How to Coach Yourself and Others Better Coaching Through Visualisation | Page 229

reader cannot receive it passively. He or she must actively draw on
personal experience to make judgments in response and thereby be
drawn into a relationship with the writer to learn more.
Engagement with metaphors has the potential to sharpen analytical
acuity, to create new ideas, and to demand an active process of
meaning making to understand what people do or how they relate to
each other.
However, metaphors do not always work in this way. Some
metaphors have become so embedded in our language and thinking
that they do not trigger the effect just described. Instead, they have
become “dead” or “frozen” (Goodwin, 1996; Tsoukas, 1991).
Cornelissen (2002) defines dead metaphors as those concepts which
have become so familiar and so habitual in our theoretical
vocabulary that not only have we ceased to be aware of their
metaphorical precepts, but also have we stopped to ascribe such
qualities, instead we take them as “literal terms.” (p. 261)
When educators speak of “delivering” programs, or of “strategy,”
they are not generally aware that they are using metaphors. For
example, in a speech by the former UK prime minister, Tony Blair
(2005), outlining reforms that “will create and sustain irreversible
change for the better in schools” he uses such metaphors as:
“Over the last 50 years, state education has improved.
And that improvement has ACCELERATED in the last eight years.
But successive reforms since the war have not always DELIVERED
all that they aimed to DELIVER.
What is different this time is that we have learned what works.
We have the experience of SUCCESSFUL schools.
What we must see now is a system of independent state
schools, underpinned by fair admissions and fair funding, where
parents are equipped and enabled to DRIVE improvement, driven by
the aspirations of parents.”
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