Are You Spotting The Metaphors Under Your Nose?

Are You Spotting The Metaphors Under Your Nose?

There are powerful metaphors everywhere. 

Metaphors have the power to completely shift and change how we see a situation.

Let’s start by defining what a metaphor actually is. 

The dictionary defines a metaphor as a way of describing someone or something by showing their similarity with something else.It’s making a point or explaining something by comparing two things that on the surface might not look the same.They can help us connect dots that we aren’t seeing by mapping one experience onto another.

So some common examples might be ‘Time flies when you’re having fun’ or ‘He’s as slow as a snail.’

Metaphors in stories are particularly powerful in helping us understand complex ideas or see how our experience could map across and help us see things in a different way from a more helpful perspective and break down old ways of thinking.

Metaphor is used in so many different healing modalities and therapies, particularly ones that work with language patterns such as hypnotherapy and NLP.

The bottom line is they can be incredibly powerful.  And they are everywhere, if we look for them. 

So what’s making me want to talk about metaphors today?

I had my own little live action symbolic metaphor moment that made me stop in my tracks, and lol a little bit.

And I wanted to share it with you because I think it can be applied to so many things and in all honesty, this little moment sparked joy for me.

I’m going to tell you about it and also see how many metaphors I can get into my story about my metaphor ha!

If you’ve been with me a while you know i’ve been going through some big, complicated life changes for the last year. 

It’s been a rollercoaster. 

I’ve been feeling recently like i’ve been a little bit stuck in groundhog day and the light at the end of the tunnel of my situation has been feeling further and further away with setback after setback. 

I’m not complaining…it’s been awful but there’s a lot I’m grateful for and I feel like I’m so close to being able to share all my stories and lessons with you and I for one cannot wait for that day.

Anyhoo. 

It’s safe to say I’ve been in the weeds and often feeling like I’m wading through treacle.

Every day I’d wake up and I’d open my curtains. Nothing new. Nothing really to notice.

I have a few plants on my windowsill.

I’m a serial plant killer so I only allow myself to have practically indestructible plants like succulents and I still manage to over or under water.

I’ve also had a white orchid for a number of years and in all honesty, it had seen better days.

The leaves were yellowing and dry and the once proud stem looked like hay with a dead and dried flower at the end.

I had been told more than once that it was dead and I needed to throw it out.

It didn’t look good.

The other day I opened my curtains as usual, nothing different.

And I notice there’s an entirely new stem, as long as the original one, with 7 buds on!

Every single day I had looked directly at it, this thing that looked pretty much dead and hadn’t even spotted the life and the growth that was right in front of my face and it was about to erupt into beautiful flowers.

How could I have not spotted an entire foot’s worth of stem when I’m looking at it every single day?

And I realised, how often am I (or we) doing that?

Seeing something every day, thinking it’s dead or on its last legs but actually in the background it’s growing something new and beautiful?

I know I know, I’m feeling existential but it’s true.

How often do we just run on auto pilot and not notice something incredible right in front of our faces?

How often is something amazing happening and growing in the background when all we’re seeing is the doom and gloom or the pain of what isn’t going right for us.

So what can we take from this glorious little piece of symbolism that brightened my day and created an instant shift in what was going on for me. 

Can you be patient?

Can you trust that there are positive and beautiful things happening alongside the pain b?

What growth are you not seeing?

What could be blooming where you’re not paying attention?

The funny thing was, and take from this what you will, literally the day after the discovery of me not spotting an entire foot of new growth and 7 budding flowers on my seemingly dead orchid that I look at every day, there was a huge breakthrough in my own life of something that had been growing very quietly and invisibly in the background of something where on the surface all looked lost. 

Keep the faith.

Just keep swimming.

Look for those metaphors.

You got this!

Fx

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Fran Excell, Success Mindset Mentor at www.franexcell.com – Helping Business Owners & Executives Overcome Stress & Self Sabotage so they can get back their time, get off the emotional rollercoaster and feel more in control. 

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