,
client produce the
they managed to take on just the perfect amount of water and
the perfect amount of nutrients to grow the perfect tomatoes
unwanted behavior.“

© Matthew G Barnett 2018 | www.cognitiontraining.co.uk | www.meetmattbarnett.com | www.headgearlabs.com