How to Coach Yourself and Others Better Coaching Through Visualisation | Page 227

15.9 How metaphors work

To fully understand the power of metaphors we need to know how
they work.
1. The first phenomenon of metaphors is that they trigger an effect
(Camp, 2005).
By comparing two things that are both similar and dissimilar, they
throw the reader or listener into a state of momentary uncertainty,
where the degree and significance of the similarity and dissimilarity
must be considered. We are tilted off balance and find ourselves
“exiles from the familiar” (Burns, 1972, p. 109).
The term used to capture this mental state is “liminality,” defined by
Anderson (2005) as “the ambiguous condition of being between, at
the limits of existing structures and where new structures are
emerging ... a transformative stage where a thing is in process of
becoming something else” (pp. 590–591).

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