Luciana Lage wrote:

That’s an excellent question. I’d love to see many comments here to enrich everyone’s repertoire of stories.

I have seen beautiful moments of renewed courage and focus with the metaphor of the garden as told by Buddha. Our life is much like a garden full of different seeds.

In a garden, what happens with the seeds you water? They grow stronger and produce their fruits.

Our life has different kinds of seeds: There are the seeds of love, gratitude, compassion, courage, and self-sufficiency. We also have the seeds of fear, pessimism, envy, jealousy, and self-worthlessness. You choose which seeds to water.

The water is the attention you put on different aspects of your life. What would you like to grow in your garden?

In the book Harmonic Wealth, James Ray says that energy flows where attention goes. That is exactly what happens in our lives. If we focus on what we lack, we end up blind to our resources to grow and flourish. When we direct our attention to what we have, we feed and strengthen our courage, creativity, and sense of worth.

Tameron Chappell wrote:

I would recommend 2 books that I have recently bought that may give you inspiration - More Magic of Metaphor; Stories for Leaders, Influencers and Motivators by Nick Owen and Metaphors in Mind; Transformation through Symbollic Modelling by James Lawley and Penny Tompkins.

The former book explores influencing, motivating and leading others using metaphors and the latter is based on Clean Language approaches and talks about how to work with a client's own metaphors.

One story I liked in particular from Owen's book is about mice and is roughly the following;

The baby mice were a few days old when a huge cat towered above them licking it's lips. The mother mouse immediately jumped infront of her babies and barked 'WOOF WOOF'. The cat was so surprised it left. The mother mouse turned to her babies and said 'Let that be a lesson to you. Never underestimate the importance of learning a second language!'.

But then this story is very salient for me as I struggle to learn Japanese.

Susan Seybert wrote:

That's a great big request!! I love to ask clients, "How is this honoring your values?" It quickly takes them to resonance, or dissonance if the decision/question is not honoring their values.

Defined values are key for this to work powerfully. I like to work with my clients to define their values, have them choose descriptives words to support the value, name the value AND choose a person/place/thing that embodies that value for them. I find that this exercise really makes the value pop -- they remember it quickly, they know what it means and feels like in their heart AND head.