If You Want a Better Life, Tell Yourself Better Metaphors.
By: Michael Lim
Tags: Creativity, Books, Language, Self Improvement, Reading

If You Want a Better Life, Tell Yourself Better Metaphors.

The Story You Tell Yourself Is the Story You Live By

You probably do not notice it but we use metaphors all the time.

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

We use metaphors to sound more than just cool and philosophical. Metaphors enable us to bring structure to our daily lives, create new meaning, interpret our past experiences, and plan our future aspirations. In short, like the role of DNA, metaphors are the linguistic building blocks to our reality.

They are so ingrained in what we do and how we do it that they have become invisible to us. We barely give it a second thought and that’s why metaphors are so powerful. They operate in the background of our existence, almost like the strings and we are the puppets.

Metaphors control how we interpret the experiences in our lives. For instance, metaphors give a conceptual meaning to a highly abstract concept such as love. The most common metaphors we have for love is: Love Is A Journey. This is why we get common phrases such as:

We’ve hit a roadblock in our relationship

This relationship has come to a dead-end

I feel like we are spinning our wheels in this relationship

A few of these are actually starting to sound familiar to me…

Metaphors are also the reason we associate the abstract concept of being ‘happy’ with the orientational metaphor of being ‘up’. You’ll often hear people say:

I am on a high today

I feel like we are coming up

That boosted my spirits

By the same token, we tend to associate ‘sadness’ with being ‘down’.

I am feeling a bit low today

My spirits sank

I am depressed

In essence, the distillation of everything that makes life meaningful (e.g love, happiness, sadness) can only be adequately captured through metaphors. We can’t escape the metaphor’s power to shape our experiential existence and bring meaning to our daily activities. We could not have designed a more perfect linguistic tool to program how we think, feel and act.

I hope you are starting to see why metaphors are so important.

What I am trying to say is that the metaphors we tell ourselves are the metaphors we live by. They ultimately constrain the range of possible actions and opportunities we think we have in a given context. We act to be coherent with the stories we tell ourselves. Humans are made to avoid cognitive dissonance, we don’t like being consciously inconsistent with ourselves. We want our actions to align with our identity and for better or for worse, metaphors are what define our identity.

The implications of this are enormous.

If you live by negative metaphors, you will only really have negative experiences.

For instance, two people can have the same experience but live by different metaphors and thus elicit different actions. Where one person can experience learning and excitement, another person can experience failure and discouragement.

The interpretation is solely determined by the metaphoric filter we use. Thus, the only difference between one person moving and one person stagnating in life are the metaphors they tell themselves.

This is not exactly new either. There has been an enormous amount of research into this field in recent times. Carol Dweck’s fixed and growth mindset is essentially a theory that uses contrasting metaphors for human intelligence.

The fixed mindset follows the metaphor that the mind is concrete . It is difficult to change once set and only gets more difficult as you age.

. It is difficult to change once set and only gets more difficult as you age. The growth mindset is a metaphor that the mind is a sponge. It is the notion that the mind is malleable and can change with enough deliberate effort.

Both of these metaphors rely on a broader metaphor of the mind as a substance. Whichever metaphor you identify with will shape how you view, interpret and act in your world. Choose wisely.

What Can You Do?

What should be clear by now is that most of the metaphors we live by come from our own context or culture. This means we are not innately born with metaphors but are instead indirectly or directly given metaphors from our parents, caregivers and society.

This brings both good and bad news.

The good news is that metaphors can be treated like a habit. This means that through proactive behavioral changes you can train yourself to break bad metaphors and establish good ones. Metaphors exist in your mind. If you can reimagine metaphors, you can reimagine your life. This might take some time and conscious effort but the payoffs can be enormous.

The bad news is that we can live most or all of our lives unconsciously. If we never really know what our metaphors are, we will never know how to change them. What is then not made conscious to us will only be experienced as fate. We will always remain victims of our metaphors and the cycle continues on and on.

For instance, if you live life by the metaphor that Life is Dangerous, you will only act and then experience life according to that metaphor. You’ve trapped yourself in your own linguistic prison.

On the other hand, if you live life by the metaphor that Life is a Journey, the inevitable setbacks, stumbles and heartbreak that are associated with journeys can be interpreted as a necessary part of a long and beautiful adventure.

It is really quite simple and we often get the simplest things wrong.

Summary:

We all have the ability to live better lives and that starts with having better metaphors.

The process of improving your life involves consciously recognizing previously unconscious metaphors and how you lived by them. Self-help is really just a constant process of deconstructing old metaphors and constructing new ones.

Choose better metaphors and you will have a better life. Continue to live by toxic metaphors and you will have a toxic life.