What do juggling, leadership, success, and happiness all have in common? Questions like that have provided endless answers, fueled my career, and propelled my life. This week we’re Off Balance On Purpose, mastering metaphor.

What you are learning is far less important than if you are learning! Are you going deep in study and wide in scope? Are you developing a new skill or mastering an old one? I sure hope so, because all that you know can be leveraged, using the power of metaphor.

Metaphor is perhaps the single most powerful teaching and learning tool we possess. Since the beginning, spiritual teachings, success principles, and life truths have been taught, learned, and shared using stories and analogies. Metaphor gives us the power to make the unfamiliar more familiar by connecting the known to the new. Teaching with metaphor is like a golf swing. It’s all about the follow through. It’s not enough to make contact with an idea, but you must extend the concepts fully, and consistently, until the act of association becomes fluid and repeatable.

Once you master metaphor, you can learn faster, activate your life experience, and cross-pollinate skills, ideas, and experiences. You can step more confidently into new moments, thinking, “I haven’t done this before, but it’s similar in some ways to this.” Claiming the experience you have allows you to lean into the uncomfortable. And seeing the connections transcends knowledge and delivers true wisdom.

Like a good book, the measure of your happiness is not the external reality, but the mastery of what’s inside, what’s understood, and what is useful. Physical disciplines connect to spiritual truths, to relationship keys, and principles for success. This means that you already have what is necessary to turn a new page.  The way you do anything becomes the way you do everything, once you realize it’s all an expression of who you already are. Until next week, stay Off Balance On Purpose.

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