How to Coach Yourself and Others Better Coaching Through Visualisation | Page 226

This is an example of what's called a pivot point, a global change,
where just making this one change would transform the way you
think and feel in multiple areas of your life.
15.8 Test this out for yourself. Your exercise:
1. Answer the question, "Life is like" (Write down the metaphors
you've already chosen for yourself),
2. Create new, more empowering metaphors to replace the one's
you've written down by asking yourself, "If life was like playing a
win win sport it would be".,
3. Decide that you are going to live with these new, empowering
metaphors for the next thirty days.
Take control of your metaphors now and create a new world of
possibility, richness, wonder, joy and fulfilment. "Life is painting a
picture, not doing a sum." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
How we think, how we make sense of the universe, is by means of
metaphors (Beckett, 2003; Turbayne, 1962).
Metaphors are not just a literary flourish used by those with a poetic
turn of mind, but a fundamental tool that has been used by humans
from the earliest times to shape thought and action (Lakoff &
Johnson, 2003). Metaphors are so pervasive and embedded in the
way we think about things that we often don’t even recognize when
we have used them
Metaphors function positively and negatively. They have the power
to help us create meaning and understanding and to improve how we
lead.They also have the power to manipulate, to shut down thinking,
to deflect creativity, and to harm. Their very ubiquity, their
indispensableness, lends metaphors great power.

226