Create More Mind-Blown Moments with Your Audience: A Guide to Using Metaphors
Recently, as I’ve worked with my clients on their messaging and speaking, the subject of communication “power” has come up quite a bit. What limits us so often in the business world is an insistence on communicating in more literal ways. If you’re an expert in accounting, you only talk about accounting. If you speak to sales people, you only tell stories about sales people. But the world’s highest-impact storytellers don’t communicate that way. Instead, they create memorable moments of clarity and emotional connection with audiences by using many more metaphors than most people feel safe using.
We need to change our approach and weave more metaphors into our communication too. They’re one of the most effective ways to differentiate and resonate, and by avoiding them, we only limit our power.
Let’s begin…
How to Source Powerful Metaphors
The trick to finding great ideas for metaphors isn't randomly grabbing comparisons from your life. Everyone has seen (and quickly scrolled past) those ham-handed attempts at comparing something popular with something from the writer’s industry. (I’m sure we can learn plenty of marketing lessons from Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, but I’m guessing about 99.999999999% of the millions articles written by marketers about Tay-Tay would actually make you dumber.)
No, it’s not about BIG FAMOUS THING meets YOUR SPECIFIC THING. Instead, effective metaphors are about marrying the emotions on both sides. To find great metaphors, ask yourself this question:
What emotion is my audience feeling?
Consider your ideas and teachings. Consider what the audience feels when they try to understand or do something relating to your advice. What jumps to mind? How do they feel? Now find examples in your life or what you observe from others when you or they felt similar. The topic and action and even the people featured all seem irrelevant to your audience, but the emotions match. That’s the trick.
Example: Teaching People to Try New Things
Let’s say my message was all about getting others to try new things. I want you to take risks or innovate. There are two ways I could communicate this message:
The literal approach: "When faced with a new opportunity or unfamiliar action, you probably do tons of agonizing research, outsource your understanding to experts or consultants, outsource your actions to contractors, or even just sit still and not try anything new. But studies show people are more afraid of the unknown than the new task itself. So rather than agonize over how to do the new thing well or search endlessly for the exact right answers from others, your first step should be to make the unknown known by trying something quickly right away."
The metaphorical approach: "I used to be afraid to make espresso in my kitchen. I’d ask my wife to do it. I followed experts online and even almost bought a course on espresso-making. I would agonize over it instead of just ... trying it. But once I started making it, I realized how wasteful all that agony was. Turns out it’s not so difficult to make espresso, and even if I messed up, I could either fix my mistake quickly or go do some research in a more focused, less aimless way. That’s the thing about trying new things. Studies show people are more afraid of the unknown than the new task itself. So rather than agonize over how to do the new thing well, make the unknown known by trying something quickly first."
In this example, the emotion between my experience making espresso and your experience trying whatever new thing you’re thinking about is the same: agony over trying something new. But the metaphor makes it accessible and removes objections. That’s the thing about metaphors: they aren’t just vehicles for clarifying your ideas, though they’re brilliant for that purpose too. Their real power, however, is sweeping away objections the audience may bring to your ideas, so that others internalize and care about what you’re trying to tell them.
By speaking literally, giving you direct advice or sharing a story about someone in your exact situation, you’re no longer mindful, paying attention to my message. Instead, you start comparing what I’m saying to your situation, most of which I can’t access or anticipate. This means you erect barriers to my ideas entering your mind and staying there. You bring objections. By remaining literal, I give you license to think, “This is directly about me and so I am going to compare and contrast every single detail to me exactly.”
But by speaking metaphorically, you relax. By sharing something that doesn’t resemble your exact job or life, you’re more likely to let your guard down and enjoy a seemingly lower-stakes story on face. Because on face, there’s nothing to scare you, nothing to confront you, no direct advice to tell you to change or to feel bad about your current ways. It’s just an enjoyable journey, however brief, into something that’s “irrelevant” to your reality. But by the end, I’ve not only connected with you emotionally (thus earning more trust), but I’ve pivoted back to the literal lesson extracted from the metaphor.
The combination of Fewer Objections + Openness to Listen + Emotional Alignment + Powerful Lesson = a mindblown moment. You “get it.” Moreover, you FEEL it.
That’s the power of metaphor.
Metaphor vs. Analogy vs. Allegory: What's the Difference?
Here, we need to define a few key ideas so we know what we’re discussing and using the rest of the way, both in this guide and around our platforms.
Analogy/Simile: Acknowledges it's a comparison using "like" or "as"
"Finding good data insights is like thrifting—you have to sift through a lot of junk to find gems"
Metaphor: Positions the comparison as literal truth
"When I went thrifting last week..." (tells full story) "...and that's the thing about finding stories in your data" (shares the literal insight extracted from the story)
Allegory: Never tips its hand that it's a comparison. The lesson is more implied, and the story is more like a journey towards meaning than it is an overt comparison of two things.
The Matrix never explicitly says "this is about society's control systems"
For most business communication, IMO, metaphors work best because they allow you to share a complete story that leads to an insight. It’s easy to bat away superficial comparisons (“it’s like…”) and it’s much harder to deliver allegories well (we rarely get the runtime). But a metaphor, or a short metaphorical story, arriving at an insight you share overtly? That’s tailor made for our kind of communication.
