Improve Your Communication Skills, 2nd Edition

particularly useful in brainstorming sessions or conversations 
that are seeking to solve complex problems. 
Using metaphors 
Metaphors are images of ideas in concrete form. The word means 
‘transferring’ or ‘carrying over’. A metaphor carries your meaning 
from one thing to another. It enables your listener to see 
something in a new way, by picturing it as something else. 
• Write single words, in BLOCK CAPITALS, along lines 
radiating from the centre. 
• Main ideas will tend to gravitate to the centre of the 
map; details will radiate towards the edge. 
• Every line must connect to at least one other line. 
• Use visual display: colour, pattern, highlights. 
• Identify the groups of ideas that you have created. 
Try to 
have no more than six. 
Give each a heading and put the 
groups into a number order. .
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57 Seven Ways to Improve Your Conversations
Metaphors use the imagination to support and develop your 
ideas. 
Metaphors bring your meaning alive in the listener’s mind. 
They shift the listener’s focus and direct their attention to what 
the speaker wants them to see. They stir their feelings. Metaphors 
can build your commitment to another person’s ideas and help 
you to remember them. 
If you want to find a metaphor to make your thinking more 
creative and your conversation more interesting, you might start 
by simply listening out for them in the conversation you are 
holding. You will find you use many metaphors without even 
noticing them. If you are still looking, you might try asking 
yourself some simple questions: 
• What’s the problem like? 
• If this were a different situation – a game of cricket, a