If you are a teacher, have you ever tried to teach or train someone, and felt that your student or trainee was not fully grasping the subject? Did you find they were struggling to understand you?

Be aware, pay attention, drop your ego, and ask questions about your teachings to find out if your message is getting across perfectly.

It is no new or profound fact that our minds work in mysterious ways.

Let's play a fun game. Stop everything your doing, read the next sentence, then, close your eyes. Can you see or notice that there are images streaming through your mind? These images are always present to help explain to your mind all the things you hear or think about.

Your subconscious mind and thoughts are in charge of painting and creating these images, and true learning happens when we connect and involve our subconscious mind with our conscious mind.

Whether you are training groups or individuals, your goal is to not have your information just flow into one ear and out the other. We want them to grasp the teaching. We want them to be able to use it in their life, and ultimately we want them to be able to teach it to others.

This means that the trainees must fully understand what you are teaching.

Most speakers are boring, and do not engage different parts of their audience's minds. One of the most valuable tools to engage people's minds in your topic is to involve their subconscious mind into what you are teaching. One of the best ways to involve the subconscious mind is to use metaphors.

A metaphor is very influential in creating images in the subconscious mind which translate to higher understanding of the topic discussed.

Great metaphors are like making magic with words. Metaphors are fun, entertaining, and they are truly engaging. It is a very effective technique because it utilizes parts of the brain that would otherwise be busy creating non-related images, other thoughts, or anything else that is not in line with the teaching you may be giving. Realize that while we are alive, the brain does not ever stop working. Our goal as trainers is to make sure that we can make as many parts of our audience's minds work on the same message. This is what Geniuses do. Subconsciously or not, they are able to use their entire brain or many parts of it to work together to solve 1 problem.

What is a metaphor?

Here is a Shakespear/Wikipedia example:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances; (William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7)

In this example, "the world" is compared to a stage, the aim being to describe the world by taking well-known attributes from the stage. In this case, the world is the tenor and the stage is the vehicle. "Men and women" are a secondary tenor and "players" is the vehicle for this secondary tenor.

It may not be the easiest thing to come up with great metaphors, the more you practice, the better you will become, and the easier it will be to create new ones.

The best metaphors are vivid, memorable and emotional descriptions of the topic you are talking about. When you use these metaphors your trainees will learn better, and the information will stick easily.

There is no universal metaphor for any one subject. It is a trial and error type activity. Metaphors are something you can begin to test on your spouse, or better yet, a child.