YOUR CAPACITIES

Parabolas and metaphors

Our capacity of using inspirations

Have you ever done something that was a "piece of cake"? Have you thought that somebody was "the light of my life"? Or maybe you thought "life is a game".

Maybe you have heard that "if life gives you a lemon, make a lemonade". Maybe in some difficult moment you got inspiration in this phrase to persist.

And certainly you know the story of the Ugly Duckling, that was "ugly" and discovered that in a different context it was "beautiful".

We have in our minds the ability to establish parallels among our internal representations and from this to extract options of action. Parabolas, metaphors, analogies are useful just for this: to wake us up to new possibilities, in the same measure of the similarity that we perceive -  the connections we do - between the metaphor or parabola context and the situation under our attention.

To you not to think I am exaggerating in this capacity of yours of dealing with metaphors, take these more: "free as a bird", " I was shocked", "the bread of life".

Want more? Even "learning with experience" has metaphorical elements, since a situation hardly repeats itself in the same exact way, what makes it necessary that the similar elements of the past context of the experience (personal or other's) to be transposed to the context at issue. That is, we really have a lot of practice with this process.

Our capacity to use inspirations doesn't include only stories and our own experience. For example, have you ever inspired some decision in the experience of anybody else? Maybe a friend’s or a celebrity’s. Probably it will not be necessary to remember that this is only possible due to our capacity to inspire ourselves this way.

Nowadays, Neurolinguistic Programming, the main intelligence model applied in this site, has incorporated stories containing metaphoric elements with the name 'therapeutic metaphors', for the purpose of making behavior changes. Many such stories, having an appropriated structure to each person/situation, had been elaborated, with many cases of success. NLP also has tools for modeling thinking strategies of geniuses, and Robert B. Dilts did it for Disney, Mozart and others.

Examples of inspirations of this site:
Section Parabolas.

Creativity: Profile - Walt Disney

Creativity: Profile - Nikola Tesla

V. V. Vilela

Editor

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