Recently I’ve begun reading Ben bedtime stories. He’s 11 months old now and although I don’t know how much of what I say he understands - I bet it’s a lot more than we think. So I thought he would benefit from a little story each night.
Thankfully there are millions of bedtime storybooks so I don’t think he’ll ever get bored of them. The one that we are working through has lots of little stories, maybe 3 to 4 pages long. To be fair they aren’t that riveting, but they help Ben to sleep and I’ve also noticed that reading them is damn good practice for storytelling.
Of course all of these stories are metaphors. In the case of this particular collection, all of the metaphors seem to be related to healthy eating - we have the boy who only eats cheese and peas who gradually learns to eat a balanced diet, the princess who only eats sweets and the giant who runs out of cakes. The beauty of metaphors with kids is that whilst they enjoy the story, the message gets processed by their unconscious and (hopefully) influences their behaviour. I wonder if they do one about the boy who nearly got an ASBO?
Anyway I digress. Metaphors don’t only work on kids. When anyone tells us adults a story - it’s time to curl up and enjoy the ride. Metaphors still reach our unconscious mind and get processed at least unconsciously. I like to think of a metaphor as a trojan horse… the story is accepted at face value by the conscious mind, which allows the horse to bypass its outer defences. Once inside the defensive walls of the mind, the deeper messages of the metaphor can be released, creeping in to the inner santums of the castle undetected.
Skilled trainers use this to their advantage, by embedding commands and even nesting additional metaphors in to the original story, which can peel away deeper and deeper layers of defences allowing the information to sink in to the deepest levels of your unconscious.
And we are subjected to this every day - TV adverts are a good example - we see the idyllic family unit enjoying the latest breakfast cereal or the poor women in desperate need of stool softening, and at some level, past our defences, these messages are processed by our mind - by attracting the parts of us that sympathise with or envy characters in the metaphors it generates connections in our mind between our situation, our goals and the products on offer.
However the sneakiest use of this approach has to be product placement in movies. The movie is one big metaphor that opens our defences up for a couple of hours. Within that we empathise with characters - connecting with their situations, traits, desires, goals, and once we are in some way connected with them, we see them benefiting from products, AND WE WANT THEM! Personally if I had the money I would happily have James Bond’s watch, car, laptop, phone, Bond girl, etc. etc., not because I need them but because at some level I connect with the character and hence his trappings.
So perhaps you can imagine how much easier it is to get your point across to someone if it’s embedded in a story, or a metaphor, that engages their mind and gives your point the full attention it deserves? I used to get frustrated that people weren’t listening to my point of view, but once I began to embed my point within a story of when my point was useful before or people who have already benefited from this approach, I quickly found that the defences dropped and my suggestion was considered with more and more attention, so this might help you too, don’t you think?
