March is One of Those Months
kind of betwixt and between. Here in New England, winter has basically lost its grip, but  spring is playing hard-to-get. I remember this proverb from childhood: March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb. A little Googling turns up the year 1732 as the earliest reference to these lines! Now that’s staying power. What makes the image stick?

Visual Description is Powerful
We can all picture what a lion looks like, and what a lamb looks like. Those visuals immediately conjure up feelings. Lion stands for rough, tough, mean, snarly. Lamb stands for gentle, meek, cute, cuddly. A very few words can pack a punch by creating a visual picture that comes along with built-in meaning. Thus the transition from tough winter to gentle spring.

Use Analogies
to say something is like something else, making it easier to understand. This is particularly helpful for business communicators who often have to talk about complex issues and concepts. You’re basically saying to your audience: we’ve seen this before, we understand it, it’s just now in a different setting. So here’s a creative way to help you think about it.

Life is Like a Box of Chocolates…
you never know what you’re going to get. Try creating prompts for yourself to discover new approaches to talking about what you do:

Mitigating risk is like…
Trying to partner when we have competing goals is like…
Analyzing data is like…
Projecting numbers for Q2 is like…
Attempting to create consensus is like…
Simplifying complexity is like…

 Where Do You Find Ideas?
You’re probably living analogies every day in your daily routine. Think about your kids, client interaction, pets, cooking, sports, grocery shopping, trying to fix a leaky faucet! How is problem-solving your client’s crisis like shopping for nails in the hardware store (or on Amazon)? Do you see how this works? Compare the issue under discussion to something commonplace to give your listeners a different entry point into the conversation.

Wandering in the Desert of Extraneous Verbiage
is a visual metaphor I came up with. It paints a picture in which I describe a speaker who just keeps on talking and talking as they wander, searching for their own point. By placing the action in a specific and unusual setting (the desert), I immediately capture imagination, and listeners recognize what I‘m talking about. I even wrote a blogpost about it.

You May Have Heard Metaphors
like “running a marathon” or “climbing a mountain” or “stick to your knitting” used in business communications. What metaphor can you pull from your own life that makes sense for you? The simpler, the better. The shorter, the clearer.

Mix It Up
Instead of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, try interjecting a fresh figure of speech, and you’ll be good as gold. (Ahem.) Analogies and metaphors are fun word choices that inject energy into your same old, same old. And when you say something that’s unexpected, your listeners’ ears perk up and you’ve got their attention in a new way.

Give it a try. You may be surprised by what you come up with, and your audiences may be surprised by how interesting you sound!

Happy lamb-like spring.

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