“Do you believe other persons might be able to use the same metaphor for their
career?”
“In what situation do you think another person could use the same metaphor?”
“Do you believe X would attach the same meaning to your metaphor?”
“What similarities and differences can you envisage ?”
“How do you feel about your friend’s perspective ?”Discovering similarities and differences between various perspectives on the same topic
allows to creatively envisage a situation and evaluate its facets, avoiding the risk of
analysing metaphors in a linear way.
Timeline
Introducing timeline in personal career metaphor requires counselees to look
retrospectively and prospectively along the timeline and indicate an appropriate
metaphor for each time moment they focus on. Clients may be asked to remember certain
moments in their lives and associate a career metaphor to those stages, or project in the
future and choose an appropriate metaphor for that moment.
The exercise may stimulate a new metaphor, or the extension of the existing one. For
example, in case of “mountain climbing”, the perspective of future may yield “the cycle
metaphor”, since the mountain is only one of a mountain range about to be climbed.
Change of perspective
The exercise requires counselees to view the current metaphor through another metaphor.
Thus, a client using a metaphor involving the growth and development image may be
asked: “What would your career metaphor look like as a journey?” The exercise is to a
certain extent similar to that of the perspective of other people. The difference is that if in
a certain situation the client faces difficulties (or we notice resistance) in imagining the
perspective of another person, we may propose this new reading of reality.
Group perspective
People associate a certain metaphor to their personal career, often fancying that it is the
only way to conceptualise things, and considering that everybody else thinks the same
way about their career.
The exercise intends to make clients aware of different perspectives on the same
phenomenon. Clients will be asked to inquire friends and other people they know about
how they see their own careers and in what terms / metaphors they would describe it.