The Art of Specificity: From Clip Art to Vivid Imagery
Most people communicate in “clip art”—generic, forgettable descriptions. But your power comes from being incredibly specific. In the metaphor, remember to provide several “indelible images” by describing a few key specifics.
Clip art version: "I walked to the corner store. It’s an older store. I stepped inside and smelled something horrible. I walked past the counter where they sell hot dogs and…"
Vivid version: "I walked to Mack's Deli on the corner. It's got this old yellow awning with faded red letters—you can't even see the 'k' in Mack's anymore. Anyway, I kicked aside a crumbled newspaper and stepped inside. It smelled like grandma’s basement. Also hot dogs. Day-old, boiled hot dogs. Which, incidentally, were sweating slowly on the counter behind glass.”
When you give more specific details, your audience fills in the rest from their own experience, creating a vivid, shared mental image. I gave you a handful of details just now about Mack’s. But mentally, you were actually INSIDE of Mack’s, even though it doesn’t actually exist. Specific details have this way of enrolling the audience in the creation of the story, which only cements the meaning. With metaphors, we bring people out of their literal realities, go beyond superficial statements and ideas (clip art), and immerse others in a new place, thus opening them up—not just because they picture what we overtly shared, but because they add way more vivid details themselves, sparked by our own.
Combined, this makes our stories theirs. We share a metaphorical story from a single, personal memory or moment in our lives, yet others can deeply relate (even if the topic, action, or people featured are “irrelevant” to them). As the saying goes, in the specific, we find the universal.
Here’s my full essay about communicating with greater specificity.
The Grounding Effect: Why Metaphors Matter for Experts
It’s easy for others to disassociate from you and your ideas, especially if you're successful, well-known, or privileged in any visible ways (as I am, being a straight white man with an above-average head of hair and an OK smile, let’s be real). Literal teaching can trigger comparison games. Your audience thinks, "Easy for YOU to say—YOU already have the audience/money/connections/hair."
Metaphors go beyond the literal, both in what you talk about (espresso vs. “try new things”) and more importantly, what you avoid talking about (I have a sizable audience and many years of traction, so any story from my life can read like “I did it, and you can too!” which most of us should recognize as BS). What we fail to do in the business world, with our all anchoring to the literal, is root our communication in any universal human experiences. That’s why the business world is indeed so fraught with people running around shouting, “I’m awesome and you can be too!”
Said another way: effective storytellers don’t need to experience anything extraordinary. They know how to find meaning in the ordinary.
For proof and practical tips for doing this yourself, listen to How Stories Happen, where I’d guess 8 out of every 10 guests tell stories about things that would never make headlines. They don’t need anything newsworthy. Great stories merely need to be noteworthy.
Suggestions for Using Your Metaphors
Start Small
Begin with quick comparisons before attempting full story-based metaphors. I’ve told my espresso story in my speeches across a couple minutes of runtime. But before that, it was just a quick comparison that popped to mind. “Oh, them trying new things feels like me trying to make espresso.” Then that led to writing out my espresso story in a newsletter, which THEN led to the higher-stakes moment of using it in some speeches. As you can tell, it’s a handy story to keep in my back pocket and flex to different moments and needs across my platform.
Remember to Match the Emotional Stakes
The feelings in your metaphor should mirror the feelings your audience experiences using your actual advice or confronting whatever reality your advice is meant to improve. Frustration maps to frustration, excitement to excitement, confusion to confusion. But if you don’t accentuate and embody that emotion in your metaphor, it will fall flat. If I’m not in full agony trying to make espresso, the pivot back to the literal won’t work. This is a paradox: if you want to connect deeper externally with your metaphors, you have to turn deeper internally. You have to really feel what you felt in that moment of your life, then convey how you felt.
Your performance can help, if you’re speaking. (If I’m trying to make you feel somber or introspective, but I’m speaking in a peppy, quick cadence, it won’t work. I have to embody the emotion in my delivery of the words.)
If you’re writing, then specifics are your friend. Along those lines…
Use the Specificity Test
Have you deployed the five senses? Can you (and others) see, hear, or feel what you're describing? If it's too abstract or generic, add sensory details until it becomes vivid. Start with one or two small details, then flesh out your storytelling, whether in future versions of that same story or in future stories.
I find that gut-checking against the five sense (are they involved?) is a helpful heuristic. You can also imagine that you’re taking a photo or shooting a video of your story. What’s captured on film? If the answer isn’t clear, you need to be more specific.
Don't Overdo It
Vary your approach. Try to lead with metaphors as an opener, then try opening with literal points. See what suits your style and message. Not every piece of content or project needs to involve something metaphorical, but having the skill available makes you more versatile and higher-impact everywhere you go.
Remember, Everything Is Material
The most powerful metaphors come from paying attention to your daily life with fresh eyes. That neighbor walking his dog while on a phone call. The way you procrastinated about learning something new. The feeling of seeing something unexpected or awkward from someone else.
In the moment, treat everything as potentially brilliant material. Judge and develop it later, but first, capture it. The best metaphors are often hiding in the most ordinary moments.
The goal isn't to impress people with clever comparisons. The goal is to clarify your ideas and connect with others more deeply. The metaphor helps them see what you see and, more importantly, feel how you felt. This all creates a certain kind of mind-blowing moment with the audience.
They understand you. They care about you. They’ll never forget you. All thanks to your metaphors.
That’s why we do this work.
Literally.