A metaphor is any story or figure of speech implying a comparison. It includes simple comparisons or similes and longer stories. Metaphors communicate indirectly. Simple metaphors make simple comparisons: as white as a sheet, as pretty as a picture, etc.

So the purpose of a metaphor is to pace and lead the client’s behaviour through a story. You can
(1) plan out stories in advance or (2) determine what stories you tell (and tell well) and adjust these stories so they create the effect you want. What is critical are the order and sequence of the internal representations you lead the client through.
The basic steps to generate a metaphor are as follows:
1. Identify the sequence of behaviour and/or events in question: This could range from a conflict between internal parts, to a physical illness, to problematic interrelationships between the client and parents, a boss or a spouse.
2. Strategy analysis of client: Is there any consistent sequence of representations contributing to the current behavioural outcome?
3. Identify and determine the desired new outcomes and choices: This may be done at any level of detail. It is important that you have an outcome to work for. The metaphor will be the story of the journey from the present state to the desired state.
4. Establish anchors for strategic elements involved in this current behaviour and the desired outcome. For instance, in one knee you might anchor all of the strategies and representations that stop the client from having the necessary choices; and on the other knee you might anchor any personal resources (regardless of specific contexts) that the client may have.
5. A logical, smooth story: The story must be logical and match the listener’s experience and all transitions must be smooth. Sort out the elements of the present state and the desired state, the people, the places, the objects, activities, time, not forgetting the representational systems and submodalities of the various elements.
6. Choose an appropriate context for the story. Pick one that will interest the other person, and replace all the elements in the problem with different elements, but hold the relationships the same. Plot the story so that it has the same form as the present state and leads through a connecting strategy to a resolution (the desired state). Pace the client’s issues by establishing behaviours and events in the characters in the story that are similar to those in the client’s situation. The story line beguiles the conscious mind and the message goes to the unconscious mind.
7. Displace referential indices: Change the referential indices from the client’s experience to reflect the character’s and object’s (either fictional or real) in the story. Map over all nouns (objects and elements) to establish the characters in the story. The characters may be anything, animate or inanimate, from rocks to forest creatures to cowboys to books, etc.
What you choose as characters is not important so long as you preserve the character’s relationship to the client. Very often you may want to use characters from well-known fairy tales and myths.
8. Establish a relationship between the client’s situation and behaviour, and the situation and behaviours of the characters in the story. Map over all verbs (relations and interactions). Assign behavioural traits, such as strategies and representational characteristics, which parallel those in the client’s present situation (i.e., pace the client’s situation with the story). Make use of any anchors you have established previously to secure the relationship.
9. Access and establish new choices and resources for the client in terms of the characters and events in the story: This is done within the framework of reframing or reaccessing a forgotten resource, again, using any appropriate pre-established anchors. You may choose to keep the actual content of the resource ambiguous allowing the client’s unconscious processes to choose the appropriate one.
10. Use ambiguities, direct quotes and other language patterns to break up sequences in the story and redirect conscious resistance, if such resistance is present and is hindering the effect of the metaphor. Conscious understanding does not necessarily interfere with the metaphoric process.
11. Provide a resolution. Finish the story so that a sequence of events occurs in which the characters resolve the conflict(s) and achieve the desired outcome. Keep the resolution as ambiguous as necessary to allow the client’s unconscious processes to make the appropriate changes and personally work out the resolution.
12. Collapse the pre-established anchors and provide a future pace, if possible, to check your work.