Pay Attention to the Metaphors
Your view into another’s world
Humans are sense-makers. We use language and all its creative affordances to help us interpret and share our understanding of the world.
Even though we may hardly notice the metaphors we use in our everyday speech, they are an integral part of making sense of things.
With just a little more awareness about how metaphors work, we might see how these creative language shortcuts can provide us with a window into a person’s thought process and perspective.
In this article, I’ll share examples of common metaphors and explain how we can see through them to gain new insights, have better conversations, and connect more deeply with others.
A quick primer on metaphors
“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”
— George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By
At its simplest, a metaphor is a way to convey a complex idea, in a word or a phrase, by expressing it as if it were something else. Doing this allows us to ‘borrow’ the salient qualities of the other thing and map it back onto the thing we’re describing.
In short, metaphors save us from having to give long lists of adjectives to share what we think and…
